Identity area
Type of entity
Authorized form of name
Parallel form(s) of name
- Joe Barr
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
History
Joe Barr was born on 29 April 1941 in Preston, England. The family moved to Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in 1948 and then to Kampala, Uganda, in 1951. He went to school in in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi but left at the age of 15 to join the Royal Navy as a boy seaman. He left the Royal Navy in 1971 having served 12 years as aircrew (Observer/Navigator) in Fleet Air Arm helicopters in a variety of roles. He emigrated to Australia in 1971 and worked for 2 years as an Air Traffic Controller. In 1973 - 1974 he was an assistant office manager in Melbourne before moving to Canberra in 1974 to join the then Marine Operations Centre (later Australian Coastal Surveillance Centre) as a marine search and rescue coordinator. When he left the position in 1981, he was the Controller (Operational Manager) and he then joined the National Disasters Organisation (later Emergency Management Australia) as a planning officer.
Transferred to the Refugees and Disasters Section of what is now AusAID in the early 1980s, he worked as an overseas disasters liaison officer with special interests in the development of disaster management assistance to Pacific countries. He was involved in Australian aid support programs following regional disasters in Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Samoa as well as Cambodia. In 1994 he returned to Emergency Management Australia (EMA) as the Director of Policy, Planning and Operations and spent periods acting as Director General. Set up in 1974 to coordinate national disaster management, EMA was an independent, low-profile organisation of about 70 personnel in Canberra and the Australian Department of Defence, answering directly to the Minister for Defence, Robert Ray.
In 1995, Joe Barr was nominated by Australia to become the first Australian member of the international UNDAC (United Nations Disaster Assistance and Coordination) Team. In 1996, he retired from the Public Service to set up 'Pacific Emergency Management Associates', based in Canberra (ACT) as a consultancy agency, which he ran until his retirement in 2007. During this period he participated in UNDAC post-disaster missions to the Seychelles (flood), Papua New Guinea (tsunami and drought), Turkey, Afghanistan, Indonesia, India (earthquake) and East Timor (post Indonesian departure).
Other consultancies were to the European Union, AusAID, the United Nations Development Program and other UN Agencies, USAID, Emergency Management Australia, various Pacific regional organisations, mostly involved in training and development activities, including developing manuals, project design and workshop planning. He developed the first Australian disaster management assistance programs for Pacific countries and worked in Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Cook Islands, Wallis and Futuna, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, Philippines, East Timor, Kenya, Uganda, Eritrea and Ethiopia.
Places
Pacific nations ; Philippines ; East Timor ; Kenya ; Uganda ; Eritrea ; Ethiopia
Legal status
Functions, occupations and activities
Public servant ; Technical educator ; Consultant ; Community worker
Mandates/sources of authority
Internal structures/genealogy
General context
Relationships area
Access points area
Subject access points
Place access points
Occupations
Control area
Authority record identifier
Institution identifier
Rules and/or conventions used
Status
Level of detail
Dates of creation, revision and deletion
Created by Christine Bryan and Joe Barr on 21 May 2014
Language(s)
Script(s)
Sources
Communications between Christine Bryan and Joe Barr on 20 May 2014