Social memory-the long-term communal understanding of environmental change and the transmission of experience-enables societies to interpret, anticipate and recover from extreme events. The news media was an important vehicle for understanding and internalising the 2011 Brisbane flood, and thereby for recalling and creating social memory of past and present flood events. In this paper we present a systematic analysis of Australian newspapers in 2011-2012 to explore media framings of the flood, and focus in particular on how narratives evolved about the relationship between the flood and climate change. While the media narratives that we identified revealed awareness of climate change, the prominence of two opposing stances belies deep divisions in public understanding and the politicised nature of the issue. We show that some media coverage of the flood articulated the risk of extreme events in a changing climate, but much of the discourse cast the flood in terms of blame and political opportunity and paid little attention to longer-term aspects of regional resilience. Throughout this discourse, we found evidence that human experience of extreme weather and natural disasters is encoded and archived in memory, individual and collective memory of past events is recalled to make sense of present experience, and these processes tend to shape future responses. As policy related to the 2011 flood, and extreme events more generally, is influenced by the public discourse, it is important to understand the nuances of communication around these events and the media's role in reinforcing or changing perceptions.