Courageous Women

Philippa McDonald

KAREN HODGES WAS JUST A KID WHEN A BUSHFIRE TORE TOWARDS HER HOME in the central west of New South Wales. It was Christmas Day, and her whole family sprang to action. ‘I must have been 11 or 12,’ she recalls. ‘All the men were out on the trucks and we – my mum, aunts and I – were handling the two-way radio. We lost contact with my uncles for several hours and we didn’t know if they were alive or not as the fire had run over them.’ Her uncles survived. ‘I wanted to be on the truck,’ Karen says, ‘but it wasn’t the done thing at the time.’

Four decades on, Karen is not only on the two-way radio, she’s in the RFS control centre as the most experienced incident controller in New South Wales. She has led the fight against up to 20 emergency-level bushfires.

In the 2019–20 fire season, she was at the helm, trying to stop what became known as the Gospers Mountain mega-blaze, one of the largest bushfires in the world to have started from a single ignition point.

The blaze, which was sparked from a lightning strike, grew so massive it eventually covered one million hectares and seven local government areas. It raged for 79 days, and Karen was the incident controller for 60 of those days, often working for 16 hours a day. In her hands were the lives of 3000 firefighters.

‘I have to say, my whole time within the RFS, the fire behaviour on this particular time was very erratic,’ Karen says. ‘Nothing we did stopped it. It was a sleeping giant at the very beginning. We had some rainfall and it went to sleep. But as soon as the weather turned again, it reared its head again. It was a continuous beast. We had what they call the pyrocumulus storms, where the fire was creating its own firestorm and we had that on several occasions on the fire ground. That’s something we haven’t experienced much in the past at all.’

The hot, dry conditions were relentless. Efforts to slow the blaze even in the middle of the night were for naught. Streams and rivers had run out of water, making aerial firefighting difficult in remote areas. Nothing could hold it back, not even fire trails that had held during previous bushfires in the area.

And it wasn’t just the fire itself that the RFS and locals had to deal with. ‘There was the tiredness,’ Karen says, ‘there was fatigue, but there was also hope at times that we would be able to contain the fire. And then when we couldn’t, the devastation, disappointment. There were so many people that were trying their very best, all the volunteers, the community, the incident management team in here.’

RFS superintendent Karen Hodges. (Mridula Amin/ABC)

RFS volunteer Stacey Kent. (Mridula Amin/ABC)

They tried to save every house, but it wasn’t always possible and around 100 homes were razed. ‘The ones we lost, we were devastated. We look back on it and, talking to the volunteers out there on the day, we’re all still dealing with what happened to all the people out there.’

Karen knows the region intimately, having joined the RFS headquarters as an administration officer back in 1988. Within a year she was training to be a firefighter and helping to recruit for the local fire brigade.

But she quickly realised that change had to happen within the RFS. ‘It was at the field day,’ she recalls, ‘where the brigades were competing against each other, running scenarios with the equipment and trucks. The ladies got chocolates and the men got trophies for their participation. I wasn’t impressed and I changed that.’

There were no uniforms for women so they designed their own.

By 1990 Karen was the first woman to ever be appointed to the position of deputy fire control officer. She found herself in conflict with some of her fellow firefighters.

‘I had to convince the men I would be OK on the fire ground, that I wouldn’t kill someone. There was a bunch of old timers in one brigade and they wouldn’t let me present them with their medals because they wouldn’t take them from a girl.’

Thankfully, she says, her boss was a very good mentor. Karen rose through the ranks and within a decade, at the urging of 21 brigade captains, she successfully applied for the role of fire control officer.

The job is not always easy, particularly when fighting a mega-blaze, but Karen finds inspiration in the people she works with. ‘It’s the volunteers that keep me going,’ she says. ‘They come and do it for free and I think, wow. And on those bad, dark days we looked out for each other.’

One of those volunteer firefighters is 26-year-old Stacey Kent, who was deployed to fight the Gospers Mountain mega-blaze.

Stacey was motivated to join the RFS because she had friends affected by the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria. ‘I joined on my sixteenth birthday,’ Stacey says, ‘and I’ve loved it ever since.’

She did 120 shifts during the bushfire season, 40 of them virtually in her own back yard, fighting the Gospers Mountain fire. Her footage of driving through what appears to be a firestorm is extraordinarily frightening. ‘I was a frontline firefighter. We would be doing anything from putting out spot fires to property protection.’

But nothing could prepare her for what she and her crew from the Round Corner brigade would experience on one horrific day when the firestorm erupted around them.

‘Just walls of flame, and as far as you could see, from the treetops up to the sky, and [it] was just orange no matter where you looked. And dark from all the smoke . . . it was just a wall of flame coming at you.’

Stacey’s day job is as a neo-natal intensive care nurse, which means when she’s not fighting fires, she’s saving babies. She’s a kind of angel, a superhero.

‘It’s pretty full on. I was doing night shifts at the hospital and then doing day shifts on the fire ground,’ she says. ‘Or doing day shifts at the hospital, night shifts on the fire ground and day shifts at the hospital. So I had two full-time shift-work jobs, essentially.’

Under Karen Hodge’s command, Stacey and her fellow RFS firefighters waged an almighty battle to prevent the mega-blaze taking a run towards Sydney’s northwestern suburbs. Their goal was keep the fire on the northern side of the Hawkesbury River.

Despite massive flare-ups, they worked day and night putting in backburning operations to try to contain it.

‘If we couldn’t hold it,’ Stacey says, ‘it would have jumped the river and come into the Hills District and it would have gone through Maroota, Glenorie – encroached into suburbia really.

‘You were just praying and hoping that what you were doing was enough to hold it. If it crossed the river, though, it was going to be catastrophic.’

Evacuation centres across Castle Hill and Baulkham Hills were established in clubs and the area’s biggest shopping centre, but in the end the firefighters were successful.

‘I’d like to say thank you to a lot of people,’ Stacey says. ‘We’d show up in these areas and there were people who had lost their homes or potentially could lose homes that were still coming out to support us and give us water and make sure that we were doing OK. The generosity and support that the public had for the firefighters really showed the best of that Australian mateship.’

Karen and Stacey represent the changing face of the fight against bushfires. They were pivotal in the mighty effort to contain one of our biggest fires, which was within a day of reaching Sydney’s urban fringe. With future bushfires forecast to be even more frequent and catastrophic, it’s heartening to know we have such courageous women leading the battle and standing on the front line protecting us.

During 2019 and 2020, Philippa McDonald covered the bushfires and bushfire recovery for the ABC