SUE: My name is Sue Mountain.
I’m a member of the Yarrambat Fire Brigade.
I’m a volunteer fire fighter and currently the first Lieutenant of the Fire Brigade.
Yarrambat is north-east of Melbourne, um if anyone knows where Greensborough is it’s
about 10 minutes on from Greensborough.
We are an entirely volunteer brigade.
Um, so all the fire fighters are volunteers, and the auxiliary as well.
No one gets paid to do anything, they just give of their time.
They’re a junior brigade, we have kids from the ages of 11 to 15.
We really have a junior brigade to just get the kids involved in the community, for them
to understand what volunteerism is, and most importantly to have fun.
We have a very high success rate of our kids going on from 16 and becoming fire fighters,
so it’s wonderful that kids who have mostly been here for five years with us, actually
choose to become a volunteer and uh, go on to be fire fighters.
MADELINE: I’m Madeline.
SARAH: I’m Sarah.
MADELINE AND SARAH: And we’re junior CFA fire fighters.
SARAH: I’ve been here for about six months.
MADELINE: I’ve been here for just over two years.
You get to go down to the fire brigade and we get to do sleep overs, trivia nights, uh
we learn about the communications.
SARAH: And the radio.
MADELINE: Yeah the radios and what buttons to not click in the truck [laughs].
JESSIE: Hi I’m Jessie.
KYLE: I’m Kyle.
JESSIE: And we’re junior volunteers for the CFA.
KYLE: It’s just a good way to get out of home, like get out of the house, get something
to do, get active.
(JESSIE: Yeah)
MADELINE: Uh, this was wet hose and ladder.
SARAH: And basically we had two hoses, and they join in the middle and we had four people
that run down, two people uncouple the hose connectors and run down with a branch which
connect to the hose and the other two people run back to the tank and they turn it on,
they connect it and turn on water runs through and hits the target.
KYLE: It’s pretty powerful, like, you have to have your back foot back or else you’ll
just fall back, probably like, fly around with it.
(JESSIE: Yeah) SARAH: It’s funny when people don’t connect
it properly and the water just goes everywhere (MADELINE: Yeah, and you get all wet) [Laughter]
SUE: Our regret is that we didn’t come here ten years before.
That, that’s the one regret.
MADELINE: I like to do my bit for the community and um my mum and dad think it’s good and
I love doing it.
SARAH: My parents always told me, sometime in your life you’ve gotta do something good
that can help other people as well as yourself, and like, joining this, in the future if I
go onto Seniors I will basically be helping lives and I’ll be doing something that I
can hold with my life that I’m doing good for someone else.
JESSIE: Just being able to help the community and being a part of something else to be proud
of.
SUE: We feel it’s really important to do things like this in our lives.
We often say, what would we be doing if we didn’t have this?
You know, and we’d be sitting at home and yeah we’d be mowing our lawns and probably
have a better garden than we have now but um we wouldn’t swap it for anything because
we really enjoy doing it, you know, it keeps me out of trouble [laughs].