Western Region

It was just a fun time for, you know, half a dozen girls who decided that we needed to adapt.
We needed to learn to do something that was foreign and we were probably of a generation where our mothers and our grandmothers were still in that - making the sandwiches and doing that.
In an emergency situation we were wanting another role.
It was a really hot December day and there was a big bushfire out of town and it started in a big paddock out way out of town. So all the men had jumped on the fire truck, the bushfire truck, and headed out to fight that fire which left basically a few women in town and a lot of kids. And a fire started just over the road there and this fire - it was hot, it was windy, the dust was blowing, there was just a bunch of women and a dozen kids over the back with wet bags. And then Tommy Glasgow came down the street with the little red fire truck and that truck had always sat in the shed. None of us ever knew how to use it. There was about 100 gallons of water on board and we got it going.
It kind of slowed things a little but then a big truck from Ungarie was coming through to the main fire and they came along and they put it out.
So after that it was, this is ridiculous, we have to learn how to use these things because otherwise you know, we could have lost our town that day. We could have lost lives that day. We just knew that we needed the skills.
We got together a half a dozen of us and said "righto, let's learn how to use this truck."
It's what we did, we all got together and we'd fire that little girl up and took her up and hook her into a water main and pretend to put fires out.
The adaptation was hard because it took a lot of courage for us to, you know, we had a lot of naysayers, there were a lot of blokes who thought we were nuts, but at the end of the day it was about pulling together as a community and saying: "well this was a need for our community" and we took it on board to fill that gap.
In 2019, we're living in Lawson and the big bushfires came through and everybody was working.
All the fire brigades were out and all my friends in my community were working hard to help put these fires out and I remember wanting to help, but it wasn't the right time. I hadn't signed up, I hadn't done the training and so I couldn't be a part of the community that was trying to fight back these fires. And so when I moved out to Lithgow I realised that I didn't ever want to feel helpless like that again and I want to be proactive - and so I joined the VRA.
Every call out is different, we respond to things from road crashes, to lost bushwalkers, to canyoners to cats stuck in roofs to people stuck under houses.
The range is quite wide - and so being ready and willing to adapt to whatever is in front of us is so important. And how we do that is by that preparation before. Not being reactive, but proactive. And so I think that applies in all areas as well, not just rescue, but within community.
Being in a regional community, everybody knows everybody and that's an amazing gift because when we need to adapt, we're not doing it by ourselves. At LINC, we work for a lot of families and youth, and part of what I do here is try to provide a lot of opportunities for people to connect with each other.
Well when we first started boomerang bags it was mostly to - it was mostly to get rid of plastic out of the environment and get rid of the single use of plastic - and that has been very successful - and there's way less plastic bags out there now, but we still keep going because as much as anything we get to have conversations about the environment.
Every time we hand out a bag we talk about climate change and whatever but much more than that we actually have connection with all the people in the community. As a group we have a great time together and I think even the ladies who started the whole project all those years ago, they say now it's so much more than about bags, it's all about the people and how we help people just by connecting with them.
In both my roles we see parts of the community that many people don't get to see and I think what that's taught me is that we are not exempt from that.
And so it's important that we are proactive and we do take the time to be prepared for when that might happen to us.
So adaptation means to me: life's never straightforward. There's always going to be something thrown at you, and how we cope with those changes determines how we're going to proceed moving forward.