This time three years ago I was desperate to leave parliament to get back to my community, which was in the midst of a big bushfire. By early December 2019 we knew that this fire was beyond anything we'd seen, but we didn't realise that it would become the world's biggest fire from a single ignition point.

It has taken the full three years since for most of the RFS firefighters who spent months fighting the Gospers Mountain fire, volunteering on the North Coast or heading down south to receive their National Emergency Medal. It has been a huge job for the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury RFS headquarters. In the Hawkesbury around 640 RFS members were awarded the medal and in the Blue Mountains a staggering 840 medals wer