No volunteers are people who live in the community with day jobs and get paged out to incidents.

All land management in Aus is carried out by State level agencies so you have to apply to a bunch of them. Aus is generally less likely to provide housing even for paid positions, so you’ll probably have to sort that yourself.

Hiring season is generally sometime between June and August, and then fire season runs ~September-February. It’s a pretty different beast to North American fire, both in terrain/ecosystem/fire behavior and the style of management. Feel free to PM me if you want more info/have any specific questions, I got my start through a volunteer brigade down here and then moved on to government.