2028: Queensland's "Year of Flight".

Picture this moment.

The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum: Sunday July 30, 2028. A hot summer evening in the “City of Angels”. This night, is the closing ceremony of the 2028 Olympics, and the handover of the Olympic Flag to the Lord Mayor of Brisbane, is followed by the raising of the Australian flag, as a massed marching band plays Advance Australia Fair. After the flag is raised, the crowd (nearly 80,000 strong inside the LA Coliseum) simply looks skyward.

Queenslanders watching at home (on a late Monday afternoon: July 31, 2028) is hoping their gamble pays off: after all, they remember the kangaroos Sydney sent to Atlanta in 1996, Vanessa Amarosi getting rained on at the 2002 Commonwealth Games closer in Manchester (and her redemption in Birmingham in 2022… that got overshadowed by the passing of Olivia Newton-John), and even our effort at Hampden Park in 2014 to sell the world on the Gold Coast’s Commonwealth Games four years later.

For Queensland, this is more than a handover. It’s the beginning of the most important period for tourism promotion in our state’s history: one that had it’s seeds sown as the world recovered from a pandemic.

2028, has already been a year with our eyes on the sky in the Sunshine State.

The handover in LA… is just icing on the cake.

2021: The Three Stream Dream.

Welcome, to our look at 2021. The title says a lot, but to warm you up for the announcements ahead: let's take a moment to remember that a significant milestone is approaching.

2011 Floods: a flood of memories.

On this day, ten years ago: the first signs of what would become the hardest period for the SE corner so far this century (outside the COVID-19 news story that has dominated almost the entire year of 2020) began. The events that led to the Lockyer Valley/Toowoomba flash flood tragedy on January 10, and the 2011 Brisbane/Ipswich flood that followed, will be guaranteed to be revisited by any news service worth their salt (whether it is print, online, radio or television) in the weeks to come.

As I said in mid-2018:

“We know, in 2021 there will indeed be a flood of memories: much like how 1984, and 1999 were for 1974: but one thing must be remembered. Brisbane is a city built on a floodplain. Flooding is a fact of life, you can try and tame it with dams and levees, but the threat still exists: and hopefully, when the next big flood happens: we hope that the lessons of 2011 have been learned by a river city which can end up in the river, once in a while.”

We know there will be limited attendance at services marking the milestone in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley due to COVID-19. It will be a fitting reminder for the families of those we lost ten years ago and for flood awareness in general in Queensland, if the following occurred on January 10, 2021.

- Quite simply: A minute’s silence, at 3pm (co-ordinated by radio and television stations).

In addition, there needs to be serious thoughts about Queensland making January 10 each year, a non-public holiday observance for flood and cyclone readiness (or should we say… resilience), akin to how Japan has commemorated the Great Kanto Earthquake on the 1st of September 1923 (which devastated the nation’s capital Tokyo: due to both the earthquake itself, and resulting fires), every year since 1960 as a national disaster awareness day on the 1st of September.

It is indeed fitting, that we in Queensland begin to observe January 10 as the Jordan Rice Day for Flood and Cyclone Resilience: named for 13 year old Jordan Rice, who made a brave decision to insist that his younger brother’s life was rescued over his own on January 10, 2011 in Toowoomba’s raging torrent.

Now, onto 2021.