On Saturday 7 February 2009, 173 people lost their lives and more than 2000 houses were destroyed in bushfires (wildfires) in the Australian State of Victoria. The scale of life and property loss raised fundamental questions about community bushfire safety in Australia, in particular the appropriateness of the ‘Prepare, stay and defend or leave early’ policy. This paper presents findings from research undertaken as part of the Australian Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre’s (CRC) ‘2009 Victorian Bushfires Research Taskforce’. The research examined factors influencing patterns of life and property loss and survival across the fires through mail surveys (n=1314) of fire affected households. Just over half of the respondents (53%) stayed to defend their homes and properties, whereas the remainder left before or when the fires arrived (43%) or sheltered in a house, structure, vehicle, or outside (4%). Results reveal a survival rate of 77% for houses that were defended by one or more household members, compared to 44% for unattended houses. The paper identifies inadequate planning and preparedness and the tendency for people to wait until they are directly threatened before taking action as major factors leading to late evacuation, failed defence and passive shelter.

Head-mounted video recording is described as a potentially powerful method for studying decision making in natural settings. Most alternative data-collection procedures are intrusive and disruptive of the decision-making processes involved while conventional video-recording procedures are either impractical or impossible. As a severe test of the robustness of the methodology we studied the decision making of 6 experienced orienteers who carried a head-mounted light-weight video camera as they navigated, running as fast as possible, around a set of control points in a forest. Use of the Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test indicated that compared with free recall, video-assisted recall evoked (a) significantly greater experiential immersion in the recall, (b) significantly more specific recollections of navigation-related thoughts and feelings, (c) significantly more realizations of map and terrain features and aspects of running speed which were not noticed at the time of actual competition, and (d) significantly greater insight into specific navigational errors and the intrusion of distracting thoughts into the decision-making process. Potential applications of the technique in (a) the environments of emergency services, (b) therapeutic contexts, (c) education and training, and (d) sports psychology are discussed.

This review discusses issues in conceptualizing and measuring counselors' theoretical orientations to practice. Two dimensions of counselor theoretical orientation seem to emerge in several studies: an Analytical-Experiential dimension and an Objective-Subjective dimension. Fifteen instruments previously proposed as measures of counselors' and therapists' theoretical orientations are evaluated. Psychometric properties and the utility of each instrument are critically examined. Few instruments show evidence of reliability and even fewer have been shown to have evidence of validity.

In most OECD countries, emergency response to accidents and natural disasters is very dependent on a trained workforce of emergency services volunteers: fire, rescue, medical, care and relief. With its large area, sparsely settled population, and frequent periods of low rainfall, Australia is particularly vulnerable to the threat posed by wildfires. There are an estimated 220,000 rural fire volunteers (in a population of 20 million) in eight state and territory volunteer rural fire services. These fire services have experienced significant decreases in volunteer numbers over the past decade, a trend which is true also of North American volunteer fire services. An investigation suggests that the decrease is driven by two related sets of factors: economic and demographic. Globalisation and deregulation of the economy, and technological innovation, have resulted in structural changes in the nature of work: privatisation, casualisation, self-employment, and demands for increased productivity. These factors make it more difficult for members of communities to volunteer, regardless of their motivation to do so. Further, like many other OECD countries, Australia's birth rate has fallen over the last three decades, resulting in a decline in the proportion of the population aged between 25 and 45 years-a trend that is unlikely to be reversed in the foreseeable future. These economic and demographic changes make it difficult for Australian volunteer rural fire agencies to meet their community protection responsibilities. Responding to these challenges may require radical changes in the way that these fire services are organised and supported. r