Trigger warning: Some people have had firsthand experience with bushfires, and reading about them may cause stress. This article contains historical details about bushfires.
Youi is proud to partner with veteran firefighters Jim Smith and Mark Dobson to help Australians prepare better for bushfires. With a combined firefighting history of more than 60 years, Jim and Mark are leading members of Australia’s firefighting community.
Their experience encompasses major bushfire events, including the Canberra bushfires in 2003, Black Saturday in 2009 and the Black Summer fires of 2019 and 2020. Jim and Mark now work together in their respective roles as General Manager and Founder at Ordinary Courage, a consultancy dedicated to equipping first responders and organisations with the tools for good workplace mental health.1
We sat down with Jim and Mark to discover what brought them together and why they’ve dedicated so much of their lives to defending Australians against fire and to helping them be better prepared.
How did you get started as firefighters?
Mark: “I served as a Physical Training Instructor in the Royal Australian Navy for about 20 years and then joined the fire service in 2002 when I was 38, as a second career. I’d done other work in between, but I’d missed the sense of teamwork I’d enjoyed in the military. Since then, I’ve attended high-profile bushfires, such as the 2013 Blue Mountains outbreaks and Black Summer, and performed recovery work in fire-impacted locations, including Tathra and Casino in New South Wales and, most recently, the Grampians in Victoria.”
Jim: “I was 23 when I joined the fire service in 1980. I’d just finished university and had planned to be a geography and economics teacher. But I did a bit of prep teaching and thought, ‘This isn’t for me.’ My best mate had joined the fire brigade a couple of years earlier and was happy there, so I decided to give that a shot instead.”
And you’re still fighting fires well into your retirement, Jim?
Jim: “Yes, I am! Six months after I retired from Fire and Rescue NSW, I joined the NSW Rural Fire Service as a volunteer, and I’ve been doing that for about eight years now. I remember the captain saying, ‘What do you want to join the bushies for? Haven’t you seen enough drama?’ But I know how crucial volunteers are to the bushfire frontline, and I wanted to do my part.”
What are some defining moments from your decades of firefighting?
Jim: “I’ve pretty much experienced every big fire in NSW from 1980 through to today. I was on the ground in the summer of 1993 and 1994 when Sydney was surrounded by a ring of fire, I’ve overseen the response to major bushfire outbreaks as Deputy Commissioner for Fire and Rescue NSW, and I served as an officer on a fire truck during the devastating Black Summer fires.
“But I would say that my crucible moment – the one that set me down my current path – was June 8, 2000. I was an inspector at Crows Nest in Sydney and had to lead the body recovery of three firefighters who had died in a routine hazard reduction burn in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. One of them was George Fitzsimmons, the father of former RFS Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons,2 and he was probably the most experienced hazard-reduction-burning person in NSW. It was a horrendous task and a very sad thing, but to me, it meant, ‘Well, you know what? If I ever get the chance, I’m going to make sure that will never happen to any firefighters who work with me.’ And in 2001, when an opportunity came up to be the Manager of Bushfire and Natural Hazards for Fire and Rescue NSW, I jumped at it.”
Mark: “Black Summer really brought home for me how the intensity of our bushfires has increased. I was on one of the strike teams fighting the fire that came up through Mount Tomah (in the Blue Mountains) and destroyed a lot of homes there. We had prepared houses and evacuated people, and when the fire front came, we pulled back as we generally do into a big open park area about three times the size of a cricket ground. We thought that would be fine. But then, when that bushfire came up the ridge line, it was about 80m high. Just a wall of fire. We’d had the aircraft drop a lot of fire retardant and everything, and it just didn't make any difference at all.
“The whole state was on fire, and the workload was just insanely intense. Even when you were on your days off, you were getting called in to join other strike teams across the state, pretty much from August through until February 2020. Normally, you’d get time off to catch your breath and recover physically and mentally, but it was just ‘next, next, next’.”
Does facing these kinds of mega fires ever get any easier?
Jim: “It does get a lot easier because your responses become second nature. You just sort of look and go, ‘Yep, we’ve got our work cut out today,’ whereas someone who hasn’t been there before just thinks, ‘We can’t possibly do anything here.’
“You’ve got to focus on the things you can do. Most of the time, you're running around with only two or three thousand litres of water in the truck, so you've got to know where to use that water most efficiently. So, yeah, it gets easier psychologically as you get older. But that step up to the tanker seems to get higher and higher as the day goes on, I tell you!”
Where did you both meet?
Mark: “I was the Wellbeing Coordinator for Fire and Rescue NSW for more than nine years, looking after the mental health of our firefighters. Jim was the chair of our mental health task force, so that’s where we first spent a lot of time together and formed the foundation of our relationship around the mental health space.
Jim: “Before we worked together, we’d played sport together. I was President of the Fire and Rescue NSW soccer club, so I’d be playing soccer, and Mark would be playing rugby. We were always short, so some of the rugby guys would come and play soccer for us. And some of them like Dobbo (Mark) did both the whole time, so we got to be pretty close.”
What are some of your shared values?
Mark: “The thing I love most about working with Jim is his strong bias towards action. It’s easy when there’s a big problem just to talk nonstop about the nature of the problem. Whereas Jim has always been, ‘Hey, what do we need to do? What's the next step?’”
Jim: “Mark won an Australian Fire Service Medal for his pioneering work supporting first responders’ mental health, so like me, he’s absolutely passionate about building mental health resilience in the workplace. We worked really hard together at Fire and Rescue NSW. We trained our managers on how to identify mental health issues and how to talk to people with mental health issues, and we saved five times the amount of money we were spending on workplace injuries through psychological conditions. That wasn’t the reason we did it, we did it to help people, but what comes from that is you end up with really good resilience programs.”
You’ve also both helped bushfire-ravaged towns get back on their feet for Disaster Relief Australia.
Jim: “Yes, we’ve both carried out volunteer work for Disaster Relief Australia, so we’ve been able to see firsthand the devastating impact of Australian bushfires – and just how important community resilience is in terms of outcomes. My focus has always very much been, ‘Okay, we’ve had this tragedy, what can I do to make that better?’”
Mark: “As firefighters, when people lose their homes, we might put the fire out and stop the spread, but then we will pack up and go on to the next disaster. Whereas with Disaster Relief Australia, we go into the community afterwards, and we spend one, two, maybe three months with them. We help them demolish their houses and sheds, cut down damaged trees, build fences, and just all the things that they have to do to slowly recover.
“Sometimes, we’ll go back a year later and continue to help them. That’s when you really get to see the community impact of fires on a larger scale. You get to feel some of their pain, and you empathise more with the challenges they’re facing.”
When did your interest in mental health resilience first surface, Mark?
Mark: “Looking back, it was definitely when I was deployed to the first Gulf War in 1990 as a young member of the Navy. It took us about six weeks to get there, and for most of the crew, it was a bit of a shock.
“We’d never imagined we might actually have to go to war. So, even though my role was to keep people physically fit, I also played a big part in maintaining morale. I spent a lot of time talking to the crew and just making sure that they were all right, making sure everyone was going to be able to perform. That’s when I realised that looking after people is the most important part of the job.”
Now, you and Jim are teaming up again to build mental health resilience at Ordinary Courage. What’s your goal there?
Mark: “Firefighters aren’t the only people who find it hard to talk about how they’re feeling, although most would rather run into a burning building! I founded Ordinary Courage when I realised that the principles we were putting in place at Fire and Rescue NSW applied much more broadly. As a mental health consultancy, Ordinary Courage empowers leaders everywhere to take a more proactive approach to their employees’ mental health. There’s been a lot of reactive work done in the past to help people after they’ve experienced something traumatic, but research suggests that this doesn’t really change outcomes very much. The way you protect yourself against trauma is to build up your resilience beforehand. That’s what creates better outcomes.”
Finally, what motivated you both to partner with Youi to help better prepare Australians for bushfires?
Jim: “We share the same goals: to help make Australians more bushfire-ready and to prevent fire deaths. Sometimes, when you’re partnered with a government agency, it’s not always easy to get the message across. You might have a mega bushfire going, and the politicians are saying, ‘Well, there is no climate change here,’ and you’re saying, ‘Well, there is, and the firefighters on the ground know there is, I’ll tell you, so we all need to change our approach to bushfires.’ Not having any of those constraints makes this a fantastic platform for us.”
Mark: “At a practical level, the better-prepared people are for a bushfire with a bushfire safety plan, the better they’re going to cope physically. And at a psychological level, if you’ve made the decision to leave your property and you’ve thought in a very logical way about all the things you need to do and take, and your family are all safe, you’re in the best place to recover – even if you do lose your property. The people who have real problems with recovery are the ones who are caught off balance. This is a really great program to encourage people to start that preparation.”
For more expert tips to help you get bushfire ready, visit our you.prepared emergency content hub.
Jim Smith & Mark Dobson
With a combined firefighting history of more than 60 years, Jim Smith and Mark Dobson are leading members of Australia’s firefighting community. Their experience encompasses major bushfire events, including the Canberra Bushfires in 2003, Black Saturday in 2009 and the Black Summer fires of 2019-20. The pair now work together in their respective roles as General Manager and Founder of Ordinary Courage, a consultancy dedicated to providing organisations with the tools to sustain good workplace mental health. Youi is proud to partner with Jim and Mark in the creation of this bushfire preparedness content.
The content in this article has been prepared based on current government and emergency services guidelines and expert advice provided at the time of publishing. This information is subject to change. Please be sure to check for the latest information and always consider your personal circumstances regarding bushfire preparedness and response.
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1 Source: Ordinary Courage – Who?
2 Source: ABC – From disengaged teenager to fire chief: How Shane Fitzsimmons became a leader during the bushfire crisis, May 2020
3 Source: Mental Health Commission of NSW – Mental health and wellbeing strategy for first responder organisations in NSW
