BILPIN DUO CELEBRATE 70 YEARS OF SERVICE TOGETHER Bilpin Brigade members Albert Newton and William ‘Bill’ Johnson recently notched up a truly impressive milestone – 70 years of service with the NSW RFS. In June, the two men were joined by their families at a small ceremony where they each received a 70-year service medal and a life membership certificate and plaque. Community members and Albert and Bill’s brigade colleagues lined the Bells Line of Road with signs and balloons to celebrate as the men did a sociallydistanced lap of honour. HUMBLE BEGINNINGS Bill joined the Bilpin Brigade in 1946 at the age of 16, just after the conclusion of the Second World War when many young men were still serving in the army and manpower to fight fires was restricted to older men and young boys. Albert joined a few years later in 1950 when he was 15, and a lifetime of friendship and service was born. The Service was very different in those days, and the two men learnt to fight fires with none of the tools or comforts familiar to the modern firefighter. “When I started we had no equipment,” says Bill. “We fought the fires with a wet bag, a green branch, a box of matches and a chipping hoe.” “We had no drip torches, so we lit the bush up using stringy bark and gum leaf or old branches that had fallen out of the tree,” says Albert. “You’d light that up and walk through the bush and the leaves would drop off and get it going.” 20 BUSH FIRE bulletin || FEATURES
Not only was there very little equipment in those days, but there was also no uniform or PPE, and definitely no fire truck. Bill even rode his bicycle to his first fire. “When I became equipment officer in the Bilpin Brigade, we had 28 steel knapsacks and nothing else,” says Albert. “Then in the late 1950s we got an ex-army Blitz Tanker with 300 gallons on the back.”
STANDOUT CAMPAIGNS Over the decades, the two men have been involved in countless campaign fires and spent many summers protecting the community of Bilpin. Up until the deadly fires of 2019/20, they hadn’t lost a single home to bush fire in the area. “The one fire that stands out most for me is the 1968 fire,” says Bill. “We had three months of fire – it started in October and finished on Christmas Day.
