Our People
16 February, 2026
Holding Halls Gap together after the fires
NICKI Van Veen was overseas when Northern Grampians Shire’s Australia Day Awards named her a Local Hero. In a small community, absence at a ceremony matters — not for applause, but for the chance to look people in the eye and say thank you. When we meet weeks later at Halls Gap’s Adventure Cafe, Nicki does something more revealing anyway. She moves the spotlight off herself before it can settle.
She starts with Blanche Leithhead, her friend and fellow joint winner.
“I call Blanche my co-conspirator,” Nicki says, “Any time something needs to be done in the community, we’re working on it together.”
Council’s citation credits both women for “exceptional community spirit” during the 2024–25 Grampians bushfires, coordinating support, communication and wellbeing through the Halls Gap Recovery Kitchen Cabinet.
Blanche became a trusted voice — someone people rang for clarity. Nicki chaired weekly recovery meetings for six months while running her business and volunteering with the CFA, helping deliver meals, wellbeing activities, workshops and children’s programs, and securing nearly $250,000 in funding for the Halls Gap CFA.
On paper, those are dot points. In Halls Gap, they were the difference between drifting after disaster and finding footing again.
Because the fire is not the whole story.
The fire is the rupture. Recovery is the work.
In Halls Gap, summer carries two meanings. One fills the town. The other sits quietly in the background, shaping routines and decisions. When the danger passes, what remains is a slower, less visible challenge: restoring confidence, rebuilding connection, and preventing isolation from becoming its own kind of damage.
Nicki did not arrive in Halls Gap with a plan to lead. The American arrived with skills — and a habit of using them when something needed doing.
She grew up in Denver, studied international relations, and once imagined a career in demanding humanitarian work overseas. Australia was not part of the plan.
She met Pat Drum — a mechanical engineer from the Wimmera — on a dance floor in Denver on the day she finished her master’s degree. “Turns out,” she says, “I moved overseas for love.”
In 2009, Nicki arrived in Melbourne while the effects of the global financial crisis were still reverberating. One of her first lessons was humbling: she applied for a café job making sandwiches and was told they’d hired someone with more experience.
“I remember thinking, I have a master’s degree and I can’t get a job making sandwiches,” she says, “This is going to be rough.”
She worked her way into the Victorian public service through a short temp contract that grew into an eight-year career. Later came burnout, a deliberate pause, and a shift into consulting — helping people doing meaningful work strengthen the impact they were already trying to make.
Nicki and Pat moved to Halls Gap in mid-2021, during lockdown. The three-kilometre rule, she notes, “gives you a pretty good radius in Halls Gap.” Anyone you met was local. Connection happened quickly because there were few alternatives.
“Pretty quickly,” she says, “we discovered this is actually a very welcoming community.”
Years before the fires, a small group of locals kept meeting after emergency preparedness workshops. The idea was simple: resilience is not built during disaster — it is built beforehand. So they did the unglamorous work. Shared meals. Regular gatherings. Trust built quietly, without urgency.
When the fires came at the end of 2024, that groundwork mattered.
As the immediate danger passed, the harder phase began. Nicki, already volunteering with the CFA and working in community safety, shifted her focus to recovery.
One line from a friend in those early days stuck with her: “We cannot wait around. Calvary is not coming. We have to do it for ourselves.”
The first response was food. Within about 36 hours, they organised a New Year’s Eve dinner. One hundred and thirty people came — not to celebrate, but to sit together.
“A lot of that early work was around wellbeing,” Nicki says, “Connection. Reducing isolation. Reducing anxiety.”
Week by week, they met. Listened. Responded. Meals. Workshops. Children’s programs. Spaces where people could feel grounded again. Nicki chaired weekly recovery meetings for six months, while continuing her business and CFA volunteering.
“It takes a lot of work on the ground,” she says. Their goals were clear: increase connection, reduce isolation, improve communication, strengthen collaboration.
Then she uses the word that explains her approach.
“Just trying to be caretakers for our community,” she says.
Caretakers don’t perform leadership. They practice it.
Nicki doesn’t deny pride. “I do feel proud. It certainly wasn’t just me, but I do know I was a catalyst for bringing that together.”
She also speaks about response. “Any time we put the call out, this community responds,” she says. “It’s powerful.”
Late in our conversation, she tells a small story. While overseas, Nicki lost her wedding ring. When she returned home there were flowers, a jewellery box, and a card — signed by 15 women — who had organised a replacement so she wouldn’t come back empty-handed.
She still sounds stunned.
“What kind of people do that?” she asks.
The award offers one answer.
Nicki Van Veen arrived in Halls Gap for love. She stayed because she found belonging. And when the fire front passed and the harder work began — the work of recovery, of steadiness, of resilience — she helped the town find its feet again.
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