Keeping things shipshape As people fleeing the fires in Mallacoota boarded the HMAS Choules, Senior Constable Trent Montgomery expected to see relieved faces, but he instead encountered people in shock. Sen Const Montgomery from the Melbournebased Public Order Response Team (PORT) was one of a team of four police assigned to the naval warship for the evacuation of more than 1,100 people from the East Gippsland town, which had been stranded by fire.
tracker recorded him as having climbed 175 floors’ worth of stairs – the equivalent of more than two trips to the top of the Eureka Tower, one of Melbourne’s tallest buildings.
With the vessel’s Australian Navy personnel guiding the ship through the Bass Straight and ensuring the complex logistics of the trip, Sen Const Montgomery, Sergeant Mark Jarski, Sen Const Anastasia Papageorgiou and Sen Const Rebecca Rose helped maintain order onboard.
“They were extremely well trained and whenever they were given a task to do, they would just get on with it and do it so smoothly,” he said. “Their strengths complemented our strengths in managing crowds and we worked well together.”
The team started helping with the long boarding process about 8am on 5 January and didn’t clock off until almost a day and a half later, when the evacuees had safely arrived in Hastings, a 21-hour trip through the Bass Strait away.
to ensure people’s emotions onboard didn’t spill over.
Sen Const Montgomery said the voyage was the hardest he has had to work as a police officer.
Long queues for food and toilets and showers that were pushed to their limits also tested people’s patience.
“It was non-stop from start to finish and intense work all the way through,” Sen Const Montgomery said.
Not wanting to add to the stress of the situation, Sen Const Montgomery and his colleagues decided to go without their firearms and lock them away in the ship’s armoury.
“I started off by walking around and engaging with the evacuees and most people seemed as though they were in shock, rather than relieved. “It was quite confronting seeing how affected they had been by the whole fire ordeal.” The heightened state of stress of the evacuees meant the four officers needed to work well
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Sen Const Montgomery was impressed by the way the navy operated.
POLICE LIFE | AUTUMN 2020
“We continued to have access to them, but we wanted to make sure we didn’t come across as confronting or intimidating,” he said. Patrolling the ship to ensure people didn’t access restricted areas was an important task and meant Sen Const Montgomery’s fitness
Although it was a challenging 35 hours, Sen Const Montgomery said the mission to evacuate the town of Mallacoota was “one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen”. “In PORT, we help out at a great variety of different jobs, but this one was special,” he said. “So many Australian agencies – the Australian Defence Force, Victoria Police, medical personnel, Red Cross and even media – working so fluidly to assist in rescuing that many people was truly a feat of Australian strength and something to be proud of.”
Editorial: Jesse Wray-McCann Photography: Australian Defence Force
