Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size It's hard to imagine Shane Fitzsimmons as a teenage tearaway. Yet growing up near Sydney's northern beaches, where he attended Pittwater High, report card after report card would come back saying, "Shane is capable of so many things if he would just stick with it", or "Just behave in class", or "Don't get distracted." "I got lots of those," he says drily. "I'm pleased there was no social media around then." When Fitzsimmons left school in year 12, he aimed to become an electrician or plumber in line with his father's urgings to get a trade. But, he recalls, "I wrote to every man and his dog and couldn't land one." The future New South Wales Rural Fire Service Commissioner ended up as a motor mechanic, often working on the service desk. Prime Minister Scott Morrison and NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian with RFS Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons at the Picton Bowling Club, which was being used as a evacuation centre in December. Credit:Edwina PIckles One day a former deputy principal brought her car in and spotted him at the counter. "Oh Shane! I'm so pleased to see you've got a job! I thought you would have been in jail by now." It's a story he tells without a trace of embarrassment. (Candour appears to be a Fitzsimmons trait, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison discovered to his cost recently, when the RFS chief publicly chided the federal government for not giving him advance notice of the decision to roll out the army reserves.) Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video


One wonders what his teacher would make of her wayward pupil now, observing him night after night on the TV news, flanked by the Premier, steering the state with apparent steely calm through the most destructive bushfire season NSW has seen. Our meeting at the RFS headquarters in Olympic Park was meant to be over lunch, but on this morning the fires are threatening to ramp up again. The vast central control room on the fourth floor buzzes like a mini-Pentagon, with uniformed types from the RFS, army, air force, police and other emergency services arrayed at desks before a wall of giant screens. We take a small corner table in the canteen. The clock ticks past midday and staff members trickle in with plates heaped high. Fitzsimmons wants only a bottle of water. "Anything?" I suggest, nodding at my own cup of tea. "Coffee, a snack?" "No," he says, patting himself on the belly. "I can live on what I've got." He admits to not finding much time for exercise, something "my physique probably depicts very well". Besides, he declares, he has to leave for the airport shortly to farewell a contingent of Canadian firefighters. To hear how Fitzsimmons pulled himself out of his troubled teenage years is to understand why he talks of the Rural Fire Service as "family", and why he so passionately rejects the idea that the service should morph into a paid force. To him, the RFS is a vital social institution as well as a firefighting force. Fitzsimmons as a 20-year-old volunteer firefighter in 1989: "It kept me on the straight and narrow."


His parents, George and Carol, split when he was in primary school. He says he "loved and admired my old man enormously ... and I don't want to bag out my dad", but George was "not a nice person" when he drank. "I wasn't Robinson Crusoe when we were in a family with domestic violence and all that sort of thing, and the domestic violence extended to children ... myself more than my two [younger] sisters. Mum had to cut a break for her own benefit." George eventually re-partnered, giving Fitzsimmons two half brothers (to whom he is close) but a near-terminal rift occurred between him and his father when he was in his early 20s. As a result George did not attend Fitzsimmons' wedding to Lisa, the daughter of the local council fire control officer Keith Simpson, who was also George's employer at the time. Ironically, Lisa used to chide her own father about the demands of his job, which often tied him to home base so he could monitor the radio networks overseeing local bush fire brigades. She and Fitzsimmons had only just started dating when he overheard her vowing to her father: "I'm never going to be involved with anyone in this bloody organisation. All it does is dominate your life!" It's a running joke between them now. It was Lisa who, expecting their first child, pushed Fitzsimmons towards a reconciliation with his father, and several happy years followed. "He was a better grandfather than he was father," Fitzsimmons says. But tragedy struck on June 8, 2000, when a prescribed burn at Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park went horribly wrong and George perished in the flames along with three other firefighters. Sixteen-year-old Shane Fitzsimmons in 1985 (front, centre, holding hat at waist level) with his dad, George (bottom left), and their Duffys Forest Rural Fire Brigade crew. George was killed with three other firefighters during a hazard-reduction burn in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park in 2000.


The glue that had bound father and son during his turbulent adolescence was their membership of the Duffys Forest Rural Fire Brigade. "It was almost like a modern-day creche for teenagers," Fitzsimmons recalls. "Dad would duck up there for the weekend, and I'd go with him. "It kept me on the straight and narrow more than anything else. There was a sense of belonging and inclusion, of being entrusted with responsibility, the whole idea of doing something in the community I found really powerful." It was also where he learnt "foundational skills - teamwork, negotiation, compromise. And leadership. With volunteers, if you try to be too demanding and assertive, they will quickly tell you to get stuffed. The real challenge as a leader is to bring people with you." At the exceptionally early age of 19, Fitzsimmons was elected brigade captain. This created a dilemma back at headquarters because, technically, a captain had to be 21 before getting the keys to the local fire station. Rules were bent, and Fitzsimmons threw himself into every course the service could offer him, while continuing TAFE studies at night. In 1994, ferocious blazes along the eastern seaboard prompted the government to put the old bush fire brigade system under review. Fitzsimmons, already on the radar as a standout volunteer, was brought into the management fold in September of that year and given a job in risk planning before moving into operations. In 1997, the RFS was set up and Fitzsimmons, under the mentorship of then commissioner Phil Koperberg, became an assistant commissioner a year later at the age of 29. He took over the top job in 2007 and somewhere along the way acquired a masters in management from Macquarie University. Then prime minister John Howard is briefed by Shane Fitzsimmons and Phil Koperberg of the RFS before visiting the bushfire devastated suburb of Warragamba in 2001. Credit:Glenn Campbell


I ask how he's handled the enormous burden of responsibility that has rested on his shoulders these past weeks, with the safety of tens of thousands of people in his hands. "What makes it work is the relationships we have got between heads of the agencies here in NSW," he says. "They have never been better. "Don't get me wrong," he adds. "The enormity of damage, despair and tragedy – you feel that personally, but somehow you have got to compartmentalise that because you have got a dynamic and unfolding situation that's not going to go away." During the "darkest moments" he has been on the phone to Lisa, in tears. Those moments have included driving to the scene of the fatal fire truck accident that claimed the lives of two young fathers, RFS volunteers, in the days just before Christmas, and the unutterably sad task of calling on the bereaved families afterwards. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Then came the funerals during which Fitzsimmons, in full dress uniform, had to pin medals on the small children of those men. Such times take him back to George's death, when Lauren, the older of his two daughters, was also just a tot.

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