We’ve heard the news grabs and the voices of authority, but in the season premiere of You Can’t Ask That, you’ll meet nine firefighters from around the country who will give you their raw, personal, unfiltered insights into fire, fear, heroism and more.
During the unprecedented bushfire season of this summer, more than 2000 homes were lost, and more than 30 people died. 1 billion animals are estimated dead. Our cities have been choked with smoke haze, children kept inside at schools and daycare centres. Towns and livelihoods have been destroyed. And the cleanup is only just beginning.
Throughout all this, there was one group of people who experienced the fires like no other: Firefighters. Those running towards the flames, risking their own lives to save ours. Most of them volunteers. So what is it really like to be a firefighter?
Every firefighter you’ll meet in this episode has lost something to fire — colleagues, family members, homes, places of cultural significance, animals, possessions, memories.
Mark Carter is 60 years old. He’s a career firefighter — he’s been doing this for more than half his life. Mark was stationed in Melbourne’s Metropolitan Fire Brigade headquarters during the Black Saturday fires of 2009, when he got a call.
“A mate of my dad’s told me that mum was missing and dad had gone to hospital. And I just knew then that it was bad.”
He drove straight to their farm.
“I managed to get up to the fire. It was just like napalm. The whole place… I just knew within myself that she hadn’t got out and I just thought, the least I can do is be the first to find her.”
Before she became a firefighter, 37-year-old Yugambeh and Minyungbal woman Rachael Cavanagh used to wrestle crocs for a living. So when she signed up to fight fires, she wasn’t afraid of much. But, Rachael says, coming face to face with a wall of flames, “It’s pretty bloody scary. Fire can do whatever it wants. It does whatever it wants.”
Now a professional firefighter and cultural fire practitioner, Rachael says,
“My eldest girl, she absolutely loves that I’m a firefighter and she tells everybody and she goes to school and talks about it. But this year, she was like, ‘Mum, I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you to do that anymore’.”
In this episode, you’ll also meet salt of the earth volunteers like Darryl, from rural NSW, who’s been fighting fires with wet potato sacks since he was ten years old, and tells of his boots melting off in a fire; Michele, a volunteer from rural Victoria, who calls the recent bushfire a “nasty bitch”; Jackson, from the Aboriginal community of Wreck Bay in NSW, who’s been juggling fighting fires with family life and driving trucks for a living; and father of four Mark Guerin, who made it to our interview after defending his home from bushfires only days earlier.
