‘Fires everywhere’: the Australian firefighters on the frontline of the new global Flame Age

‘The whole country was stretched thin,’ says RFS volunteer Ash Morrow, who has returned from a firefighting deployment in Canada straight into record temperatures and an incoming El Niño. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

Ash Morrow spied flames and smoke higher and wider than the eye could see. It was June 2023. The 25-year-old Australian with the volunteer Rural Fire Service (RFS) in New South Wales was putting out wildfires in the northern Canadian province of Alberta, not too far from the Arctic Circle.

“It was a baptism of fire,” he says. “Literally.”