We'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast was produced, the Galligle people of the Urination. We pay our respects to Elder's past and present.
It's December twenty nineteen and we're in the Blue Mountains, just outside Sydney. At this time of year, tourists usually flock here for the stunning scenery and well renowned bushwalks. But this summer is different. This is black summer. Across the country, seventeen million hectares of land are burning. That's almost the size of France. The fires have been raging
for months and there's no end in sight. Greg Mullins has dedicated his life to fighting fires, and he's doing his best to help the residents, wildlife and homes under threat. It's midnight and he stares up at the fifty meter high wall of flames. He's been here for sixteen hours today, his uniform is charred. His mind starts to play tricks on him. Deep down, he knows that the rain will come one day, this will be over. But what if it doesn't end. What if it just keeps burning until
next summer, until there's nothing left to burn. I'm at Middleton and this is head game today on the front line in one of the nation's most catastrophic bushfires. Now I'm super excited. I have the firefighter Extraordinary Greg Mullins
in studio with me. Now, Greg, after your name, you have multiple initials, so it goes Alpha, Oscar, Alpha, Foxtrot, Sierra, Mike, so af s M. Could you just break that down for me, mate, because I know you're someone super important when you've got all of those initiative.
Yeah, lots of letters. Yeah. AO is an Officer of the Order of Australia, So it's the Australian honors system. That's the second highest one. And the a SM is the Australian Fire Service Medal, So that's that's I don't know how many years. There's not that many a year given out Australia wide to people in the fire services.
So I got it right, Firefighter extraordinary. Now, fascinating career. But where did it all start for you? Mate? When did the did you think to yourself, right, I'm going to become a firefighter. This is what I want to do. Your father was a volunteer firefighter. Did it all stem from him?
Oh? Look, pretty much. We lived in an area in the north of Sydney, beautiful area but surrounded by National Park, and every summer there were fires and you just look out over the hills and the bee brown smoke and at night orange glowes, and so you were really tapped into the fire danger. If it was hot and windy, you knew, you know, it's really dangerous today, and Dad
will probably take off on the fire truck. But I actually, I think the day I decided I needed to be a firefighter was when I burnt down my sister's cubby house when they were both at school and in the backyard of our house, and it scared the hell out of me.
Take me back at that moment, Were you like me? Did you like to play with matches?
Look? Yeah, I think I was only about four years old, and I was My sisters had built this magnificent cubby house in the backyard, but it was made out of dried leaves and grass and branches and things, and I was just playing with some matches and it caught fire and Dad was at work, and yeah, there you go. But I just remember looking at the flames up in the tree tops, and the lady next door and my mum getting buckets of water because there was no reticulated water.
We helped run water tanks and I it scared the hell out of me. And then when my sisters came home, I just remember I thought they're going to beat me up, my older sisters, but no, they just cried and I thought, I felt so bad. So I think, actually that's maybe it's about four years old. Wow, and you felt you felt I better put these things out, not light them, because it's not and jail's not a good trajectory. I don't really want to go there when I get older.
But look, my first big fire was actually I was twelve years old, was not in seventy one, as I said before. Dad was a volunteer firefighter. The fire station was just over the raid from our place, but there was a big fire. Dad wasn't on duty that day, but my older brothers called during the afternoon and I said, we're home alone, my sister and I. This big fire is coming towards us. What do we do? And Dad just said, come with me. I jumped in the car
and off we went. And I thought my first big fire, and I was hooked. It was really scary.
But I love how you just came out of that. I fought my first fire when I was twelve years old. Wow, talk about that being in the blood and you know that being your destiny or your your career. Take me back to that moment. Did were you scared? Were you were or were you panicked? What was going through your mind?
Because it takes a certain state of mind, doesn't it to be able to run towards something that's burning rather than what the majority of people do, and probably rightly so is run away from it.
Yeah, yes, a bit counterintuitive, but I was. I think from that early age, I was fascinated by fire and I used to watch how fire was burnt. And we used to do burn offs in our backyard because we're in the bush and we had to protect ourselves from summer from when summer fires came. And I knew quite a bit and I'd read about it. I was really fascinated. I was a bit of a fire nerd by age twelve, and I was just excited. I thought, Gee, Dad's taking
me with him. And Dad was so calm, you know, And over the years I went to many many fires with him, and you'd know, in the military, you know, you've got some commanders who scream and yell and make everyone panic, and Dad was just one of these calm people who just calmed everyone around him down. And so I had no reason to be scared because of Dad's
just calm, collected way went around about it. And even when you know, we had twenty meter flames coming towards us and sparks setting the grass a light under our feet, they just said, okay, move over here and just all right, and if it gets too bad, we'll go in the house and if that catches fire, we'll wait till last minute, then we'll come out under the burnt stuff. And it
was just, oh, okay, this is normal. But I yes, there were some frightening moments, but not for a moment did I feel like it was unsafe, because my dad was there.
And it was from that moment that you knew. Was that a turning point in your a decision making moment where you said to yourself, I want to be a firefighter?
I think so. I think that was the day I just thought, this is you're against the elements and you're helping people, and it ticked all the boxes and it was exciting. But there was an adrenaline rush as well, and it was really challenging. You had to actually work out what's going on here. The fire is going to go quicker uphill, but it's flat here, so it'll slow down. Then we can go on and attack it the intensity or die down. But then it's going to come at us from the back, so I've got to be ready
for that. And it was really mental gymnastics working out what's happening and oh, I can't see now, there's too much smoke out.
Smile the flames. Ultimately, aren't you they one step ahead?
Yeah, And it was intellectually stimulating. You know, you've got your strategies and your tactics and then your tasks and all everything sort of led to the same outcome you hoped, but halfway something weird would happen, a new fire would break out over there, and you'd have to start again and change it all, and so you had to be flexible and it was just a really really interesting thing to do.
Love it. So when did you actually join the fire service? When was the day that you thought, you know what that's going let's do what I do best.
Yes, So look nineteen seventy one, that big fire and nineteen seventy two, I remember a friend at school said, do you want to join the bush fire Brigade down here at Duffy's Forest, And I said, well, I live. They were adjoining suburbs and I asked that if I could join legal and he said you're too young. You need to be sixteen before you get on the truck. And Terry Hills and so I was able to join this other bush fire brigade and as someone pointed out
to me it was actually my brother. He said, that's because they'll take anyone. They're desperate. That's why they've taken you pass.
So they made you feel special.
Then, yeah, yeah, thanks Terry. But that was that was a good grounding. And then a couple of years later I did join up the local brigade, which was just over the raid from US, and lots of fires through the nineteen seventies, mainly bushfires but also occasional house fire and car fires, car accidents.
I suppose when you join up, especially in Australia, you know you're going to see active duty. And I called it active duty because there's exactly that you know, weekly, if not daily.
Oh yeah, look, And I became a full time firefighter as soon as I left high school. When I was I was eighteen and nineteen seventy eight, nineteen seventy eight, and I worked in the city here where we are now and that city of Sydney headquarters here. What we'd do fifteen thousand calls a year or something. It was just constant. You're back into the station, you'd go to another one, and a lot of them were false alarms, automatic fire alarms, but lots of chemical spills, car accident rescues,
building fires, weird things, and it was just constant. And if you're in the suburbs in summer, you were going to a lot of bush and grass fires and the objective was keep them small, get to them quickly, keep them small, and on hot, windy days we'd double the response so we'd get there quickly and be able to round them up. But some of them just got away and you could fight these fires for weeks. So it
was yeah, and fire services these days. When I joined, it was mainly just fire, but then you know the chemical spills and the rescue the first day helping ambulances. Yeah, So it was and again such incredibly rewarding work and the people you worked with just salt of the earth. You know, they put their lives on the line for something they've never met without, and they'd put their lives on the line for you. And you know a couple of situations I was in, I thought I'm done. Someone's
grabbed me and dragged me out. So and you think, wow, what a privilege working with people like that, men and women who give their all.
It's the first situation that you actually found yourself in when you were like, wow, I'm in deep hair. I need the team. You know, I'm not going to get this alone.
Yeah, yeah, well I do. And so it was a bushfire locally, well it was actually it was a hazard reduction burnoff, but the weather forecast was wrong and Dad was in charge of this group. There's about ten of us down in a valley with just hand tools to cut fibers, and term is overrun. We were overrun by the fire. So it went flames were three four meters high. They suddenly went to ten fifteen meters high, and I just again it was Dad's calmness got us out of that.
He got us onto a rock shelf and we a lot of sparks. We got some burns and a couple of got smoke inhalation, but we got out of it alive. But I think without someone as calm and as experienced as my dad, there would have been panic. And so that was pretty hairy. But look, I had quite a few over the years. I was at a building fire on my twentieth birthday. I remember it well, and in North Sydney. There's about three stories on fire and I went into one level with a line of hose and
the roof came in and knocked me. I was pinned by a big beam, but I had a bree thing upright a cylinder on my back, so that saved me because it would have broken my back and I was stuck, but it was all burning around me and I couldn't find the hose. The blake who was with me, I don't know what happened to him later on he got
separated from me. But I was able to crawl out, worked my way around the walls because that's the strongest bit and there was still stuff collapsing, and there's fire up above me and around me, and made it to the balcony and everyone's digging. What's happening. I said, there's young blake from thirty six station trapped under there, and I thought, oh no, it's a blake I was with. So I started digging and I said, who is it?
Who is it who's trapped and they said Greg Mullen said no, no, it's me wo And look, I remember I had a really good boss at that time, and he took me aside and he said he didn't do anything wrong. We sent you in there and we didn't realize it was ready to collapse. But that's you know, the thing five fighter is you've got to be You've got to know about chemistry, hydraulics. You know, if you're on the tenth floor and you want a certain pressure on your hose, what do you pump at? You know,
what's a friction loss? You've got to no building construction, You've got to be a bit of an electrician. What's the power doing? How what have I got to look at a plumber? You know, there's all these things you have to know, and it's just got more and more complex over the years. But that's what makes it such a wonderful career. And again back to the men and women on the front line, you just you just don't find better human beings. You know, I loved working with them and still do.
Black Summer twenty nineteen, going on to twenty you're established, what rank are you holding at this stage?
I'd retired, So I retire in January twenty seventeen. So as I did fourteen years as Commissioner of Foreign Rescue in New South Wales, which is one of the world's largest fire services. And look, I'll be open about it. I had to get out because I had PTSD and I sort of tried to deny it to myself, but my head was not in a good space and it was just time I had to go.
And so did you recognize that or did someone else recognize that I.
Was in denial? I knew all the sime PTSD, yeah, and I was too busy looking after other people, but it just came to a head.
And look, I remember it was at a moment that you thought something's not right.
We had a former Major General from the Australian Army speaking to a mental health conference of fire services that we'd arranged and I was up the front and I'm listening to him. He's written a book, Exit Wounds, and he was talking and I was just ticking the boxes as he went, and I just remember someone said to you, okay, because my legs bouncing and I've fidgeting, fidgeting, and I had to walk out and it all sat opened the gate, and so it was and I finally did something that
a lot of men don't do. I sought help. And you know, this is one of the cultural things in fire services in particular, heavily male dominated, and blacks don't tend to talk about their feelings, and it was one of the reasons I pushed hard for more for women and fine and risk in New South Wales now has the largest proportion of frontline women than any fire service in Australia and up there in the world. But it's
changed the culture for the better. People talk more. But yeah, that was really confronting just to go and talk to someone and say I don't feel the best. And it very quickly sort of escalated the diagnosis and everything. And they said you're in a you're in a pretty bad way, and I said, yeah, yeah, but I'll be right. And I said, no, no, you weren't.
The default answer. Yeah, yeah, I'll be fine.
Yea, you know that you're not. And look, I remember the day I retired, it was just this huge weight lifted off my shoulders. I wasn't responsible anymore. And the thing, you know, you'd know in the field, you've been in triggers, and my trigger was losing someone and going to knock on the door and tell a family they'd lost someone. And I couldn't. I didn't have another one in me.
And in every time a page I went off, I'd have a panic attack, going no, no, no. And the day that I stopped and I gave it back, I thought, oh, I thank god, thank god.
That didn't that didn't last too long, right, Yeah, because you got called up for Yeah.
Look, Dad tapped me on the shoulder and he said, you know they're short of volunteers mate locally and you're able bodied. Yeah okay, but look it had been my plan and that was your thing. People people say, what you got out of that because you went well and you went back into I said, yeah, but it's different. It's that it's that leadership stuff and being responsible, that's it. And you feel an obligation. You know, there's a lot of money.
Try calling for you again.
Ultimately, Yeah, they've invested a lot of money, you know, I know, I work with a London fire brigade, with Los Angeles City Fire Fire Department, New York Fire Department, New York Take you know, been around the world, got all this knowledge. So just say, I know I'm retired, now I'm going to the beach. Well no it's not. It wasn't going to and look if there was smoke on the horizon and I couldn't do something about it, that really hurt me, you know, it was I've got
to do something. So I went back to being a volunteer. So leading up to those fires, that was the original question you asked. I was a deputy captain, so I was a crew leader, you know, just in charge of a crew. But I had all the qualifications to be a group leader, in charge of a number of brigades, and to be an incident controller. And so I'd get called in to do command roles or just take a crew to a small fire and put the fire out. But yeah, the lead up into twenty nineteen twenty eighteen
was almost black summer. But then it rained in New South Wales in November and it just we lost homes very early in the piece, so earlier than we'd ever really had big fires before in August should have shouldn't have been until October. Big fires in the state of Queensland, Tasmania in places that had never burned before. And so this was prior to, yeah, prior to and just saw.
The warning signs were they did that ring alarm bells?
Oh yeah, oh yeah. No. I was losing sleep. And I'd been tapped on the shoulder by the Australian Climate Council to come on board as a member as a natural disasters expert. And they were formed after the Liberal National Party government that came to power and I don't know what year immediately sacked everybody on the Climate Commission. So they got crowdfunded, the community crowdfunded them. They became
the Climate Council. So I'd come on board and I was telling the Climate Council, something really, really bad is coming. This is twenty eighteen. We just dodged a bullet, but millions of hectares were burnt, dozens of homes.
Yeah, this is out of the norm.
This is Yeah. It ever doesn't rain in twenty nineteen. I don't know what it's going to look like, but it's not going to be good. So yes, that's where I.
Was at so did they lessen to you?
I look absolutely, and I put to the Climate Council, I said, I'd like to I think it would be really beneficial to have former fire chiefs who can speak, because when you're employed by government, you're bound by government policy and you don't come out criticizing the government, or you can, but you won't have a job for much longer. But I want to form this group of former fire chiefs and they said, yep, go for it. So cut
a long story short. One week of phone calls and I had twenty three former fire chiefs from every fire service in Australia just saying, look, where as worried as you are, we've got to do something. We've got to go to the government. We've got to go to the Prime Minister because this is going to blow up at
the end of this year. And that didn't turn out to be that successful because the government didn't want to listen because we said two horrible words, climate change, and ideologically that was a no no. So they just attacked us wow and said we were what the Deputy Prime Minister call us at the time, time wasters in a city Lata sipping your joking me, yeah, idiots or something that was something like that, and it was just it was actually amusing just to see how juvenile they were.
But the Prime Minister would not respond to our letters and would not meet with us, and we were just saying very simple things like you need to streamline how you use the military because they'll tell you that it's the system that's thirty years old, is broken and it's very hard for them to help with assets, et cetera.
And the fire chiefs at the moment have asked for just twelve million dollars because they need more firefighting aircraft that they leased from overseas and they got to get in now, and they just said no, twelve million was a rounding error in the federal budget. But they just wouldn't and because it was because we mentioned climate change and.
They were soon eating their words. Right, when did it start to really get out of control? When was the next let's called it the next wave, because ultimately, guess what happened. You had you had the warning shots over over the bow and now it's like no one, no one took year to that even though you didn't have the funding. Did you start preparing for what you knew was coming.
Oh, look absolutely, and the fire services were just going, you know, we don't know where it'll hit. We know it's going to be bad because it was. We're in drought and two thousand and eighteen have been really hot, and in two thousand and eighteen we looked to California. They lost twenty thousand buildings in two thousand and eighteen, including the the city of Paradise was basically destroyed and
nearly one hundred people killed. And often we follow California our big fire season, so I factored that in thought, Oh, you know, so that's what happened to them. We've had this build up. If it doesn't rain, if we don't get winter rain, pardon my French, we're screwed. And we didn't get the winter rains. So just to understand the fires, the legislation in New South Wales says we get our bush fires from first to October to thirty first of March e chick because for one hundred years that was
a case. So in July, months before that, we were having major fires and by August we were losing homes. And in the past, no, you don't lose homes until near Christmas, maybe November, but in September sixth I remember September sixth we had catastrophic fire weather in northern New South Wales and had never even got close before that date. Yeah, it just and I just watched this unfold in southern Queensland and wet rainforest or so called wet rainforests that
had dried out was burning. That stuff that hadn't burnt for me, you know, was Gondwana rainforests from the same as it was when the dinosaurs were there, and it didn't burn. Now it was earning. Just dozens of homes lost, and so the government started to dial back there, denial and all of a sudden start eating. In September, contacted by one of the ministers saying, oh, you know, maybe we should talk to you, and we said no, we want to talk to the Prime minister. So they straightway
said they refused to talk to us. No, that's not actually the case. We said, we want to talk to the Prime minister. This is bad, but it's going to get a lot worse.
So we've start you know this, yeah, yeah, this is.
And look we did meet with two ministers. Prime minister just would not talk to us. And they held a little press conference ten minutes after we walked out of their office, saying, oh, we met with the old fire chiefs and we patted them on the head and said, you know, don't worry, we've got this, and they need to have confidence in the current fire chiefs. So tried to make out that we were bagging the current fire chess,
which was not the cuts. They were doing a brilliant job, but with one arm tied behind their back, and so it was just political and it got worse from now.
I have to think that politics would be an obstacle for allowing you to save lives, to save the land, to save animals, to save wildlife, to save mother nature. You'd have any resistance from government, you'd think they'd go right, and you know what you're doing is, you know, here's one hundredercent, let's go, you know, to prevent it at all costs. But instead, it's really bizarre.
And it was all down to ideology. And they had a platform for a decade saying there's really no such thing as climate change and we don't have to do anything, and we you know, anything we do makes no difference. It'll be three percent or a point three percent of the emissions. Why would we ruin our economy? This was their rhetoric, But Australia's in the front line, and what we were saying was, yeah, but why did we tell other countries they should get rid of nuclear weapons or
stop apartheid or whatever. You know, we used to have moral clout because ossies do the wrong thing and they're not scared to front up to someone bigger than them and say, hey, you're doing the wrong thing and climate change, we're going to whimp it out. And you know, a cynic might say they had lots of friends in the fossil fuel industries helping to fund them, and that's what we're up against. And look, so what point.
Did it get to when it was like the country's going to burn? You know this is serious because I remember it going global the news globe. I remember seeing houses going wildlife you know, koalas kang like it's almost as if Australia was on fire.
We'll look, it was and every state and territory had major fires, so and that had never happened before. There used to be sequential They come from the north and we'd share firefighters across borders all of sudden, we're in the fight of our lives and couldn't help each other. The aircraft we needed. California still had fires and they wouldn't let a lot of them go because a big aircraft we don't have any in Australia, or didn't have
any in Australia. Then we had to lease them, and so they were saying, no, we've got our own problems, you can wait. So the fires got bigger and bigger. The weather it was the worst weather ever recorded, so for months and months and months. There's a whole lot of things that contributed to that, in the Antarctic and the Tropics and the unusual weather patterns. But we had drought, so we had strong westerly winds coming off the desert, off the interior the out back, hitting the coast, very
low humidity, very high temperatures. I was fighting fires one day twenty first of December twenty nineteen. It just about reached fifty degrees in western Sydney. I did a twenty six hour shift and ended up in bed with de hydration, pretty sick, and know we we saved dozens of homes that night, but it nearly didn't make it home. And so it was horrendous weather. And as a young firefighter, I remember thinking, oh, you know the old one hundred
degrees fahrenheit, it's thirty eight degrees. That's about as hot as it would ever get. But then we were fighting fires regularly in forty five forty seven. It was just horrendous. And he took off in November again, and I was actually in California at the Kincaid Fire in Sonoma County. So I went over with the Climate Council. The ABC Australian Broadcasting Commission tagged along and I went out to this fire and they did a little special and it
went to where I think it was the seventh of November. Sorry, I'm a nerder, remember dates. It's a roundabout then, and on the and me saying, well, look at this fire in California. Here's what's changing with climate change. They didn't get big fires like this in northern California this time of year, but now they do same in Australia. And this build up, this is the worst I've ever seen,
and I'm really frightened about what's going to happen. So the next day after they ran it across Australia, the fires went wild and lost dozens and dozens of homes, some lives, and.
You're back to back at this stage, you know, every man and his dog is out. Are you undermanned as a fire service, so all your resources stretched.
It it was just relentless and relentlessly and it was just you know, you're going from August and just there was no rest months and months and people who lived in the fire areas and I was really lucky. I thought, if Sydney gets hit, you know, that's where the real property losses have traditionally happened, as on the outskirts of Sydney and the Blue Mountains near Sydney. But we're losing hundreds of homes in regional areas which had never happened
before and just showed how big the fires were. But yeah, people were exhorted and you couldn't get the interstate assistance because they had their own fires. You didn't have enough aircraft, you know. I remember watching a drop on the south coast of New South Wales thinking great, and then it was two hours before the next one because it had to fly back to Sydney and relaid and come back. And it was just there was no point, you know, and it was and the small aircraft couldn't fly because
wind was too strong. So we'd get days of catastrophic fire weather, which was a new rating we brought in because of climate change, because the weather was getting so bad. But most aircraft couldn't fly in those days because the wind was too gusty and strong. And there was a bad air crash at see one thirty hercules went in on one of these days.
Yeah, I heard about that, but it was just.
Yeah, horrific. So look, it just got worse and worse and worse, and culminated on New Year's Eve twenty nineteen. The south coast of New South Wales, which is you know, hundreds of kilometers long, beautiful beaches. Tens of thousands of people go there for their Christmas holidays. It was evacuated and there were dozens of huge fires, and I remember being down there on Newyear's Day. We left Sydney about
four am. It would have been hundreds of fire trucks heading down there, and we just couldn't do a thing because we had what we called a pyro convective storm above us, and that means the fire was so hot the convection column pushed into the stratosphere and brought gale storm force winds to the surface this incredibly dry air, and huge trees next to us were just getting snapped
off like toothpicks and thrown around. And I didn't think I was coming home again, I thought, but you talked about the animals, and this is I was back to my psychologist over this one because I couldn't talk about I can talk about it now without sort of tearing up, but it took a lot of work to get there. Remember being on a highway and there's factories burning and homes burning, and we didn't have any water, and the
power had gone and we couldn't get any water. I saw something over on the side of the highway through the smoke. What's that? And I thought it was burnt hay bales, And then some of them started to move and I went over closer and it was a mob of kangaroos who had been caught in the forest and just caught fire and come out on the raid and just died on the raid. And I've never seen that because kangaroos know how to get away from fires. And I just, yeah, i'd cry if I talked about it
for months and it just said everything to me. I just thought, my grandkids are going to grow up this. You know, millions of hectares have been sterilized for decades. Animals will come back, but nothing like when I was a kid, when my parents took me camping see kangaroos and koalas and kidnaps and goannas and well, this beautiful wildlife. It was wiped down.
I had a sense of worthlessness when you just said. I was stood there. You're looking around, everything around you's on fire. You can't do your job because you've got no resources, and I can imagine me being in a war zone, you know, with no weapon. Just wow, that must be some yeah sort of headspace to be in. What was going for your head?
I'm not good, certainly not good. And look the mental health issues with firefighters since then, and thinking you're going to die is you know, as you know, it's not a good thing, and you do that too many times and plays with the head of it. That's an understand but but just not being able to help was so destroying. You know, I'm a firefighter, but I can't fight your fire.
And sorry, I can't help you because I'm just dodging trees, and I don't know if I'm getting out of here, you know, I don't know if I'm going home from this. So and it was just it's just like having your legs cut off out from under you. You know. It was just the whole reason for being and he couldn't do it. And it brought it home to me. And I got to say, I was so pissed off with the government that day, and a couple of days later the Prime Minister had a press conference and so I'm
going to fix it all. I'm going to give them a money for aircraft. I was pretty angry, and I don't I actually don't talk about that much because I think it serves no purpose. But the other thing was he went on a holiday and didn't tell anyone. You know, if he told people, fine, but he kept it secret because he knew he should have been there providing leadership during a disaster, but he took off. And so all that.
Also emotion as anger, resentment, Yeah, you know, worth you don't feel like you can do your job, Well, you can't do your job negative emotions, yeah you can't. But how did you deal with that? Well, you go home and cry. How did you deal with that? Was was there at the moments that you sort of just broke down and was just.
Like, yeah, well yes, but look in my book, I talk about it. A day I was going out on the fire line again. It was that forty nine degree day, and but two days before I'd been fighting fires down to the south of Sydney and two young dads were killed when a tree fell on their truck. And that's my trigger, you know, the big one. And I went to a cafe before I was going on shift. I
thought I'll have breakfast, and I walked in. I had the newspaper and I opened it up and there they are on the front cover, and I've the tears started. I've I've had to pull myself together. People sort of looking at me because I'm in uniform. And I've got back in the car and I thought, okay, deep breaths, deep breaths, right, all the all the techniques to right.
So I go to the counter and autumn breakfast, and then I just remember the barrista came over to the girl and the on the cash register, and then the girl said, it's fine, It's taken care of and I said what and she said on a flow, he has paid for your breakfast, and she said, thank you so much for what you do. And I just and that. I just thought of those two young dads and I just and I lost it and it was so embarrassing, but I just sat tears, isn't it. Yeah, so brought
it back. But how nice people are and how good But these two young blakes, their families would never see them again.
And also the appreciation that, yeah, moment of kindness amongst the chaos.
Yeah, but you have to let it out. And I learned that, and I, you know, I reflected on that, but look, it reinforced with me. We had a government that needed to go because they'd lost their moral radar and they weren't listening to the science. They were just listening to mates who didn't have much between there is
and wanted to make profits. And you know, I was dealing with misinformation a certain part of the media, personal attacks and because anyone who doesn't listen to what they want to say, and I just thought, this is sick, you know, And I hope and I always thought of the UK. Margaret Thatcher was the first prime minister who understood climate change. Because she was a scientist. She was the one who said we've got to take action on climate way back then. And so it's been a both
sides of politics. So yeah, it's a given it's changing a bit now. But why can't Australia be like that? We burn, we flood? You know, I can't you see this?
Was there ever a light at the end of the tunnel where you thought were you know, it's starting to die down, it's starting to get control here, We're starting to take charge of these fires. Shall I say? No?
It was sudden because it was just getting worse and worse. And what would happen. We'd get a couple of days low in the weather, maybe three days, and then we'd look at the forecasts, so it's going to be forty five degrees again and look at the gale force winds and we got hundreds of kilometers of fire front. They're all going to you know, bad, just keep going. It suddenly rained, but it didn't just rain, it poured and people were flooded. So we went from I went from
hosing fires to hosing mud out of people's hands. And this is the trend. And you know, the basic the basic science behind it is for every one degree rise in temperature, the atmosphere holds seven percent more water. So, as the insurance industry will tell you, in Australia, most of the rain now comes in violent downpaws and causes flash flooding and then river and flooding flood. So we had record floods, floods like we've never had before.
One minute, Like you said, you know, you're dealing with the fires of relief because you've got the rain, but too much of it. You're facing a whole different catastrophic event there, aren't you.
Yeah, So it was it was more predictable. The floods were more predictable, particularly when the rivers were flooding and going downstream, but the downpaws weren't. The flash floods and people lost their lives. So, and this is what we've seen worldwide. We call it climate whiplash. You go from one extreme to the other and it's becoming more plash.
Yeah.
So it was such a relief that the fires were out, but then we had thousands of homeless because of these floods. And we had three years in twenty twenty twenty one, particularly twenty twenty two, and it was we had a triple La Nina event three years in a row and it's only happened a couple of times before. But yeah, so we're getting strange weather and strange climatic patterns. But there it's all in the extreme end. You know, nothing's
nothing's down the bottom. It's all banged, big punches and communities getting hit over and over, so they get burnt out and they get flooded, then they get flooded again.
So there was never a finish line. Then there was never this is the end of it. It was just one thing rolling into another, that whiplash going back and forth, you know, in my head as there was this big event and it doesn't I suppose it never ends for you guys, does it?
No, it doesn't. And there's day to day stuff. But look, the big strategic thing is to get the political class to say, you know what, we're going to actually get a bit of courage on board and do what needs to be done. And it was so gratifying, I have to say it to see that government that had been in for a decade, a decade of climate and action swept out, swept out and a lot of independence coming in. Who people didn't trust the two big parties anymore because
I was so much alike. And so we had half a dozen I think seven Independence Community Independence. And one of them was a journalist who was with me in California and when she did her speech to Parliament, she said, I was in California at this major fire with a former fire chief, Greg Mullins, and I just realized I've got to do something about climate and I thought, how
nice is that? And things have changed, there's action taking place, and you know, there's some worldwide events in the US, for example, a little put it back a little bit, but there's hope. Now there's a lot of China's doing a heap in the renewables space. But you know there's other things going on there, of course, but there's cause for hope. And you can't give in to doom.
It can't be ignored, especially when someone like that happens.
But look, we're on a trajectory. I think the private sector is investing a lot of money into renewaballs. We're not reducing emissions yet, but we're getting close to being peak of missions and then it'll drop. And I'm not giving up. You know, I've got grand kids.
But I suppose you can't give up, mate. It's not that you know, you've got that state of mind that you know, it seems like that you'll be doing this, mate, until until you take your last breath. Mate, by the sounds of it. And I always say to people as well with you know when I say, oh, I can't wait to retire, and my wife's like, and you're never going to have a tire, you know. And I could sort of see myself in usug where you know, you're just going to keep going and keep going and keep
going and keep going. And what does the future hold for Greg Mullins? Where are you at right now? Can you step away or would you want to step away? No?
And look, people talk about retirement and the old the old view of retirement was you get a rocking chair and sit in the corner and read a book or something. In that way, there's life to be lived out, you know. Yeah. I love life, and I love my family and my friends, and I live in a magnificent part of the world of rebuilt mum and Dad's home that they built in the nineteen fifties. And I'm back. I look at the big tree out the front that I used to climb
sixty years ago when I was a kid. And just think, how lucky am I. I'm doing stuff that I love and I'm seeing a difference, and not saying I made the difference, But there's people have waken up and look out. Of every bad thing, some good comes. And those terrible fires, worse fires in Australia history, the biggest, the most hamous, lost all the rest. People wake up and went, oh my god, and they went and this government lied to us and they swept them out of power. And I thought, ah,
there's hope, you know there. And there's as I said, this climate action happening and way above my pay grade, and some very smart people doing incredible things, and really good moral politicians leading the way. And I feel good about that. And so I'll just keep doing my little bit, whether it's locally going to a house fire or whatever, or taking charge of a bush fire, or writing a
submission to a Senate inquiry or whatever. But I'll just keep doing what I'm doing, and I hope it makes a bit of a difference.
And well, listen, I rarely use this word, and I don't think I don't like to use them. I think they're overused, but make you're a hero. Honestly, you are legend and a hero. And I say that not lightly because I've seen a few heroes and a few legends, but mate, you're certainly one of them. And thank you ever so much for coming on my podcast, head Game. It's been a fascinating chat.
Thank you for that coming from someone like you, I'm very humbled, I.
Mean, and I'm humbled to be self pleader you mate.
Thanks again, Greg, Thanks Ann.
Greg Mullins is the author of Firestorm. If you'd like to check it out, I'll link the details in the show notes. Thanks for listening to this episode of head Game. If you enjoyed it, please leave me a review. I'm at Middleton. Catch you in the next episode.