He has spent decades putting fires out, but Graeme Still started his career by lighting them.
The 60-year-old Dunedin firefighter has been at the forefront of rural firefighting efforts since the 1990s, using his expertise to battle blazes both in the South and across the Ditch.
In the past 18 months alone, he has led responses to major fires such as Lake Ohau, Livingstone and Middlemarch.
It was at Lake Ohau where the national spotlight fell on him, as he worked with the dozens of residents who lost their homes and tried to manage one of the most destructive fires in New Zealand history.
But, he admits, firefighting was not his first career choice. Or, in fact, his second.
While at high school, he wanted to join the army. He even got accepted, but after mulling it over, decided that was not the right path for him.
After leaving school, he started working in forestry, using fire to clear land.
One day he started burning on a block of land and the rural fire officer at the time "got a bit anxious".
It turned out he had broken a few rules.
"He said if I joined one of the volunteer brigades, he wouldn’t send me a bill."
By 2004, he was the principal rural fire officer for the Dunedin City Council and later took on the same role for the wider Otago fire district.
He kept that role when Fire and Emergency New Zealand was created in 2017.
In his latest career move, he has taken on the newly created job of national wildfire specialist.
In the role, he will help to develop strategies for managing and preventing large-scale vegetation fires, which, due to climate change, he expected to become more common.
"We’re not having more fires, but we are having bigger fires, and that will continue to happen."
The fire season itself was getting earlier and earlier. At the moment, he thought fire season conditions were about two months ahead of where they were last year.
It was not just fires people had to be aware of. Climate change meant more extreme weather events, such as flooding and high winds.
"It’s going to get worse, there’s not two ways about it."
He talks about fires as if they were an opponent, an adversary.
That was what had kept him in the job for so long — he loved the challenge.
"I like being able to say ‘we beat it’.
"One minute I can be sitting in a helicopter buzzing around, the next minute I can be doing an investigation, the next minute I could be talking to residents, next minute I could be looking after operations. It’s just so variable."
He also loved helping people, which was why he found October’s Lake Ohau fire so upsetting.
About 50 homes were destroyed in the blaze.
"Even if I lose a barn I get pissed off, so to lose all that was not a good day.
"I don’t like seeing people losing what they’ve worked for all their life."
It was for that reason he became so involved with liaising with victims. He could often be seen, conspicuous in his bright orange high-vis gear, heading into the Twizel Event Centre to give updates to those affected.
"I knew there needed to be a lot of work to support the village. I knew what these people were going to be going through and they were going to need all the information they could get, and straight up information, no mucking around."
He did not get a lot of sleep during big fires.
"As soon as that pager goes off you’re buggered, really. It’s mentally challenging.
"You can’t sleep until you’ve had a lot of rain, and sometimes that can take a couple of weeks."
As well as New Zealand’s fires, he had been travelling to Australia to help with their bushfire efforts for two decades.
The work could be incredibly dangerous.
"I’ve been caught in burnovers. Some of my team ended up in Melbourne Hospital, in the burns unit.
"I’ve seen some horrific bloody things."
Because of his experience, he said he knew how far he could push himself before it "came back to bite you in the backside".
After two decades, he was not sure if he would head back over as a firefighter again.
Maybe some helicopter work instead.
"I think it’s a young one’s turn."
Unfortunately, in a sense, the public may still be hearing from him a fair bit over the coming months.
He was expecting a dry summer, good conditions for vegetation fires.
"Come January, February, March, it’s not going to be pretty in a lot of areas in Otago.
"It’s not looking too sharp. We’re getting plans in place already."
