The year that tested Gladys
Shane Fitzsimmons tells a story from the hideous black summer of 2019-20. He and the NSW Premier were visiting a community just south of Batemans Bay. “As we were leaving,” the former NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner recalls, “a lady came up to the Premier and said, ‘We’ve got no communication here and I have family who will be worried about me,’ and while she was speaking, others standing around said that they were in the same situation too.” So Gladys collected their phone numbers, and “as soon as we got back into mobile range, there she was in the back seat of the car and you could hear her on the phone: ‘Oh hello, it’s Gladys Berejiklian here. Yes, I am the Premier, but I’ve just been with such-and-such and they wanted me to give you a call and let you know that they’re doing okay.’”
Shane chuckles with genuine affection. It was a classic Gladys moment – calling into play the winning combination of diligence and concern that earned her the trust of the state during that terrifying fire season and then the pandemic.
“There were,” Gladys says with characteristic understatement, “a lot of difficult days that summer,” driving up and down the coast, looking trauma in the eye, sweating on the lives of firefighters, farmers, people in blazing towns.
“There would be times when Commissioner Fitzsimmons would let me know that there were fire crews missing or people in houses who weren’t accounted for,” she remembers. “There were some
