An endless present: Experiences of time through multiple disasters in Australia

Abstract

Disasters rupture everyday social orders and relationships, including the experience of time. This article examines social narratives of time in the context of multiple disasters in rural and regional Australia. It presents findings from semi-structured interviews with community-based disaster recovery workers who were deployed in places that experienced multiple disasters between 2017 and 2022. We explore the interviewees’ own experiences of work and time, as well as their perceptions of how communities understand and negotiate time in the context of multiple disasters. The findings demonstrate community experiences of a stagnant ‘present’, where the impact of multiple disasters stalls their sense of moving towards the future and is simultaneously dislocated from experiences of the past. In engaging with these communities, interviewees’ experiences of work time in the context of multiple disasters highlight difficulties in relation to the structures of their work, and the stresses of supporting communities through multiple disasters.

Introduction

This article assesses narratives of time as related by community-based disaster workers who have supported communities through multiple disasters. Within the context of multiple disasters in Australia, narratives of time focus on the experiences of an unending present, where the impact of disaster is dislocated from past community experiences and the future is unpredictable and uncertain.

Social experiences of time

Time is fundamental to social experience. Sorokin and Merton (1937), following Durkheim and Mauss ([1903] 2009), suggest that time is a core ‘social fact’. The ability for individuals, informed by their structural contexts, to constitute meaning to and through time is key to understanding social experience (Neal, 2013; Nowotny, 1992). Micro-sociological traditions emphasise the importance of time at the level of communities. Schütz highlights the centrality of time in constituting intersubjectivity (Muzzetto, 2006; Schutz, 1962); a shared understanding of time is essential for social action and interaction (Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013). Mead ([1932] 1972: 1) suggests that the social experience of the present is particularly critical, in that ‘[t]he present is to be taken as the locus of reality. This means [. . .] that to consider anything as real is to consider it as existing in, or in relation to, a present.’ In his definition of the self in relation to the generalised other of society, Mead’s ([1932] 1972: 74) ‘I’ is ‘constantly present in experience’, as ‘[w]e can go back directly a few moments in our experience, and then we are dependent upon memory images for the rest’.

This intersubjective understanding of time is shared through social narratives. As Klinke (2013: 676) asserts, ‘time does not exist meaningfully outside narrative’. The fluid nature of time in relation to disaster can be understood through the narrative links that form between the past, present and future. The past is not a definitively constituted artefact; meaning, once made, has the potential to be remade. Mead’s ([1932] 1972: 170) perspective is that the ‘past has a reality whether in the experience or not’, and, as Forrest (1993: 444) assesses, conveys a theorisation of ‘the past not as something that was final or irrevocable but rather as being as hypothetical as the future’. Although making sense of the present through historical analogy is a common way of managing uncertainty (Halbwachs, [1950] 2020), simultaneously, the past can be subject to revision. Both the past and the future are constructed by present social action and conditions (Cwerner, 2000; Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013). Narrative work, where these understandings are shared and become socially embedded, define the agreed version of reality. This definitional closure is achieved where a stable version of this reality is intersubjectively held (Klinke, 2013). Social understandings of time, when shared, serve to produce and project these temporal facts as well as the wider realities that these temporalities are embedded within.

Time and disasters

Emerging literature in disaster studies suggests that forms of collective memory and temporal narratives are integral to the experience of disaster. For example, communities experiencing disasters draw upon past events in narrating present conditions (Ingham et al., 2023). Hobbins’ (2021: 4) exploration of the memories of teachers and their professional work following wildfire in Sweden suggests that the construction of memories is informed by ‘a dynamic relationship between past and present’. Memory may also extend across time. Raccanello et al. (2022: 1107) demonstrate that ‘collective memories of historical traumatic events are built over the long term and [. . .] transmit intergenerational lessons from the past’. As such, an individual does not need to have personally experienced disaster to possess social memory of disaster events. Present and future disasters can be envisaged via recollections of the past (Shtob, 2019) and memory, analogy and metaphors are means through which disaster resilience and recovery are experienced (Atsumi et al., 2019).

Within disaster sociology, time is fundamental to debates around the definition of ‘disaster’. Fritz’s (1961: 655) classical definition specifies disasters as events ‘concentrated in time and space’. Some recent literature agrees that the compression of time is a defining quality (Olshansky et al., 2012). Others have problematised and extended original definitions, through the concept of ‘slow disasters’ (Hsu, 2019) and in foregrounding forms of structural violence that surround, for instance, chronic industrial pollution or climate change (Hernández, 2022; Picou, 2009). Even in the context of (rapidly occurring) fire, McKinnon and Eriksen (2023) show that the social meanings made around a disaster can emerge slowly. Indigenous disaster temporalities also contrast with classical definitions, with calls for a greater recognition of contextualised disaster temporalities (Jackson, 2021).

In discussing social experiences of time in the context of climate disasters, Ekström (2016: 5349) argues that ‘emergencies are stretched out in time and increasingly experienced as being anchored in multiple temporalities’. Intersubjective experiences of time are highlighted in the way disaster survivors collectively make sense of what happened (Richardson, 2005). Analysing how individuals and communities account for time – and how these can be multiple, singular, fixed or fractured – is critical to sociologically understanding how disasters are experienced and responded to.

Multiple disasters in Australia

There are a growing number of communities across rural and regional Australia where back-to-back disasters have occurred (AIDR, 2020, 2022). Social experiences of successive disasters have been a topic of limited study (Leppold et al., 2025), yet this is of growing relevance as the frequency and severity of disasters is projected to increase due to climate change (IPCC, 2022). The experience of those working through consecutive disasters, in roles to support affected communities, deserves further attention given that these workforces are likely to also continue growing.

In the Australian emergency management context, disaster work is separated into categories of Prevention, Preparedness, Response and Recovery (PPRR) (AIDR, 2023). Agencies are often defined and staffed in relation to one specific stage of the cycle (e.g. ‘response’ but not ‘recovery’), and professional categories are delineated through the PPRR model. Cyclical models of disasters are problematised in applied practice (Bosher et al., 2021; Coetzee and Van Niekerk, 2012) in addition to the theoretical problematisation of their inherent assumptions about time (Easthope, 2018). One critique surrounds how this produces a ‘temporal dimension of disasters [. . .] [divorced from] [. . .] the wider context within which this process takes place’ (Bankoff, 2004: 24). Official representations and lived realities of disaster, as located in time, often differ. As Easthope (2018: 36) writes, ‘those caught up within disaster may not realise that they are supposed to have “moved on to the next phase” and that the circumstances influencing their lives may not be moving at the same pace as the official response’.

Community-based disaster workers navigate tensions between official instructions and expectations of disaster, and the community impacts that they witness and are integrated within. Through analysing the narratives of time articulated by disaster recovery workers in rural and regional communities in Australia, this article interrogates the ways in which these workers understand community perceptions of time and how they respond to this in their work, as well as their own perceptions of time and the impact of this upon their professional experiences.

Methods

The research context

There is growing attention internationally to the experience of multiple disaster exposures, and Australia presents a particularly relevant site for research into this topic. Australia has one of the highest rates of disaster frequency globally, and has been identified as ‘one of the most vulnerable developed countries to climate impacts’ (Hutley et al., 2022). Recent surveys indicate that 84% of Australians have experienced at least one climate disaster since 2019, and over half of the population has experienced multiple (Bradshaw et al., 2024). As experiences of multiple disasters become more common, there is a growing disaster recovery workforce that is deployed in community-based support positions in Australia.

The present study sampled recovery workers from across Australia, including Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia (there were no participants in the Northern Territory or Australian Capital Territory). There were more women (20) than men (5) who participated, aligning with broader trends in gender representation in disaster work (Gender & Disaster Australia, 2023). There were varied disasters, and timing between disasters, in the communities that recovery workers were based in, as presented alongside each quote below.

Qualitative interviews

This study draws on semi-structured qualitative interviews (Miller et al., 2004) with individuals who were working in community-based disaster recovery roles across Australia. The study focused on those working in rural and regional communities that had experienced two or more disasters (in addition to the COVID-19 pandemic) between 2017 and 2022. The interviewees were based in communities that had variously experienced bushfires, floods, landslides, severe storms, drought, arson attacks, mouse plagues and/or cyclones. Recruitment occurred through disaster and emergency management organisations in Australia that employ community-based recovery workers. Recovery workers self-identified if they met inclusion criteria and independently contacted the research team to state interest in participating. The University of Melbourne Human Research Ethics Committee approved this study (2022-23683-27129-3).

Twenty-five recovery workers participated in interviews between June and October 2022. The interviews were conducted online by [A2] and [A4] and ranged in length from 30 to 100 minutes. The interviews were conducted over Zoom videoconferencing. This choice was taken in light of past feedback from this workforce that online interviews were easier to participate in due to the ease of fitting them into busy work schedules. While Zoom may result in a different sense of presence in interviews, there is evidence for Zoom interviews as a useful method in qualitative research (Oliffe et al., 2021). Interviews were transcribed and inductive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) was undertaken. A broadly inductive approach was appropriate both due to the nature of the time-related content not being expected (no specific time questions in the interview schedule) and due to the dearth of extant literature in this area from which to pre-form deductive codes.

Formative codes about time were developed by [A4], and continued code development and analysis was carried out by [A1]. [A4] and [A1] then met to discuss and ensure the reliability of the coding prior to [A1] conducting the final analysis. The parent codes were ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’, and indicative child codes developed from this included ‘memory’ (‘past’), ‘insecurity’ (‘future’), ‘climate’ (‘future’), ‘hope’ (‘future’), ‘waiting’ (‘present’) ‘stuck/repeating’ (‘present’), ‘social breakdown’ (‘present’) and so on.

Results

The accounts of time and disaster recovery revolved around a non-linear perception of an endless present. The experience of multiple disasters resulted in a breakdown of the normal pattern of time. Time became stagnant and stretched, immersed in the perception of an interminable experience of uncertainty and insecurity. Engaging with communities through multiple disasters also influenced how recovery workers perceived work time, and on the fatigue they experienced surrounding this form of work.

Stagnation, repetition and experiences of the present

The experience of multiple disasters resulted in specific accounts of time: most dominantly, the sense of the present as stagnant, stretched and repeating. The communities that recovery workers supported were seen to understand time as stopping and stalling during a period of disasters. The usual experience of time within modernity as moving forward and progressing linearly (Hassard, 2016; Nowotny, 2018) was seceded by a sense of stagnation. The interviewees narrated a profound sense of being ‘stuck’ in an insecure and risk-laden present, with their social realities experienced as on a stagnant and repeated trajectory, rather than moving forward in a process of recovery and reconstruction.

This community sense of suspension in time was explained in various ways. The form of hazard involved was one source of this explanation. For instance, the specific form of flooding disasters was narrated as the cause of this: ‘It was just so prolonged I think. Water just stays. . .. Everyone kept talking about how floods, the water hangs around for ages so you have to just wait’ (‘P’: 2019–2020 bushfires, 2021 repeat floods and 2022 repeat floods). The idea of flooding as a form of disaster that is slow in recovery was reinforced throughout the interviews:

Some of the areas have been both fire and flood affected, but the flood affected area was greater than what we were expecting [. . .] [W]ater flowing through towns where it’s never flowed through before, it was pretty crazy. It basically feels like it’s been raining for two years anyway. (‘D’: drought, 2019–2020 bushfires, 2021 repeat floods, 2021 landslide and 2022 repeat floods)

In this quote, the feeling of persistence (‘it’s been raining for two years anyway’) captures the sense of an unending experience. Simultaneously, the multiple nature of the disasters was also key to this experience of suspension in time. Here for instance, the process of recovering from fires is impacted by ongoing rains:

they’re just in the process of rebuilding from the fires and their work’s been delayed [. . .] they’ve just got all their stuff sitting there because for the last three months – well, since the start of the year, it’s just been so wet [. . .] They just haven’t been able to do anything. (‘S’: 2019–2020 bushfires, 2021 repeat floods, 2021 landslide and 2022 repeat floods)

This impression of time – and recovery – being in a state of suspension is a recurrent theme across the social experience of communities following multiple disasters. This has an impact on the subjective sense of recovery and reconstruction experienced within these communities.

Associated with this feeling of stagnation is also the experience of endless repetition. Having been through multiple disaster events leaves communities with the impression that disasters recur limitlessly:

[T]hey’re really down about ‘When’s it going to end?’ Like, ‘We can’t come up for – we come up for a breath and then you pour some more water on us.’ And – you know, and some people are exhausted by that. (‘I’: drought, 2019–2020 bushfires, 2021 repeat floods, 2021 landslide and 2022 repeat floods)

In this way, the more marginal focus on narratives of the future (see further below) is enmeshed with the sense of repetition and stagnation of the present. Stagnation itself becomes the new normal.

This impression of being stuck in time is accompanied, for the communities, with the breakdown of social and support structures, a not-uncommon characteristic of disaster settings (Arcaya et al., 2020). Here, an interviewee reflects on experience of disasters and the loss of Elders in a First Nations community:

A lot of people are feeling lost and very disconnected from themselves and what they knew was the norm to now living a life that they’ve never been in. They’re completely different people now. We find that a lot of our young people are very disconnected. When you have your matriarchs and really strong male Elders, a lot of the time they’re the ones that hold the family together. [. . .] [Y]ou start to see people falling off the rails, as the only way to put it. They’re lost. (‘T’: 2019–2020 bushfires, 2020 repeat floods, 2021 repeat floods, 2021 mouse plague)

In this way, the breakdown of temporal norms experienced by these communities in the aftermath of multiple disasters is coupled with broader social anomie. The experience of the disasters results in new forms of risk and uncertainty in the form of the destabilisation of community and support structures for these communities.

In the face of these breakdowns of time and social structure, one of the observations that recovery workers had about community members’ reaction is a hyper-focus on environmental risks. The perception of risk becomes more acute; risks are constantly monitored and anticipated, reinforcing feelings of uncertainty and insecurity. For instance, one interviewee reflected on seeing the community fixating on fire danger levels, amid recurring fire events:

We jokingly said, ‘Look, we’ve had two fires now. That’s enough.’ Then, the third one came. [. . .] What you’ve got is an incredibly traumatised, wary, impacted with triggers community . . . that are coming up to another summer. All we’re going to hear between now, I heard it this morning, ‘How many more days of fire danger?’ (‘Y’: 2019 bushfire, 2020 bushfire and 2021 bushfire)

This sense of living in a constant state of risk is common across disaster types. For example, a similar effect is seen in relation to watchfulness around rain and potential flooding:

There’s definite fear whenever it rains. People are very fearful about the rain, the wind. There’s a really strong, I wouldn’t say obsession, but there’s a very strong focus in community on weather reports, severe weather warnings, social media. There’s a lot of people talking about the weather outlooks. (‘F’: 2017 cyclone, 2019 bushfire, 2020 bushfire, 2021 flood and 2022 repeat floods)

In this way, the sense of being stuck in the time of disaster is reinforced by vigilance around risks, where the present circumstance is translated and extended into the future, aggravating the difficulty of moving beyond the experience of acute disaster phases.

This state of being also impacts on recovery and the ability of affected individuals to engage with recovery processes. Individuals feel worn out while living in a state of anxiety and uncertainty. For instance, the enthusiasm for communal effort weakens over a succession of multiple disasters:

People get a bit despairing a bit quicker. They don’t have that period as much where it’s like, ‘We’re all working together and we’re feeling good.’ It’s like, ‘It’s happening again, and all the same problems. I’m scared.’ We get worn out and a bit negative fairly quickly. (‘M’: 2019–2020 bushfires, 2021 repeat floods, 2022 repeat floods)

The marked perception of repetition and recurrence was associated with limited energy and motivation to engage in recovery activities, and applies to both community members and recovery workers, as this interviewee indicates in relation to their professional experience:

There’s a sense of we don’t know what’s coming. No matter what we do we won’t be ready. Almost a why bother, why get up? I’ve had a number of people say to me, and some of them are my colleagues not just people in the community, saying, ‘It’s really hard to get out of bed in the morning. I just don’t hold a lot of hope or trust for a healthy future.’ (‘X’: 2019–2020 bushfire and 2021 severe storm)

Efforts at engaging with recovery can seem futile when these activities are embedded in a sense of a persistent risk and a normless present, and where sight of the longer-term future seems to be beyond reach in the context of a stagnant disaster recovery process.

The experience of an unending or extended present is a key facet of the social perception of time following multiple disasters. While some forms of disaster (floods) are seen as persistent in and of themselves, the social experience of stagnancy and continued risk remains across different combinations of disaster form. This is also often translated into a sense of lethargy or detachment from recovery efforts, where motivation dwindles through the experience of recurrence and repetition.

Recalling the past and imagining the future

While the interviewees tended to focus on the experience of time in relation to an extended present, this sense of the present was also drawn out within recollections of the past and imaginaries of the future. The experience of the present serves to frame and construct the past and the future, and so this stagnancy of the present in the context of multiple disasters changes the way in which the past and future are understood. In particular, histories of disaster tend to be erased, while the potential for change in the future becomes more difficult to grasp.

The interviewees suggested that the communities that they worked with had difficulty in relating current experiences to the past. In particular, communities seemed less able to locate present difficulties within histories of disaster:

They’ve never, ever experienced a bushfire. That is their belief, their understanding and their experience. As professionals within the space, we know that such and such has happened before, or in 1950, it happened before. We can compare things as we do in the professional space. [. . .] [T]he only way I could’ve worked well in my position was to understand and take it from the basis, ‘This has not happened before.’ It’s then supporting the community under that specific basis, ‘This has not happened before.’ (‘T’: 2019–2020 bushfires, 2020 repeat floods, 2021 repeat floods and 2021 mouse plague)

Here, the perceived inability of members of the community to locate the disaster experience within evidence from the past means that the disaster worker needs to relate to communities through the frame of the present only. This follows Schutz’s (1962) assertion that a shared intersubjectivity of time is necessary for social action to unfold. Here, the worker finds they need to cede to the community perception that there were no past disasters in order to help the community cope.

While the present is dislocated from memory of the past, the present experience is also seen as persistent in community imaginaries of the future. Imaginaries of the future are mirrors of the experience of the present:

there’s a lot of thinking around what’s next. Not if something else happens, when something else happens. And, why do you think that is? Because, they watch the news. Look at [anon. community]. When [politician] Barnaby Joyce said, ‘This is a one in three and a half thousand year event.’ Really? We’re only at July, and it’s happened twice since. (‘N’: 2019–2020 bushfires and 2021 severe storm)

This sense of insecurity is a core characteristic of the framing of the future, showing how the present experience is extended into the future.

This has implications for the way in which disaster recovery work is engaged with by communities, who feel ‘caught’ in a repeated disaster and recovery cycle:

What I mean by not able to cope is uncertainty about the future, the fear that they will just be caught in that cycle of recovery and disaster and recovery and disaster for a long time to come, and being in a state of prolonged stress . . . because they thought it was over but then another event came in. (‘K’: 2019–2020 bushfires, 2021 repeat floods and 2022 repeat floods)

In this way, the immediate future is marked by the expectation of further disaster events, both for the members of the community and the recovery workers: ‘your sense of safety or certainty around the future is shaken. I expect now that I will have another disaster, probably within the next six months’ (‘F’: 2017 cyclone, 2019 bushfire, 2020 bushfire, 2021 flood and 2022 repeat floods). The short-term future is imagined as the extension of the new, unstable present. The experience of uncertainty is drawn into expectations of the future, and frames present actions in recovery around the multiple disasters.

This occurs in varied ways. For instance, in relation to their professional experience, a number of interviewees reflect on multiple disasters in the context of climate change as an underpinning source of this instability:

We said before climate change was changing everything, ‘These things are going to happen more often. We have to be ready for it’, but we didn’t actually know until we started going through it what ready was and what it looks like. (‘M’: 2019–2020 bushfires, 2021 repeat floods and 2022 repeat floods)

As with engagement with a mutually agreed past, the recovery workers note tensions in communicating with communities on this point. This interviewee reports community reluctance in discussing the long-term implications of the changing local environment, due to the sensitivities around this point:

I’m not having that conversation with them because it’s very political. That’s their home. How can I tell them they shouldn’t be living there? But, you’ve got the reality of showing them maps with all these predictions about what impact sea level rise is going to have and what would happen in a one in one hundred event or a peak maximum event. People can see [community] will probably cease to exist. (‘V’: 2019–2020 bushfires, 2021 repeat floods, 2021 landslide and 2022 repeat floods)

These understandings of the future are intertwined with the idea of a repeating, stagnant and persistent present state of risk. In relation to the changing climate and environment, seasonal differences also vanish within the new reality of these experiences: ‘We’re talking about disaster season, which increasingly doesn’t mean anything anymore, because the disaster season is becoming the whole year’ (‘K’: 2019–2020 bushfires, 2021 repeat floods and 2022 repeat floods). Changes in season (a common marker in the social passage of time) are no longer expected and become difficult to engage with. This is yet another way in which experiences of time have been modified.

In this way, the future is conceived of as an extension of the insecure present, and constructed by communities through the frame of their experiences of the present. Compared with local community members, the recovery workers are able to situate this risk within a broader pattern of climate change. However, integrating these knowledges into the practice of the workers does not feel useful to them. This is because such forecasting is not perceived by the interviewees as something that the communities themselves could readily engage with. Instead, community members were fixed in a protracted present where the risks of disaster are omnipresent, in a way that was dislocated from a longer history of disaster or from the projected future of climate change, and with the expectation that these experiences would persist.

Time and the experience of recovery working

In engaging with these community experiences, the recovery workers navigate across these places and peoples that are suspended in a recurring time of disasters. Managing these circumstances has impacts on the interviewees themselves – in relation to their experiences of work time, and in terms of their own emotional response. As such, the recovery workers are also acting within shared, professionally structured, experiences of time.

Recovery workers often narrated the implications of working with these communities in terms of the effects on their own work time. The temporalities of multiple disasters also impact the temporalities of work. One interviewee recounts the way in which an initial sense of enthusiasm is accompanied by a burst of work activity:

When we were able to respond this year up to [area] I felt that we were just, ‘Let’s get up there, let’s help’, and it was such a big area, and we just got up there and hit the ground running. You look back and realise we ended up working 21 days straight, which we probably shouldn’t have. (‘D’: drought, 2019–2020 bushfires, 2021 repeat floods, 2021 landslide, 2022 repeat floods)

The energy for work can shift over the course of a placement. Once a worker is embedded with an affected community, the need to closely guard the separation of work and non-work time develops. This is experienced as difficult but essential:

I was pretty strict with my hours when I could be, and just working work hours and not working non-work hours. ’[C]ause otherwise you just work all the time. [. . .] It was like, ‘I can’t.’ The stress and everybody going through everything again, it was just like, ‘No. Got to step away now.’ I think there’s a cumulative effect on workers. (‘M’: 2019–2020 bushfires, 2021 repeat floods, 2022 repeat floods)

Across a longer period of months or years, the need to carefully manage work time in relation to stress becomes evident. Considering work structures in relation to the broader experiences of time in the context of multiple disasters helps to shed understanding on these shifts.

Working in contexts of multiple disasters produces a sense of burnout. This is articulated using similar framings of time as expressed in relation to the community experiences described earlier. For example, the experience of recovery as a persistent state also has a profound impact on workers:

Recovery goes for so long. There’s an expectation that you’re going to maintain that. Not seven days a week, but I don’t know. There was a comparison . . . with athletes where they say athletes have got their ‘on’ and their ‘off’ season and in their ‘off’ season they really take the time to recuperate. . .. Whereas, I feel like there’s not ever an ‘off’ season. (‘Q’: 2018 bushfire and 2020 bushfire)

The impression of being stuck in a repeated experience of disaster is another commonality between the communities and recovery workers:

I was in a meeting with colleagues from other agencies, other recovery workers, and there was a whole range of experiences in that meeting. There was people in tears, there was people saying that they’d checked whether they had enough to retire. . .. I think it is a common emotion around recovery workers in this area at the moment. (‘F’: 2017 cyclone, 2019 bushfire, 2020 bushfire, 2021 flood and 2022 repeat floods)

The sense of stress experienced by these workers is apparent throughout the interviews. In some accounts, this stress is somatised, and led to the interviewee leaving this occupation:

I had [a] physical and I told my employers. I said, ‘My blood pressure’s crazy because of this job.’ I don’t sleep at night because of this job. I cry every day. Sometimes I had to go into a room and close the door and cry whilst there was a client in the front room. [. . .] I left. (‘Z’: drought, 2019 bushfire, 2020 flood, 2021 flood and 2022 flood)

Hopelessness and repetition, as well as a suspension of norms of work-time, are fundamental to the experiences of recovery workers in the context of multiple disasters.

The interviewees’ own experiences of their work reflect the same focus of being stuck in a stagnant present as articulated in accounts of the communities. However, for a smaller number of interviewees, this was also couched in a long-term experience of disaster recovery work that encouraged them to persist despite the stress:

in community development you don’t see a result today or tomorrow or next week. You don’t even see a result until you’ve left the job and somebody invites you to the launch of something new five years later. Do you know what I mean? The results show up very slowly and over a long period. (‘X’: 2019–2020 bushfire and 2021 severe storm)

Departing from the sense of futility found in the accounts of community experience, the ability to take a long-term view of recovery meant that some interviewees could mediate the stress of their work and acknowledge the overall impact of their endeavour.

Together, these accounts illustrate that the temporalities of multiple disaster can impact recovery workers in various ways, in relation to their (in)ability to disconnect from work, their experience of fatigue, and their ideas about the impact of their activities. While there is some variation in these experiences, this suggests that a closer accounting of the link between experiences of time and workers’ stress would be a useful line of further enquiry, particularly given the likelihood of a growing need for these workforces given the projected increases in disaster frequency due to climate change.

Discussion

Living and working in the context of multiple disasters in rural and regional Australia creates specific subjectivities of time that displace the typical experience. A focus on an interminable present and a difficulty in imagining the past and future are key characteristics that workers see in community narratives. While workers themselves were able to foresee the future and recall the past, they needed to align these ideas with community narratives to make their work feasible.

Communities were perceived by recovery workers as primarily framing time through reference to the present. The unstable ‘present’ extended into the past and future, mediating how these were understood and imagined. A well-worn mechanism for engaging with risk and uncertainty is by drawing analogy with the past (Halbwachs, [1950] 2020; Hobsbawm, 1972; Rosenberg and Golden, 1992), where social actors allude to a supposedly stable past to make sense of an uncertain present. While such analogising sometimes reframes the past (Klinke, 2013), it is notable that in this study the past was instead largely absent in community narratives; the focus was on an unending present. This finding contrasts with key disaster studies literature on time, which emphasises the prominence of historical analogy in making sense of new uncertainties (Monteil et al., 2020; Raccanello et al., 2022; Shtob, 2019).

Instead, this study’s findings reflect Mead’s (1932) account of the present as the core locus of, and way of understanding, experience. It is possible that the empirical focus of this study (multiple disasters) could explain this emphasis on the present, given that these communities experience recurring stressors. Given the increasing prevalence of multiple disasters in communities in Australia and globally, understanding how recurrence impacts the community experience of time is significant.

The difficulty the recovery workers perceived in engaging with communities around the past and future was notable. There was a sense of tension in interviewees’ knowledge around the longer-term future, particularly in relation to the predicted impacts of climate change. The interviewees perceived that community members were not able to contend with the future, because they were entrenched in the experience of the present. These experiences and narratives of the future are bound by the social context of risk and uncertainty. Beck (1992, 2009) argues that advanced modernity is typified by the technical and scientific production and distribution of risks. Risk under these circumstances is systemic, tends to transgress and dislocate spatial and temporal boundaries, and is necessarily located in the future but managed in the present. This can be particularly salient in the social experience of disasters. Imaginaries of the future can become important within disaster settings, for example evidence in the work around anniversaries (Kroepsch et al., 2018; Neal, 2013), determining the end of ‘recovery’ (Whittle et al., 2012) or forecasting future disasters (Clot-Garrell, 2024). However, our findings are more resonant with literature on climate anxiety or climate distress, which highlights persistent uncertainties between an experienced present and an anticipated future, and how this may lead to non-action (e.g. through ‘eco-paralysis’), or in contrast, to motivate action (Whitmarsh et al., 2022; Wu et al., 2020).

Moreover, for these disaster workers, this focus on the present and persistent uncertainty has practical implications. They needed to modify their own approaches to recovery work, in particular to act ‘as if’ they shared that understanding of the disaster (Vaihinger and Rosenthal, [1924] 2021). Part of this was acting as though the disaster was not linked to a past (previous disasters) or future (climate change), and as though there was no knowledge of these links. This emphasises Schutz’s (1962) arguments about the importance of achieving a shared intersubjectivity of time – or at least the impression of this – in social action.

These findings also contribute to discussions on the definition of a ‘disaster’ within disaster sociology. While defining disasters as ‘concentrated in time’ (Fritz, 1961) continues to dominate, this study finds a different orientation to time and disaster. Instead of being ‘concentrated’, time is stretched; the subjective experience of disaster is as extended through (formal) time, rather than an acute event. This suggests a need to challenge dominant definitions of disaster to account for community experiences. This links to broader efforts to further problematise time within the field (Hsu, 2019). Moreover, in the context of multiple disasters, Alcántara-Ayala (2019) discusses how the focus on large-scale events within disaster studies serves to obscure evidence that multiple, smaller disasters can have a significant effect on long-term community well-being. As our study suggests, such multiplicity might have distinct impacts upon narratives and experiences of time.

There are also practical implications to this. For instance, the Australian Red Cross has appealed that the Australian government classify drought as a disaster. Drought is currently not classified as a disaster because of its slow onset and lack of defined starting or end points (Australian Red Cross, 2023); this comparatively limits the services and support available in drought-affected areas. However, this study shows that both ‘acute’ and ‘slow’ disasters are stretched in time, and similarly cause for persistent pressure and uncertainty. This contributes an empirical example to literatures critiquing the ‘disaster cycle’ approach conceptually (Bosher et al., 2021; Coetzee and Van Niekerk, 2012), in relation to disaster management outcomes (Cronstedt, 2002), and as a policy tool (Balamir, 2022). The perception of a stretching present does not align with the distinct phases of disaster within the PPRR cycle as used to institutionally determine practice, furthering the difficulties these workers encounter. This resonates with calls to move away from ‘events-based’ emergency management and recovery programmes that respond to disasters individually, to instead focus on how community support can be sustainably provided across multiple disasters (Eriksen et al., 2025).

The understanding of time in the context of multiple disasters can also support analyses in the sociology of time. The experience of a succession of important events in a short span of (formal) time seemed to make explicit the social construction of time within this context. The topic of time was not the initial focus of the research design. However, the prominence of narratives of time became clear during data collection and analysis. That ‘time’ emerges strongly even when not specifically probed for suggests that perceptions of time (which are often not conscious) may become more explicitly foregrounded within the context of disruptive experiences. This would indicate potential analytical utility in thinking through the sociology of time via the empirical area covered by the sociology of disasters.

This study also identifies areas for further reflection in the intersection between time and emotions. This is evident both in terms of the community – for example in the link between feeling hopeless about recovery in the midst of a constant disaster-defined present – and perhaps most starkly in the interviewee’s own accounts of time and their work. There is room for further explicit interrogation of these experiences through the interplay between the sociology of time with the sociology of emotions. Mullaney and Shope (2015) suggest that emotional states impact on the ways in which people experience time. Drawing on Hochschild’s ([1979] 2019), ‘emotion work’, they propose the concept of ‘temporal emotion work’ to articulate the inter-relation of emotions and time. Examinations of disaster contexts may be useful in interrogating this link, for example extending the empirical path taken by Whittle et al. (2012), who find that emotions around flooding in the UK were critical to the social actions in this setting.

The need for strict emotion management in professional settings can exacerbate worker stress (Rushton et al., 2022). While our analysis focuses on experience of time and work, the narratives uncovered the complex and stressful emotion work on the part of disaster recovery workers. Emotion management and burnout in work settings are often linked to gendered expectations of caring (see Kroll et al., 2021). It might also be useful to probe this area given the gendered distribution of disaster recovery work, which is also exemplified by our participant sample. Further examining the implications of work time on the well-being and motivation of recovery workers is necessary; the stress produced by this form of work (including around the management of ‘work’ and ‘non-work’ time) was a pervasive theme across the interviews.

The problem of focusing on disasters as acute ‘past events’ – when the subjective experience of a disaster may still be very present – also links to the well-being impacts of disasters. Drawing in biomedicalised understandings of emotions and disasters, Erikson and Peek (2022) problematise the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder after disasters. They argue that this biomedical framing suggests that discomfort is a response to something that took place in the past, not something taking place in the present, and that the concept does not account for disruptions in larger social order and everyday life that may persist or be exacerbated over time. They state that ‘[i]f someone suffers from a traumatic reaction two or three years after a disaster is reckoned to be over, the only logical deduction is that the original calculation was inaccurate. The disaster is not over. It is ongoing’ (Erikson and Peek, 2022: 59). Our study adds weight to this by showing that the community experience of time does not mirror the formal classifications within which the recovery workers must institutionally operate, and further that disaster experiences can stretch perceptions of time, which may also contribute to broader well-being.

Given the centrality of time to the social experience, it can be difficult to conceptually disambiguate time from other narrative components. We presented the narrative elements of ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ within these overarching stories about time. However, lived experiences of time are not so neatly categorised. Narratives of time and multiple disasters are not in stasis; they will change as the wider social contexts shift. Nevertheless, the narratives presented by these workers shed light on the destabilisation of time in the context of multiple disasters, which contributes to our broader understanding of how these workers and the communities they serve might be better supported.