Mark Coulton (Parkes, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In February this year, the communities of Dunedoo, Cassilis and Coolah suffered a catastrophic event—a bushfire that started to the east of Sir Ivan Dougherty Drive. Over the next several days the fire destroyed 55,000 hectares of valuable farmland, thousands of kilometres of fencing, just under 40 homes, numerous woolsheds and the village of Uarbry—the church, the hall and most of the homes. I happened to fly over the area on my way to Canberra on the Sunday of that fire, and the firestorm sweeping the area was one of the most sinister things I've ever seen. The community was absolutely devastated. I spoke to one farmer who lost 348 cows in that fire and, later, had to sell another hundred that had been burnt and weren't able to be kept. That's a lot of money! Not to mention the home on his property, the woolshed, the yards and several pieces of machinery, including trucks and tractors. It's very hard to come back from there.

But very shortly after, the organisation called BlazeAid came to town and, under the leadership of Laurie Dawson—who, incidentally, was still in the area after the Warrumbungle fire four years earlier—set up camp at the Dunedoo showground. I recently had the privilege of spending three days fencing with BlazeAid. They are still there and will be in that area until the end of September. This is the magnitude of what they've done: 977 volunteers so far have cleared 653 kilometres of burnt fence and replaced that with 695 kilometres of new fence. They've done 7,931 volunteer days, accumulating 47,586 hours. If you put that at six hours per day, at $20 an hour—and they're worth much more than that—that's $951,720 worth of volunteer work! For the last six months, the local community have been feeding this camp on a roster basis, and they've served up 20,181 meals in that time. I would like to pay tribute to BlazeAid and to the people who volunteered, whether for a couple of days or—like Dennis Osborne, who was in charge of the team I was in—six months. That's a mighty effort. The people of Dunedoo and Cassilis and the farmers of that area very much appreciate what you've done, and I'm sure many of them would not be on the land without the assistance of BlazeAid.