An iconic fundraiser that has evolved from beefcake and brawn to cancer kids and cute dogs is coming to an end. Production manager Tony Scott shares the stories – and photographs – from 35 years of the New Zealand Firefighters Calendar and tells Kim Knight why the latest is likely the last. Videos and visuals by Michael Craig.
Tony “Scottie” Scott reckons he could be selling toothbrushes and people would still buy them.
“Sorry to interrupt, guys ...” Early Friday morning, and he moves through a Warkworth cafe with a grin on his face and an Eftpos machine at his hip.
“Can we tempt you to a lovely dog and firefighters calendar? Everyone’s fully dressed, mate!”
In 1991, the first New Zealand Firefighters Calendar featured flames, well-defined pecs and a bright pink tagline that left nothing to the imagination: “Some like it HOT!”
The 2025 calendar is likely the last for this iconic fundraiser. The end of an era wears a T-shirt, protective pants and poses with a spotted dog called Banner.
“In 2017, when Fire and Emergency New Zealand came into play, I got chatted to by the big bosses,” explains Scottie, the calendar’s production manager.
There was no formal directive or ultimatum, but there was a suggestion the fundraiser could be “more community-minded and family-focused. They asked: ‘Is there any other concept you can come up with?’”
And so Scottie went back to the future. Because it turns out this calendar has never just been about bare naked biceps.
Flick through 500-plus pages of pin-up history and discover body paint and lace bras – but also historic equipment, rescued babies and the occasional kitten. Over the past 35 years, the calendar has evolved from beefcake and brawn to cute dogs and children with cancer. It has never featured an apostrophe in its title but, for a handful of years, there was both a men’s and women’s version. Junior firefighters first made an appearance in the mid-1990s, and even the very earliest editions starred men who wore a helmet AND a shirt.
At the heart of it all? More than $1 million raised for charity.
Scottie was just 20 years old when that first calendar was shot. He took over as production manager in 2013 and is proud of every iteration.
“We’ve done a lot of really cool stuff over the years ... I have the view that, so long as it’s not rude ... it’s for a good cause, it’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek, the guys enjoy doing it and everyone usually has a laugh when they buy it.”
More recently, the sponsorship that pays for photography, printing and other costs has dried up. There are fewer firefighters available to help with the street sales, and an independent “Kiwi Firefighters Calendar” has been created to fill the sixpack-shaped hole left in the market when the original changed its content strategy.
“I’ve been asked so many times, why are we stopping?”
Ultimately, he says, the project must support its charity and pay its suppliers, and he couldn’t risk letting anyone down.
“The biggest thing I’m going to miss is just the places I go to every year to sell the calendar.
“I’m in a cafe and mum wants their son to join the fire service, so you spend 10 minutes talking to them about that, or someone asks about a smoke alarm and you point them to Fire Risk Management. It’s such a conversation starter ... it’s almost irrelevant what we put in the calendar!”
If someone offered him the $15,000-$20,000 he would need to keep it going?
“Definitely, if someone wants to approach me, I’m always willing to talk – though I think my partner might have something to say about that!”
The Firefighters Calendar has always been a time-consuming affair. It takes weeks of planning, and months of selling, and absolutely nobody can predict what might happen on photo shoot day.
“This is a Covid story ...”
Each year, the calendar spotlights firefighters from different parts of the country. The production crew had already flown ahead to Nelson and Scottie was in a hired van driving all the gear down. The team had met for dinner when their phones lit up.
“And it’s a lockdown. And the next day is the shoot. The main station phones up and says, ‘There’s a minimum of 10 people, and there is going to be more than that with the people who need to be at the station’. The boss goes, ‘Look, I’m really sorry, you can’t be here ...’”
A volunteer station came to the rescue. The calendar crew held its collective breath - and hoped the siren didn’t go off.
“We always make things work,” says Scottie. “And I think that’s a tribute to what we do as a job. We have limited tools and things to do a job, and we get the job done.”
In the beginning, there was (mostly) beefcake.
The first Mr January was a 30-year-old Mark Van Dorsten, posing shirtless on the Ponsonby Fire Station watchtower for a calendar page that would list his hobbies as running, scuba diving and cycling.
“That was a long time ago,” says Van Dorsten when we track him down to his current job as the national sales manager with PSL Fire and Safety. “It was just anyone silly enough to say ‘I’ll do it’!”
Van Dorsten had some modelling experience (back to the camera only, for a beer advertisement) and, while he had an inkling this would be one of “those” calendars, says: “I had boundaries!”
Did he ever feel objectified?
“I can assure you, I’m not now,” he laughs. “It was a little bit of a prestige thing, in a way. You’re part of this, part of the calendar and its history.”
It was 2007 when Bevin James stripped down to his braces and posed for the calendar. Almost two decades later, he doesn’t hear his phone ring.
“Sorry, I was just mowing the lawns ... ”
Shirt on or shirt off?
“I don’t want to scare the neighbours ...!”
James is a former firefighter and the man behind the new, independently produced Kiwi Firefighters Calendar. Media attention around the content shift in the original convinced James there might still be an appetite for the all-beefcake version.
He says appearing in the original had always been “a bit of a badge of honour – something cool to aspire to”.
When the 2007 calendar came out, “My first reaction was relief that I didn’t look totally stupid. The next was, ‘Dammit, I should have done more sit-ups’. You know, you’d cop a bit of grief from workmates but, at the same time, you were kind of proud of it because you’d made the grade.”
James reels off the countries where a sans-shirt firefighter is still in production.
“Australia, the United States, China, France ... I thought it was a shame we didn’t really do that any more ... surely, as a nation, we’re mature enough to handle a topless calendar, you know? You’ll see a lot worse on prime-time TV.
“We’re not models by any stretch of the imagination, but if we can encourage people to, in the main, live a healthy lifestyle and be proud of yourself ... There are so many positives that can come out of it – the positive effect that being physically active has on your mental health.”
The Kiwi Firefighters Calendar (the second edition is currently on sale) supports men’s mental health and Movember.
Back in 1991, the first New Zealand Firefighters Calendar supported both the Burns Unit and the home team for the World Firefighter Games. In the following decades, it has contributed more than $1 million to the Child Cancer Foundation. (And, if Tony Scott looks familiar, perhaps it’s because he’s also the instigator of the Firefighter Sky Tower Challenge, in which local and international firefighters race 1103 steps, lugging 25kg of equipment and raising more than $1m annually for Leukaemia & Blood Cancer New Zealand.)
“Times have changed since we first started [the calendar],” says Scottie. “We used to have second jobs to be able to live, really. We didn’t have overtime or anything like we have now. So we’d go out in groups and do fundraising things. Chip bricks, clean sections. Then someone came up with this great idea to make a calendar ...”
He grew up in Auckland’s Mt Eden. He remembers being in kindergarten and his dad taking him to see the fire engines at the Balmoral station.
“As a little kid, you have this romantic notion of the job. When I got a bit older, it became more appealing. I actually started to go down a pretty bad road in my early teens ...”
One of those uncles who isn’t really an uncle was a firefighter. He told Scottie if he didn’t do well at school, if he didn’t stay out of trouble, he’d never get into a brigade.
“There were times when I could have made a bad decision and I’d say to my friends, ‘Mate, I can’t do this, there’s something I want to do with my life’. And I joined as a volunteer at 17-and-a-half and became a permanent at 21, and I only have 10 years left.”
Scottie is a crew chief with Auckland Airport Rescue and chief fire officer of the Kaikohe rural brigade. He commutes from the Far North every week in a truck that is, more often than not, loaded with rescue puppies bound for new homes.
“It’s a job that’s given me a huge amount of fulfilment,” he says of the organisation he joined as an almost wayward teen. “I love to get involved in all of the other things it brings. I love to be able to help people and, especially, it’s important to help people when they’re at their worst.
“It just makes you feel really proud when you’re out there selling the calendar or doing other fundraising, and people tell you how much they respect the firefighters. You put this uniform on, and you feel like a superhero because of what people think of it ... and you have to keep that in mind when you’re out in public.”
Warkworth is well into its first coffee of the day when Scottie hits its streets with an armful of 2025 calendars and the banter of a natural-born salesperson.
“Cheaper than flowers for the ladies ... helping us, and helping Child Cancer ... no obligation whatsoever ... mate, I think the dogs are more popular than us ... $20, which I believe is $1.60 a month, that wouldn’t even be a quarter of a coffee now, would it?”
Ten minutes in, and he’s already sold a dozen calendars; at the time of writing, there were just 120 copies from the final print run left. In a world where we keep time on computers and phones, how has this calendar endured?
John: “It’s pretty simple – the fire boys do such an awesome job. They’re brilliant, they’re underfunded, and I would have given them $20 without the calendar.”
Yola: “Every single day that siren goes off – so it’s in support of them.”
Amanda: “Dad had a collapse with cancer and a broken back last year, and the Fireys were the first responders. They came before the ambulance got there and they just calmed everything down and made us feel safe.”
Anonymous: “How come everyone’s got their clothes on?”
Scottie is routinely asked if he was ever in the calendar. “I could say, yeah, that’s me in the silver jacket at the back there ...”
April 1993 and Ray Smith (a Capricorn who lists his hobbies as rugby, bodybuilding and guitar) tends to a swooning woman in a terry cloth robe. A fully clothed Scottie has his back to the camera. He’s hosing down some impressive flames but is not, it has to be said, the viewer’s main focus. He’s there again in 2005. This time, it’s his son Harry who steals the limelight in a miniature uniform and a grin to rival his dad’s.
“Now, he’s an apprentice electrician. He joined the rural unit and did about three years with us ... all these kids are grown-ups now.”
Scottie thinks perhaps half of his current crew weren’t even born when he started on the job.
“The funny thing as a firefighter is that all you want to do is get in there and do it. As an officer, you’re thinking, ‘Am I going to let my guys get in there and do it?’ I call it the seesaw effect. I’m at the other end of my seesaw now.
“It’s been a great ride. This New York chief told me once, ‘Scottie, if you love what you do, you never work another day in your life’. And it’s absolutely true, you know.”
Track the changing face of that job via the pages of its fundraising calendar.
“One of the big things we did, well into it, was introduce a women’s firefighters’ calendar,” says Scottie.
“Typically, when the guys turn up for a shoot, they go to the gym, they work out, and they come in with this stony face. The women were just completely different. They’d stay all day, exchange numbers, become the best of friends. They got a lot of self-pride out of it.
“When the women’s calendar stopped, a couple of them actually wrote letters to say how, back in the day, they were bullied at school, that they didn’t feel they were anything very much, and that this had given them so much empowerment.”
There were, he admits, some reservations going into the first shoot involving children who were being supported by the Child Cancer Foundation.
“My photographer at the time was like, ‘I don’t think this is going to work’ . ... they were all in tears by the end of the day.”
Some of the junior models arrived carrying thousands of “beads of courage”, representing every cancer treatment, experience and milestone.
“It’s pretty humbling. For me, being a parent, just thinking ... you’d never wish that on any kid, and for us to be able to give them an hour and a half of complete and total joy, dressing up, squirting the hose and getting their photos taken.”
He recalls a girl, aged 9: “She just had this presence about her, this aura. And she had this big, clear bead and I said to her mum, ‘What’s that one?’. And she said, ‘That’s her re-suss bead.’ She had been gone for 13 minutes, and they worked on her.
“That photo just jumps at you, man. This kid’s going to be something one day. Like, she’ll probably be our Prime Minister.”
Thirty-five years of calendar history is spread the length of a long table in the mess room at Auckland’s historic Pitt St fire station. The back wall is festooned with cloth badges swapped with brigades from around the world and there is a box of doughnuts on the kitchen counter.
“Output, input,” says Scottie. “The guys will spoil themselves occasionally.”
But: “I see how hard it is, as you get older, to keep in that kind of shape. It’s so tempting, when you stop for gas to get a pie and a Coke or a coffee ... but they work real hard, and fitness has become such a big part of what we do.”
Scottie remembers an early photo shoot out the front of this station. His partner, Heather, held a large silver reflector, illuminating a shirtless firefighter.
“Every five seconds, there was a car horn. Everyone was waving. And this woman just walks up to Heather and says, ‘How did you get THAT job?’”
The hardest part of producing the New Zealand Firefighters Calendar?
“Having to tell a guy who didn’t make the cut. You know, ‘You’re fine, you’re a good-looking bloke, mate, but there’s only 12 photographs ... ”
Story / Kim Knight. Video & Visuals / Michael Craig. Interactive Design / Chris Knox. Digital Designer / Laura Hutchins.
With thanks to Tony “Scottie” Scott. Calendars can be purchased at www.nzfirecal.co.nz