Can an organisation create a new sense of shared responsibility within the community to foster and build disaster resilience? 

Banjo Patterson in The Man from Snowy River tells us one person, attuned to contours and ridges of the local environment, can achieve far more than a pack of ‘cracks’ who ‘learnt to ride droving on the plains’.

So can one person, in one town, help to create a new direction in emergency management in their community? Can one person, after years of being in command, learn to lead in a different way?

Fire & Rescue NSW (FRNSW) has been working with the Australian Institute of Police Management (AIPM) to facilitate organisational change through the development of its regional leaders. The ‘Leadership Musters’ are premised on three assumptions:

• Firstly, local problems require local solutions with changes being driven up, rather than driven down
• Secondly, changing demographics, and social and economic pressures require new approaches if local emergency management capabilities are to be maintained and,
• Thirdly, leaders have to find change within themselves if they are to engage and influence others to develop new local solutions to ‘strike firelight from the flint stones’.

The ‘Leadership Musters’ have uncovered a hunger for new knowledge and skills and a desire for a new engagement between organisations, leaders and followers. 

Like The Man from Snowy River, often the initial focus is on the ‘tried and noted riders with their stockhorse snuffing with delight’; few pay attention to the ‘small and weedy beast’ from the Snowy.  Retained Fire Captains are neither small nor weedy, and with local knowledge, experience, ‘pluck undaunted’ and ‘fierce hot courage’, they have the opportunity to lead the renewal and rebuilding of the social capacity of their communities to be more resilient in the face of emergencies.