7 episodes

This Australian bush fire season has been unprecedented. In this podcast you will hear harrowing accounts of survival and the incredible acts of bravery and kindness which are helping the town of Malua Bay in southern New South Wales on the path to recovery. The town’s cast of heroes is a long one - the young surf life saver whose quick thinking spared hundreds of lives at the town beach, the RFS volunteers whose houses burned while they were saving others and the now homeless pharmacist who dispensed free medicine in the dark. This podcast captures the best of Australians.

Mates Under Fire Daily Telegraph

    • News

This Australian bush fire season has been unprecedented. In this podcast you will hear harrowing accounts of survival and the incredible acts of bravery and kindness which are helping the town of Malua Bay in southern New South Wales on the path to recovery. The town’s cast of heroes is a long one - the young surf life saver whose quick thinking spared hundreds of lives at the town beach, the RFS volunteers whose houses burned while they were saving others and the now homeless pharmacist who dispensed free medicine in the dark. This podcast captures the best of Australians.

    Fear

    Fear

    Paradise is a fair description of Malua Bay before the Black Summer fires. Crystal waters lapped at pristine sand, tree lined green hills with narrow roads where hundreds of families lived in modest homes rising above the waterfront. Then, all&nbsp...

    • 32 min
    Ashes

    Ashes

    Former Wallaby Al Baxter was fearsome on a rugby field but on New Year’s Eve he joined more than 1000 people in a terrifying fight for life on Malua Bay beach. A whiskey in his beach bag settled his nerves to some degree after a frightening day. You wi...

    • 35 min
    Heroes

    Heroes

    Stoic fire chief Shane Fitzsimmons gave comfort to the people of Malua Bay 24 hours after the inferno. The toll of the dreadful fire season is never far when the commissioner recounts the toll of 25 deaths across the state, including six of his own men...

    • 36 min
    Trauma

    Trauma

    Amid the horror, one thing is sure in Malua Bay. No one will be the same. We speak to Lifeline about how they are helping people come to terms with the trauma. Post traumatic stress is already apparent in many who stared down...

    • 18 min
    Kindness

    Kindness

    Heroes are easy to find in Malua Bay. Raj Gupta is a lifesaver. Too humble to talk about his own fire losses, he would rather talk about the patients who come to his Malua Bay pharmacy. He opened it in the wake of the fires and dispensed medicine in th...

    • 30 min
    Rebuilding

    Rebuilding

    Has COVID-19 stopped the rebuilding after the bushfires? Dick Adams was a deputy police commissioner but he says he has never seen a disaster of this scale and it is his job to fix the coast. He is a recovery coordinator. His first job is to clear the ...

    • 16 min

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