Böcker av David Topp

David Topp succinctly explains how a city built on a flood plain will never be flood free.- Peter Spearritt: Emeritus Professor of History, The University of Queensland.Brisbane Breached: The Story of a Drought Defaulted Floodplain delves into the intricate historical chronicles of Brisbane, meticulously exploring the city's enduring struggle against the dual forces of severe flooding and prolonged droughts.The narrative unfolds, juxtaposing the recurrent major flood events between 1841 and 2022 with intermittent, yet impactful, periods of drought. Such occurrences, inherently linked to Brisbane's geographical position constructed within a flood plain, present profound policy challenges that have persisted over time.In dissecting the prevailing beliefs in the efficacy of dam constructions as a panacea for Brisbane's water-related vulnerabilities, this book confronts the prevailing misconceptions. The inadequacies of solely relying on dam infrastructure become apparent in the face of the city's unique topographical limitations, prompting a necessary paradigm shift in policy considerations.Foreseeing an imminent population surge, projected to add one million residents by 2032, this book's discourse posits the urgency of transcending traditional water management strategies. This paradigmatic shift becomes a pivotal policy proposition to avert the existential threat of complete water depletion in a city susceptible to both drought and flooding.David Topp is a Queensland Barrister. His previous book Tennyson Breach was published in 2012.

A rich collection of essays tracing the relationship between art and sound.In the 1970s David Toop became preoccupied with the possibility that music was no longer bounded by formalities of audience: the clapping, the booing, the short attention span, the demand for instant gratification. Considering sound and listening as foundational practices in themselves leads music into a thrilling new territory: stretched time, wilderness, video monitors, singing sculptures, weather, meditations, vibration and the interior resonance of objects, interspecies communications, instructional texts, silent actions, and performance art.Toop sought to document the originality and unfamiliarity of this work from his perspective as a practitioner and writer. The challenge was to do so without being drawn back into the domain of music while still acknowledging the vitality and hybridity of twentieth-century musics as they moved toward art galleries, museums, and site-specificity. Toop focused on practitioners, whose stories are as compelling as the theoretical and abstract implications of their works.Inflamed Invisible collects more than four decades of David Toop's essays, reviews, interviews, and experimental texts, drawing us into the company of artists and their concerns, not forgetting the quieter, unsung voices. The volume is an offering, an exploration of strata of sound that are the crossing points of sensory, intellectual, and philosophical preoccupations, layers through which objects, thoughts and air itself come alive as the inflamed invisible.