Manly welcomes first female station officer

Less than a decade into her service as a volunteer firefighter, Janette Baird has risen to the rank of Station Officer, leading the way for women at Manly Fire Brigade.

Janette joined the brigade in operational support – the team that does everything from fetching coffee for the crew through to supervising road closures at incident sites. Working her way up to a qualified firefighter was no easy task though. 

Born with full hearing in one ear but completely deaf in the other ear, Janette says she had to prove herself on the job. She was grateful for the support and mentorship of her deputy chief, Athol Conway, and her station officer, Dave Nyman.

“Dave’s been at the station for 17 years. He grew me from a firefighter into an officer. I’m sad to leave him but I have my own crew now.

“At a fire station, the crew becomes your family. My job now is to take care of them and the welbeing and to make sure everyone is prepared. When we’re rostered on, we do truck, PPE, and equipment checks as well as training. That’s the important part, the training strengthens our team. The better we work as a team, the better we are on the ground and those minutes we shave off in training can save someone’s life on the ground,” Janette says.

Janette passed the officers course with flying colours, scoring 100 per cent on all four scenarios. But that was just the start as she then had to apply for an open station officer position. When that gap opened up, Janette applied and was approved the night of her interview.

In her new role, Janette has her own crew and is in charge of fire scenes at callouts, making the calls on how to tackle the emergency. Callouts can range from fire or medical incidents through to vehicle accidents or civil defence emergencies. She says one of her hardest callouts was the fire at Gulf Harbour Country Club earlier this year.

“We were already on the road after attending another call so we were the first to arrive at the scene. It was my first major call in a leadership role. 

“It’s not always as it seems at an incident. As we pulled up, all we could see was smoke. It wasn’t until we were on the other side of the building that we could see the flames. We worked on that scene all night,” Janette says.

Being a volunteer brigade, all the firefighters have day jobs. Janette is the manager of a Stanmore Bay ECE centre. She says firefighting is about serving the community and it takes a whole community to support the brigade.

“It’s important to have employers be understanding about us being tired the night after a call or giving us the time off for training and attending incidents,” Janette says.

She herself has staff at the ECE who are in the fire service – Lulu Smith was the youngest firefighter when she joined the brigade at 16, following in her own mother’s footsteps. When Lulu joined she was still at Whangaparāoa College. The college has a long history of students signing up to the brigade with year 12 student Jayden Murdie and year 11 student Max Heydon now in the brigade as well.

Max is Janette’s son and he says he always knew he was going to end up in the fire service, coming from an emergency service family. Janette’s husband, Doug, is brigade support and her 11-year-old son Jack alternates between his dream of joining the service and being a police officer.

With her son joining Dave’s crew, Janette is pleased that he will benefit from the same leadership she did. She says Max is thriving in his first weeks at the brigade through his long-term plan is to join the navy as a marine technician.

For now, Max plans to work his way up to a qualified firefighter and become a driver. He says it’s every child’s dream after all, to drive a red fire truck. 

“I enjoy the physical side, the training. Waiting for something to happen is the hardest part,” Max says. 

His first callout was also Janette’s first official callout as Station Officer. Though it was an alarm without incident, she says it was a good opportunity to show Max the ropes. Since then, Max has been eager to join another callout. 

“Instead of hearing ‘Are we there yet?’, I now hear ‘Is there a callout yet?’. We’re all really eager when we start out but with the experience you realise that no calls is a good thing. It means we’ve done our job with community education around fire safety,” Janette says.