 This site here is Redgum Reserve in Batesford. It's a council reserve that has some wonderful conservation assets on it. Some beautiful big old river redgums, some remnant native grasslands, one of the rarest vegetation types left in Victoria now. And a whole bunch of revegetation work that's been done by the local community to take this from what was a bear paddock on a creek line to revegetated by diverse area that's full of birds and small mammals and the like. It's a fabulous place. It really is lovely. So people might view this as us putting fuel in here, but it's actually working in our favour because it's suppressing the fine fuel. Yes, that's true. All that long rank introduced grass that's so flammable in summer. And if you only got a look here... Some of the very best engagement I do around fire and fire ecology and fire management is that one-on-one stuff with people. Very resource hungry, takes a lot of your time potentially, but I personally think the outcomes are really, really good. And they will go and talk to their neighbours or their friends or their family and it puts hopefully a very positive spin on their interaction both with us as an agency and the issue that they had that they were trying to get a result on. Because it was so late in the season, the intensity was still quite low. And that's really evident here. I mean, you just look at this beautiful tree here. We've burnt right underneath this. And there's, you know, it's a relatively cool burn because there's very little scorch on the canopy. Personally I find that doing a site visit with people makes me feel more involved as well with their plans and their objectives. And that helps me with my own objectives and plans. And it shares their passion for the site. And it's very rewarding, especially when you see people excited about what's coming back and what's happening. I love walking through here and I walk through here just about every day just to connect with nature really and to calm the self down each day. This is life, you know, this is a kind of life in microcosm. It's one or two trees here. So that's what it means to me. Without question, the ability to build relationships based on trust, it's the cornerstone of a successful program. And I think to do that, one of the first challenges is to understand expectations. Now understand what the limitations are of our organisation and our place and our role in this, you know, melting pot, this tapestry of fire in the environment, fire ecology. Part of it is about figuring out what are the non-negotiables from that and then what are the negotiables and where do you land. So it's almost like taking your ideas and putting them through a community filter of like what is going to be easily accepted and digestible and where can you build on that. There are legal constraints on what people can do. We try to be very pragmatic about that. We try to bring people along to an understanding of why those constraints are in place. When they hopefully come to an understanding and we're not just beating them over the head with a big stick about it, then hopefully they will trust what we're telling them. So, you know, that's a long period of time and it involves trust based on honesty and an open communication about what we're trying to do, what our own skills and abilities are, what the benefits of skills and abilities and knowledge that the community have. And again, treating everybody equally as part of the team in order to do that, no matter who they work for, what role they play. You know, some of the activities that we carry out where you're actually putting fire into the landscape near people's property is quite a challenging thing to do. There's a lot, a huge amount of work that goes into making sure that those activities are as safe as possible. We just make sure that people are aware it's going on, that they know ahead of time so that if they've got concerns or queries or they wish to, you know, perhaps request that we delay a particular activity, maybe a plan burn that might be impacting something that's important to them, so that we have open lines of communication. What doesn't work well for trust is when things don't go to plan and you don't have that follow-up discussion with the rest of the team or with the rest of the community that you're working with as to why things didn't go to plan. You can't always control those things because of the weather, the fuel moisture, the amount of fuel that's there and you need to make sure that the people know that these things can alter the outcome and if they're going to trust you, then you need to be quite honest upfront about what's going to happen. It's part of that relationship. If you can bring them along, you learn something from them, they learn something from you, you come to some sort of level of agreement but there's a level of understanding around that and trust around that, then I think you've gained that ability to keep moving forward. Most of that will come through conversation and talking and understanding and learning and listening and that builds that relationship and that trust over time.