Nathan Barnden
RFS divisional commander, NSW
Roaring along the Princes Highway near the historic NSW village of Quaama on 31 December, Rural Fire Service volunteer Nathan Barnden couldn’t see more than three metres in front of his car for all the smoke and flames. Beside him, eyes locked on a GPS app, his RFS partner, John Gallagher, was counting down the metres to their destination: a burning house where seven members of a family were trapped. “I thought we’d find seven bodies,” says Barnden, a divisional commander during the bushfire crisis in his hometown of
Bega on the NSW South Coast. “But we found them hiding under a wet blanket.”
It was Jessica Gravener, her mother-in-law, Christine, and five children at Christine’s home. “The kids were in pyjamas,” says Barnden, a Canberra-based public servant. “They’d just woken up and the world was ending around them.”
But help was there. Barnden, 26, an RFS volunteer for 10 years, bundled the family, including Jessica’s two children, her niece and two nephews, into the car and hurtled back towards town. As they hit a pinch in the road and flames licked the car, “one of the kids asked if they were going to die,” says Barnden. “I promised I’d do all I could to get them out.”
It was a pledge he and Gallagher fulfilled to them and six others that day. Barnden lost his uncle and cousin in the fires but his grief spurs him on. “I don’t want any other family to deal with what we’re going through,” he says. “That’s what drives me to get up and put the uniform on. I don’t want anyone else to feel that pain.”