Into the Gum Trees...
- May 19
- 8 min read
***Content Warning: This piece includes lost lives and grief. If these topics are sensitive for you, please pause and consider your current mental health before reading.***
When I joined SES in 2002, I’d just turned 18. I was barely an adult, still figuring out who I was, and I thought volunteering was simple: you help the community. You show up, you do the job, you go home. I didn’t understand yet how much of this work stays with you.
My first big deployment was out at Dalby. Doug and I were the only SES in town apart from a couple of locals, so we ended up doing flood boat rescues. The water was moving fast, like raging fast. We started off rescuing 2 families: women, children, and animals.
On the second run, our prop got tangled in barbed wire. The wire was still attached to the fence posts and literally holding the boat in place while the current pushed hard against us, so we had to act quickly. I raised the motor, then held onto Doug while he leaned over the back of the boat to cut us free. The moment he yelled “clear,” I put the motor back down, hit the ignition and tried to drive clear of the fence line. The current was strong and pulled us straight into two gum trees before we could get clear. We hit them both hard, but we gained control quickly and navigated back into safer water.
That’s the part people don’t see, the moments where it could go either way, and you just keep going because that’s what’s needed.
Navigating out there was something else entirely. The paddocks were underwater, the creeks had merged with the river, and nothing looked like a map anymore. The only way through was an old bushie trick: railway sleepers hammered upright with red stop signs nailed to them. No words, just the red octagon. Farmers used them to mark the deep‑water channels across their paddocks. So, we’d scan the horizon for those red signs sticking out of the floodwater, knowing that if we followed them, we were in the safest water. That’s how we moved from paddock to paddock, across creeks, and eventually along the Condamine - navigation by instinct, memory, and whatever the locals had left behind
Later that day we had just gotten the boat back on the trailer when we got a call saying there was a council worker unaccounted for, somewhere at the water treatment plant. We found him waist‑deep in water inside a house next to the treatment plant, just standing in the hallway with nowhere to go. We got him out too.
But the moment that almost broke me wasn’t the rescues, it was when we were doing resupplies across the Condamine river to stranded families, collecting supplies from town, and delivering them by boat. There was a young family with a newborn baby who lived on the other side and were cut off. No food. No supplies. Normally in a disaster when people get cut off, the town shopping centre will let people put supplies on account until they can get in to pay (this was before pay online existed) but in this case the store wouldn’t let them because they “weren’t locals”, even though they’d lived there 15 years.
In the end we had to ferry them back into town so they could go in and pay. I remember sitting in the boat thinking, how does this happen? How does a family with a newborn whose home is cut off have to get into a boat and cross floodwater to get food and basic supplies. I was almost crying. To see a young family with a newborn treated like that.
There was another flood boat job out at Woodford that still makes me shake my head. A couple of kayakers had gone into Post Office Creek and got themselves stuck when the water came up too fast. The firies went in after them, got across, reached the kayakers, but then the water rose even more and none of them could get back. So, the firies and the kayakers were all stuck together on the wrong side of the creek for 24 hours before anyone called us. Back then Fire and Rescue didn’t have motors, just those old wild-water rafts, so once the flow picked up, they were committed. When we finally got the call, we went across, picked the whole lot of them up, and brought them back. It wasn’t dramatic, just one of those preventable moments where you think, I wish someone had called us straight away….we could’ve sorted this yesterday.
Not all flood boat deployments are the dramatic, raging‑water kind people imagine. A lot of the time, you travel a long way, burn days of leave, and end up doing nothing remarkable at all. I’ve been in convoys that felt like they’d never end, crawling along at 80 on the highway because someone three vehicles back couldn’t keep pace, and stopping in every town because someone needed a coffee or a smoke.
And then there was Ingham. Twelve of us, all flood boat operators, forward‑deployed because the forecast looked bad and they were worried it was going to go to shit again. We packed, drove, set up, and waited… and waited. The major flood even they expected didn’t happen. No flood tasks came. So, we spent days tidying their depot, checking height gear, auditing equipment, and helping the local group get ready “just in case.” It wasn’t exciting, but that’s the reality, sometimes you go a long way to do the unglamorous work that no one sees, and then you go home without ever putting a boat in the water.
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Which brings me to land searches.
Over the years I’ve done heaps of land searches, some with good endings, some without. The searches that have bad endings tend to be the ones that hang around. They’re a bit harder to talk about.
There is a pause, a deep breath inwards and tears welling….
The Daniel Morcombe search is the worst one for me. I went out a dozen times or so and some of the crews I worked with found clothing, and then later, remains. Even now, talking about it is hard. It was particularly hard because I had young kids at the time and it just upset me to think that it could all have been prevented if a bus driver had just pulled over and picked him up. I still tense up every time my son goes on the bus to school. I’ve got the app which helps. I can see when he gets on and off the bus.
The media can make it harder. Sometimes you’ve got media crews following your every move. One day I was trying to give a briefing, and I just lost it. I stopped my briefing and I'm like, “guys, I don't mind you filming us, just do it from a @#$# distance. I've got sensitive information that I'm giving my crew. They need to be focussing on me, not focusing on you film them.”
Then there are the long searches where we never found the person at all.
A man went missing on Bribie Island and we started with a five-day search, then multiple operations over two years. I was the Group leader at the time and spent the first 4 days in ops managing teams, but it just got too much. The mental load can be intense. We had the family come in several times which makes it so much harder, knowing they’re there and desperate to get news or help. On day 5, I took a break from control, and went out in the field, searching using quad bikes. Despite all best efforts we didn’t find him.
Over the next 2 years or so we searched for about 20 days in total because the coroner kept coming back and saying they wanted more coverage. But he was never found. We searched burnt‑out areas multiple times after bushfires and used every technique we could, quad bikes, choppers, foot searchers, trackers, everything. We found shoes. Footprints. But never him. It's heartbreaking for the family. You know he's gone, but where? You just can't find him. Your own mind and other people come up with different possibilities: did he get to the sea and carried out with the tide, did he fall prey to wildlife, or did he just lie down for a rest somewhere and fall asleep, never to wake up?
So that sits with you.
An older lady with dementia went missing about a year and a half later. Gone without a trace. Just gone. She walked out of the nursing home then just disappeared never to be seen again. That's what gets you. I think the ones that you find, they give you closure even when they’re deceased. It's the ones you don't find that sort of sit with you. Like, what if we'd looked in this area instead of that area on the 1st day or the 2nd day?
And then there are the strange moments you can’t explain. Once, during a search for an older man, I had déjà vu, a dream I’d had days earlier of a man in a yellow shirt and blue pants in a canal. I told the team leader. We checked the canal. And there he was. Exactly where I’d seen him in the dream. I still don’t know what to do with that.
Some things you just carry.
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But for all the heavy stuff, the thing that’s kept me in SES for 24 years isn’t the jobs, it’s the people. The camaraderie. The mateship. The ability to pick up the phone and talk absolute rubbish to someone who gets it. The people who check in on you when you’re recovering from surgery. The ones who show up when life outside SES gets hard.
I’ve seen the organisation change a lot. We’ve gone from hands‑on learning to certificates and paperwork. From toolbox talks to formal training. Some of it’s good, everyone gets the same baseline, but we’ve lost a lot of the advanced skills that only come from time on the ground. You can’t teach situational awareness in a classroom. You can’t teach what to do when your boat is pinned in current or when the map doesn’t match the paddock.
I’ve run operations too, like during the 2025 storms. I was given eight teams, two radios, and a laptop. That was it. Meanwhile the ACT guys had four people doing the same job I was doing alone. One of them sat with me for an hour and said, “How do you know all this?” And the answer is simple: experience. Years of watching, learning, stuffing up, fixing it, and doing it again. Years of being taught by people who didn’t care about certificates, they cared about capability.
And then there’s the cost on family. People don’t see that part. The birthdays you miss. The dinners you leave halfway through. The phone that never stops. The years where you’re doing two or three nights a week plus weekends, unpaid, because you’re the deputy controller and there’s no one else. My wife and kids have carried a lot of that load. They’ve always said “go,” but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t cost something.
The last few years have been big ones for me: losing family members, mates, and former SES colleagues. Running a family business. Trying to keep up with work, kids, therapy appointments, and everything else life throws at you. I’ve had moments where I’ve thought about walking away. Not because of the work. The work I can handle. It’s the politics. The politics can wear you down faster than any floodwater.
But every time I think about leaving, I think about the people. The ones who’ve been there since the early 2000s. The ones who’d drop everything if I needed them. The ones I’d drop everything for. That’s what keeps me here.
If you’d asked 18‑year‑old me why I joined SES, I would’ve said “to help the community.” If you ask me now, 24 years later, why I’m still here, the answer is simple: the people. They’re the reason I stayed. They’re the reason I keep showing up.
