Keeping up with public health and emergency information during the COVID pandemic challenged everyone, but especially non-English speakers.
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Albury-Wodonga Ethnic Community Council community executive officer Richard Ogetii said this period showed work needed to be done to improve crisis communication to multilingual residents.
"To make things worse, the situation kept on changing very rapidly, so by the time you are trying to get this information in a language which the community could understand, the instructions had already changed and that caused a lot of confusion," he said.
"And not everybody is actually technologically savvy to be able to understand what those (emergency) apps are talking about and what kind of information is being sent them."
These experiences, as well as Albury-Wodonga's cross-border location and familiarity with natural disasters such as fire and flood, have seen the region become a case study for a research project through La Trobe University.
Albury-Wodonga is the pilot site for the Multilingual Inclusive Emergency Alerts project, which focuses on understanding the gaps in messaging for non-English speaking parts of the community.
La Trobe research fellow Samantha Clune said alerts needed to be appropriate, accessible and informed by understanding how people receive their information.
"We know anecdotally and as members of the community that those (COVID) messages when they were translated were undecipherable and not necessarily useful for the target communities and that led to issues around safety and public health," she said.
Dr Clune co-led a smaller research project, with Professor Raelene Wilding and undergraduate student Aaron Demiri, to analyse the Border community and potential multilingual needs.
Their migration timeline from 2001 to 2021 revealed a steady increase of people from India while the population of those "born elsewhere", which included the Congolese community, rose about 30 per cent from 706 to 2103 people.
Mr Ogetii said emergency communication was improving, but had to move away from "that assumption that once you put the information out, people will understand".
"But if I don't understand the way the emergency system works in Australia, maybe I'm a migrant here, it adds another layer to how I will be able to deal with whatever information you're giving," he said.
"The first thing is we should not leave anybody behind, everybody should be involved."
The Albury-Wodonga MIEA case study was one of five projects presented at a research symposium held at La Trobe University on Tuesday, February 27.
Border head of campus Guinever Threlkeld said the event, funded by the Joss Family Fellowship for Future Researchers, allowed up and coming researchers to present on their summer study, with two projects selected to continue.
"It really whets the students' appetite to go on and pursue research careers," Dr Threlkeld said.
Student Mathew Stewart, whose topic was the de-flouridation of Australia's water, welcomed the chance to experience research as an undergraduate.
"(It) really allows students to dive into those opportunities, to get an early foot in the door, to see what sort of researchers they want to be, how they can contribute to society at the scientific level," he said.
