Peter McKechnie, Michael McCormack, Tony Clough, Steph Cooke and Bob Callow.
On July 1, Junee celebrated over 2,300 years of combined service from dedicated NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) volunteers in the Junee District at the Junee Ex-Services Club. This includes 63 medals that were awarded, including: 6 National Medals, 57 Long Service Medals, 1 Commissioner’s Unit Citation for Service.
A special congratulations was given to Bill Heffernan for an incredible 65 years of service. Among those recognised were Inspectors John Baker and Scott Conlan for their outstanding work during the Black Summer Fires.
Thomas Roy said that as a young person with the RFS, it was great to honour the older legends. “From a young person’s perspective, I think it’s an awesome tribute to the sacrifice that many members of the community have made to help protect their community, especially the regional areas. I also think the long service is very impressive. The RFS is agreat organisation that makes a real difference in regional communities all across New SouthWales,” he said.
“People haven’t left, the length of service shows that it makes a difference and people care because they’ve remained in the organisation for so long. If it didn’t mean much, they probably wouldn’t stay but the RFS has a very real tangible difference in regional communities like in our brigade in Illabo. If there’s a car accident or a house burned down, it is the community members sacrificing for each other and nothing shows that more than at harvest when farmers leave despite every minute you’re not ha-vesting costing you thousands of dollars.
“If you have rain, that will just destroy your crops and yet farmers hop out to sacrifice for their neighbour. It is an incredible testament to their dedication. For me, being part of RFS is life-changing, it’s incredible being able to have the opportunity to serve others, especially in times of crisis and be there for them and support them both physically through the protection the RFS provides, but also to emotionally be there for people through the crisis.
“It changes you and makes you a better person.”
John Stranya has 64 years with the RFS and spoke about his time. “We all started very young. I mean, as soon as we got old enough to do anything, we started to fight fires.
“In all of the communities, all the people help with the fires, that includes the village and all because we lived next to the village and they always had to put out fire breaks around the village and burn off, all the things necessary to make good fire breaks.
“We used to make two disc marks around the village and then burn between the two of them. That gave you the fire break to start with. We would burn other bits as well. That gave us an official fire break, so things couldn’t get out of hand too much. Everyone was involved in it, it wasn’t sitting around waiting for somebody else to do it.
“We didn’t have anything in the way of gear much when I was very young. We just had fire beaters and wet bags and things like that and then some had knapsacks.
“Look at what they have now, there is no comparison. There’s quite advanced equipment now.
“Also these days because of the road traffic and that sort of thing, it in corporates search and rescue as well and house fires come into it too.
“That’s a big change too, because of motor vehicle accidents and things.
“Where most of the fires used to start when I was young was along the railway line; for two reasons, one is the steam trains, and the other one was that they used to use cast iron shoes on the brakes and they used to lightoff, you’d get sparks off that and you’d be constantly on the lookout on bad days.
“These days, fires generally start when you mow.
“My opinion is unless the communities do take up volunteer firefighting and put these things out, just a few professionals will never be able to keep up with it, even with modern gear they won’t.”
David Carter of the RFS added, “It’s a gratitude and thanks from the RFS for their dedication to the Rural Fire Service and for their unselfishness from them to be part of a service which is very much an essential part of Australia’s way of life in helping to combat bushfires in the area and also other emergencies that come across our paths like floods and things.”
Tony Clough, RFS Junee Group Captain, said all awarded were deserving Junee District locals.
“It’s a great feat for a farmer or volunteer to receive a long service medal and there are several farmers out there that probably don’t want to receive a long-service medal because they probably think it’s a bit silly, but you know what, at the end of the day, they’ve made a contribution to society and I feel as though if they don’t want it, at least their family and children and grandchildren might be interested in seeing something like that, their pop or their father receiving a long service medal.
“That’s important to recognise and I think the Rural Fire Service in the last number of years now have been doing this sort of thing. It’s a great opportunity to put forward to these farmers and volunteers out there who have made an impact on society by putting out fires attending motor vehicle accidents and floods and so forth.
“I’m saying farmers because there are alot of farmers that are volunteers and I think the communities out there could feel very reassured that they’ve got people out there that are quite capable of attending these incidents with experience, and having that experience, it doesn’t matter what you do, experience is the best thing you’ll ever gain in life. The community can sit back and feel comfortable in the fact that the people, the volunteers that will go out there and fight these fires or look after the motor vehicle accidents have the capability of actually doing a job for them.
“I’ve been doing it for 54 years now, but we had people there the other day that had been there for 65 years. They’re not probably active now in the Rural Fire Service, but if it all turned to crap and we needed someone they’d probably get on the back of a truck if they had to.
“There are a lot of people out there that don’t play a role, there are people out there in the community that don’t participate and that’s a bit sad. They probably have their reasons why they don’t. Some of them are probably selfish reasons. Some are probably because they don’t feel comfortable doing that sort of thing. They leave it up to others and that’s fine, but there are also people out there that won’t do it because they don’t want to darn well do it.”
A ton of service was finally recognised in the ceremony attended by many notable figures and heroes in the Junee District RFS.
– Jack Murray
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