The national security implications of disasters are well-established within Australian policy and academic discourse. The ways in which Australian communities make sense of, experience and practice security in disaster settings have received less attention. Yet, disasters are a salient issue for these communities, who are always the first and last actors to respond and who are experiencing increasingly frequent and severe events. This chapter adopts a vernacular security approach to the 2022 flood in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales. Applying discourse analysis techniques to residents’ anonymous submissions to the 2022 Flood Inquiry, the chapter reveals how residents’ identified security threats, their causes and consequences; prepared and planned to manage threats and risks; and practiced and evaluated security responses. The chapter concludes by demonstrating how polycentric governance arrangements can accommodate and incorporate vernacular security perspectives of disasters, shaping security policies from the bottom−up.