The Rural Fire Service's Owen Tydd is this year's pick for the Australian Fire Service Medal.
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But the Liverpool Range group four captain Mr Tydd says it's not about him - "it's for all of us".
"I'm accepting this honour for group four. I couldn't do it without [them]. It is a team effort," he said.
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Mr Tydd didn't expect to make it onto the Australia Day Honours List but there's no doubt he has experience.
The Kelvin-born man has been fighting fires since he was an 11-year-old farm boy, and is now just three months shy of his 71st birthday. His father was deputy captain when he joined.
Mr Tydd recently moved to Gunnedah but it was in Kelvin at the Grantway school that he first got a taste of the then-named Bushfire Brigade.
"I happened to be there, they needed a bloke on the back of a truck. I got on the truck, they gave me a hose, showed me what to do and that was it. It wasn't a conventional fire truck. It was an old farm truck," he said.
"In the old days, the males joined the bush brigade, the women joined the Country Women's Association .... the blokes went out and got dirty and put out the fire and the women put on the tucker."
When you're on a fire ground, particularly if you're in command of people, you run on a funny mixture of ego and adrenaline ... the biggest trick with us is controlling that.
- Owen Tydd, Rural Fire Service
Mr Tydd, known as "Tyddles" and "Tyddie", has spent most of his time in the Kelvin brigade but has also been part of the Breeza, Garrawilla and Bundella brigades.
"The brigades were much smaller in those days. We weren't near as well-equipped as we are now. A lot of us fought fires with wet bags and pretty makeshift equipment," he said.
Mr Tydd was first nominated as a group captain in 1996 and took charge of his major fire in 1997 when the Pilliga Forest was ablaze.
"I had a section in the Gunnedah shire - I had 22 kilometres to look after - [and] I didn't know what I was doing," he said.
"We had to fly by the seat of our pants, literally, but we got through it and won the battle, and I suppose you'd say I developed my style, which is pretty laidback.
"When you're on a fire ground, particularly if you're in command of people, you run on a funny mixture of ego and adrenaline ... the biggest trick with us is controlling that."
Mr Tydd said when he started out there was no formal training but about 35 years ago, that started to change.
"The first time someone said, 'You'll have to do some training", I almost had a heart attack," he said.
It was a house fire in the early 1990s in his deputy captain days that changed Mr Tydd's perspective.
The Kelvin brigade was dispatched to a home in Kelvin where they found a hose running on the front lawn and no one in sight.
Mr Tydd said his first thought was that the pregnant woman had been trying to fight the fire with the hose, then gone back into the house to get her three-year-old son and hadn't made it back outside.
"Mind's eye, she was in that house. No way she wasn't," he said.
"You just have to crunch your emotions and keep going, but I sort of didn't ... the most wonderful sight I've ever seen in my life was her coming back across the paddock with her three-year-old son ... she wasn't in the house at all, but for all intents and purposes, for 20 minutes, I thought she was.
"It really affected me and I thought, 'I've got to do something about this'."
Not long after, he nominated himself for a course but said for 10 years "I couldn't tell that story without really choking up".
Mr Tydd wound up training firefighters for 20-odd years and said he was known for throwing more inexperienced firefighters in the deep end.
It is his belief that people learn by doing. He lives out this philosophy by handing the reins to firefighters he thinks have potential - whether they like it or not - and standing back to see how they handle it.
"I mentor, rather than boss," he said.
The approach has resulted in a growth in leadership in brigades and tapped into unrealised potential.
Mr Tydd said "a long time ago", a woman he knew said "the true mark of a leader is if you can walk away and not be missed".
"It is the opposite to what most people think it is and I sort of took that heart," he said.
Mr Tydd has two years remaining as a "groupie", then says he will step back and focus on mentoring.
"The young ones coming up, we need them," he said.
"It's an incredible feeling to beat a fire and get all your troops through it safe and happy with the way things went ... but I'm at the age now where I'm quite willing to stand back and let someone else do the hard work and I'll stand back and look after them."
