Anne Bradbury Shares Insights from Her Exchange in Burke Shire, Queensland

Contributed by Anne Bradbury, Manager Community Strategies, Napier City Council, 2024 AskYourTeam Overseas Manager Exchange recipient. Anne spent time at Burke Shire Council in Queensland and attended the Queensland Local Government Managers Association Conference in Cairns.

I was matched with Shaun Jorgenson, the Finance and IT Manager from Burke Shire Council in Queensland, Australia. Queensland has 77 local governments and Burke Shire sits in the northwest of the state, on the border with Northern Territory. The Shire is about the size of the country of Belgium and is home to approximately 550 people. The primary industry is cattle stations. The Council offices are in Burketown which has a population of approximately 200 people. Burketown is an isolated outback town and the Barramundi capital of Australia, and I can confirm that the Barra that I had during my week there was fresh and delicious. The Council has another office in Cairns which is needed to attract staff that may not want to live in Burketown. Shaun lives in Cairns, and he visits Burketown numerous times a year, spending approximately three months there every year.

Burketown gets isolated every year in the wet season (the summer), sometimes the town floods but even if the town isn’t flooded all their roads are impassable. Flooding has different risks to flooding in New Zealand as crocodiles and sharks have been known to be found in flood waters! Burke is a remote area, and they know they need to be able to look after themselves during the wet season. I was impressed with how resilient the residents and the council are.

The IT and communication systems at Burke Shire Council are resilient as they have back-up networks. This came to play when I was out there as their main network was damaged, so they moved to the Star link network which worked well. They understand that communication systems are as important as food, water and shelter during the floods, which is something we know too well as we struggled when Napier, a town of nearly 70,000, lost communications last year when trying to respond to an emergency event. When Shaun is in New Zealand I will introduce him to our Emergency Management officer and our IT Manager as we will be able to learn from Shaun’s experiences in setting up their systems.

On my first day in the office in Burke something was jumping around behind me, it was a wallaby. One of the office staff is a trained wallaby carer and looks after baby wallabies whose Mum’s have died. Seeing wallabies in the office seemed quintessential Australian.

During my visit I spent a lot of time with the Community Development Officer. This is the field I work in, so it was great to share stories and learn about community resilience in Burke. Community development in Burke is about connection, getting people together in social and sports events during the dry season. Residents live quite far away from others and the events help maintain their relationships.

We covered more than 1000kms driving around the region in the week I was there travelling on bitumen and gravel roads. The roads get flooded every year and the state government gives grants to rebuild them each dry season. One of the roadhouses near the border with Northern Territory was having a lady’s day so we went to check in and to see what support they needed. On the way there we threw some nets into a river, pulled them out on the way home and they were full of red claw crayfish which are native to northern Queensland. They were delicious! We visited another roadhouse that had recently raised their home and the roadhouse shop and café by more than 2 metres because they were flooded in the last two wet seasons. We visited a local jockey club where the Melbourne Cup was on show. This was a great event, bringing together people from the surrounding stations and the Country Women’s Association put on a delicious meal for everyone. During the weekend we went to the local footy (rugby league) grand finals. Again, this was a great way to get communities together from around the region and from neighbouring regions. The atmosphere was intense, and everyone had a fantastic time supporting their teams.

I learnt that local government structures are different to ours. The shire councils in Queensland get most of their funding from the state. Doomadgee is in the middle of Burke Shire Region and is one of 16 Indigenous Councils in Queensland. These councils get funded by central government. There are also Land Councils that are formed to represent Indigenous Australians, and these councils are self-supporting – they aren’t funded by state or central government.

I spent a week in Cairns and attended the Queensland Local Government Managers Association Conference. The theme of the conference was Leading from the front: Leading from the back and we were privileged to hear from speakers who had experience in all forms of leadership including Squiz (Mark Squirrell) who gave an interesting talk about his experiences all over the globe and how he navigated through some challenging and intense situations. We also heard from speakers from councils in Queensland who had similar issues to what we are trying to tackle in Ahuriri/Napier e.g. homelessness, housing issues and the role of local government. I was very impressed with how everyone got so involved in fancy dress for the nautical theme conference dinner! The dinner rounded off my two interesting weeks in Australia.