This paper documents the first substantive section of work from a Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC project on losses from natural hazards in Australia: namely, quantifying the impacts of floods with respect to human fatalities from 1900 to 2014. This examination is a fundamental first step to providing an evidence base for future emergency management practice and resource allocation and to enable efficient and strategic risk reduction strategies. The basis of this analysis was PerilAUS, Risk Frontiers’ database of historical natural hazard impacts in Australia. Utilising lessons from similar work on bushfires, this unique database was augmented and verified by the use of coronial inquest records. Inquest reports allow additional and more detailed data about the social, demographic and environmental circumstances of the fatality to be determined. Normalisation of the results, allowing the effects of population across time to be taken into consideration, enables past damaging events to be compared to those impacting present-day society. A longitudinal analysis of the resulting statistics was undertaken, examining demographics (age, gender), location (jurisdiction), seasonality and circumstances surrounding the fatality – both environmental (e.g. the event intensity) and social (e.g. factors around the decisions or actions which led to death).  Some recommendations to emergency management organisations are discussed. Outputs from this research will be of relevance for emergency management policy and practice and will feed into other ongoing research projects of the CRC and elsewhere.