There are plenty of ways to lead a fire brigade. You can bark orders, introduce new rules, and insist everyone falls into line. Or, as Russell Island First Officer Caine Ward practices, you can listen.
When changes to Queensland Fire Department procedures and processes left some members of the local brigade apprehensive about what was coming next, attendance began to suffer. Caine did something that sounds deceptively simple. He asked people what they thought. More importantly, he listened to the answers.
That approach has earned him the Queensland Fire Department Commissioner’s Award for Excellence in Values; an award recognising the culture he has helped build rather than a single dramatic incident.
The official citation praised his values based leadership, particularly the way he had used respect, inclusion and collaboration to rebuild trust within the brigade.
But Caine is less interested in talking about leadership than he is about the people who made the change possible.
“I turned it into a professional crew, and without the support of each and every single one of them, I couldn’t have done it,” he says. When he accepted the award, he did so on behalf of the entire crew. “They put in the hard yards.”
Since then, morale and participation have improved, members are more engaged in training and volunteers feel they have a genuine place in the organisation. That matters particularly in a volunteer service. People can be told what to do when they’re getting paid to do a job, but getting them to give up their Thursday nights, weekends, sleep and sometimes enormous chunks of their lives for free is another matter entirely.
For Caine, being a firefighter has become almost a full time job in itself. Training happens every Thursday, followed by call outs and community events that can fill the rest of the week. Some weeks, he estimates, his involvement can reach 40 hours.
There are bushfires and structure fires, road crash rescues and CPR. The brigade assists Queensland Ambulance Service and Queensland Police Service and works alongside neighbouring brigades across the Southern Moreton Bay Islands. Then there are the less glamorous jobs.
“There’s the never ending pile of paperwork,” Caine says.
The brigade also spends considerable time outside emergencies; visiting schools, talking about bushfire safety, attending events, men’s markets and first responder days. It is part of a broader effort to make the brigade something the community knows, trusts and feels connected to before the siren ever sounds.
Caine has also helped bring more training onto Russell Island. After completing a Certificate IV in Training and Assessment, he was able to help deliver training locally, removing the need for members to travel to the mainland. For island volunteers, that can make the difference between participating and deciding it is all too hard.
There are now about 30 people involved with the brigade, including support members who cook, help during incidents and keep things running behind the scenes.
And Caine’s approach to building a team has crossed the island’s boundaries. He has worked on stronger relationships with neighbouring brigades and other agencies, helping improve how the islands work together when something goes wrong.
It is a lesson Caine has seen play out beyond the fire station, too. Caine has lived on Russell Island for six years, after spending three years on Macleay Island following his move from New South Wales. What he loves most about island life is not the scenery, it is what happens when things get difficult.
“When things go bad, it’s amazing how many people in the community support each other,” he says.
The cyclone provided a particularly powerful reminder for him. For all the talk of resilience, Caine says you really see it when people have no choice but to rely on one another. That is why the brigade has become such a big part of his life.
“I love being involved with a group of people for the right reasons and being there for our community.”
There is a distinctly family flavour to that commitment, too. Caine’s partner, Marissa Dolereit, is the brigade treasurer, media liaison and a firefighter. She originally joined in a support role as treasurer before Caine eventually convinced her to try firefighting herself. His son Tristan, 27, is now a trainee firefighter after moving from Sydney to Russell Island about a year ago. So the Ward-Dolereit household has effectively become its own little branch of the brigade.
The upside of having your partner in the same organisation, Caine says, is that there is an understanding of what the commitment actually means; the interruptions, the time away and the impact it can have on family life.
There isn’t much room for a hobby, although Caine has found one. Gardening.
More specifically, manicuring lawns. After spending much of his week thinking about emergencies, training, volunteers and operations, he likes nothing more than getting outside and making a lawn look immaculate.
“It’s my time out,” he says matter of fact.
For Caine, who is semi-retired largely because of the time the brigade demands, the next decade is difficult to predict. But there is one thing he is fairly certain about; he’ll still be on the islands.
“We love it here. The islands have been really good to us.”
There is a new crop of recruits due to come through later this year, so in the meantime there will be plenty more Thursday nights, training sessions, call outs and paperwork ahead. For Caine, the hope is that some of them will find what he did when he joined; a group of people worth turning up for, and a community worth giving your time to.
