Well, if you can spare a quarter hour, Maitland woman Susan Kerrigan has just what you need.

Susan, who grew up in Lochinvar - "Maitland Girls High School class of 85, one of the last all girls years" and Maitland Primary before that - has produced a podcast of Maitland's flood history.

Listen to the free podcast here

An Associate Professor of Communication and Creative Industries at Newcastle University, the podcast was funded from the university's Centre for 21st Century Humanities as a start-up project.

"I've always worked in communication of some sort, at first as television producer for the ABC, and then in academia, so I was interested in a project where I could bring history alive," she explained.

"The floods was one of four projects we were interested in, along with Maitland Gaol, ghosts and gore, and sport.

"Now that this is finished we're hoping there might be funding for the others."

When she says 'we', she is referring to her sister Vicki, a radio producer in Darwin, Simon Richie and Dr Harry Criticos who used their collective expertise in radio and sound to give the finished product its professional feel.

"At one stage we even had Vicki climb into my wardrobe to record because it helped dampen the sound," Susan recalled.

The end result is an easy listening, comfortable stroll through Maitland's flood history.

"We work in communication, so we were really conscious of the fact we wanted to keep it easy," she said. "There was so much archival material available online that it would have been easy to get bogged down, so we had to get it right ... some personal detail and stories, with delving too deep.

"We wanted it to be historically informative, but digestible."