Fire Trucks!

Australia does have big ladder trucks based in the cities. That was a big bush fire where a lot of those vehicles would have fallen apart getting to it. In bush fire conditions you can't rely on having water close by so the last vehicle is for when you need to take the water to the fire.

Still extremely dry so could get very bad by January, February. Grass already crackling underfoot.

Hopefully you guys down there will be spared any serious fires this season.

By the way, if you want to see what the Yanks run for wildland fires, go back and see post #5 for some back country fire-fighting beasts.

I was given a tour of the Adelaide Fire Station of the South Australian Metropolitan Fire Service by an assistant chief (payback for driving him around Connecticut on his visit there). A very enjoyable afternoon concluded with a couple of pints in the local bar.
City and rural fire fighting is very different but putting paint and flashing lights on a four wheel drive truck doesn't really make it a "Fire truck".
We had an old army 2 1/2 ton truck (6 X 6 )with a large generator and skid mounted fire pump (500gpm with it's own 6 cylinder car engine engine) painted red with lights but it wasn't really a "Fire truck". It was a red deuce and half with a lot of stuff welded/bolted in the bed.
Likewise using old oil tankers and painting them red for water tankers isn't a good solution either, however cheap they may be. Water being heavier than oil can cause some real CG/stability problems and require extra caution when driving, especially off road.
Commenting only on old trucks in my dept, not the tanker in the picture.

We have some "interesting" scratch-built fire fighting apparatus around here in some of the smaller communities of Northern California.

But one of the largest water tenders of any Fire Department in this area, would be Mountain Gate FD's WT-41, which is a 7,000 gallon water truck on a Sterling chassis. (Post #26).

A private company that contarcts to the USFS or CDF during fire season owns two monster water trucks out of the town of Burney, a community in the eastern Sierras. One of them is an Oshkosh with a ridiculously large water tank and the other one is a scratch-built hybrid water truck built on a military 5 ton 6X6 chassis. It has a Detroit 318 (8V71) shoehorned into it and it's aptly nicknamed "The Beast from Burney".

It's also not uncommon to see contractors out on the line with water pulls like the Cat 6xx series 10,000 gallon (average) articulated water movers.

I have a suspicion that the NSW tanker semitrailer could be based in an area considered safe for smaller fire trucks fighting major bush and grass fires to resupply when their own water tanks run out. Maybe for working in rural areas where there may not be many lakes or waterholes to draw from...

Station Fire Dept, Lambert Field US Naval Reserve Air Base, Saint Louis, MO.

2013 large brush fire bordering our Central Florida neighborhood. Couple of Fire Truck pics, yeah, and it made the local news, you're welcome!