This is the town's BlazeAid camp, and you might be surprised it's as busy as ever nearly 10 months on from the January bushfires.

And it may surprise you even more to know some of the volunteers have been here since February, working six days a week restoring fencing to devastated farms in the area.

Each morning, after a hot breakfast, crews head out, put in a hard day of work concreting in fenceposts, hammering in star pickets or straining wires. Bit by bit they're helping a farming region up to its feet.

Each night, as they sit down to a hearty meal, the leaders of these work crews stand up and share their day's experience; how many posts they got in, how tricky the terrain had been, what sense they'd got of the farm family and their wellbeing.

Retirees Dennis and Carol McGrath are the Braidwood camp coordinators. Drawing on their various experiences, including project management and catering, they keep the camp community equipped to work, on task and above all happy.

The couple were travelling in Queensland when the fires hit, and after hearing about BlazeAid on the grey nomad's radio show of choice - Australia All Over with Macca - they headed south to help out. It's hard work and they've been doing it for nine months.

Carol describes herself as the camp's "little mother hen". Among her many daily tasks are helping welcome newcomers and finding them a place to stay and putting on the meals that fuel and reward the day's work. Dennis is a master of spreadsheets and works with other experienced hands in camp to keep the crews equipped and jobs planned so time on site isn't wasted.

Like coordinators at camps throughout NSW, Victoria and South Australia, Dennis and Carol have had to manage the extraordinary disruption of COVID-19.

The pandemic took attention away from the fires and the recovery efforts. It also robbed BlazeAid of its traditional source of volunteers; people chipping in a few days or a week here and there as they moved around the country.

"When Covid came, everyone forgot about the fires and Covid became the big issue and people were stopped in their tracks," Dennis says.

But there was an extraordinary byproduct of the coronavirus lockdown - a partnership between grey nomads and overseas backpackers. For both groups, camps like this became a sanctuary as their travel plans were torn apart.

For the older generation, some who've worked with their hands before retiring, the campsites give them everything they need, especially a sense of community and purpose. They've been happy to stay and work indefinitely.

"We've had a group of people who have been single travellers, a lot of single older men, who've been widowed, divorced or never married, and we've had women in the same situtation," Carol says. "They feel very needed when they're here."

For the backpackers, BlazeAid camps came to their rescue when avenues for travel and work stopped and their routes home were closed off.

And now, even as traditional backpacker opportunities open up, there's a motivation to stay. Relaxed rules now allow volunteer bushfire recovery work to count towards the 88 days' regional employment needed to extend a holiday visa. So now, a young English Matt or Italian Arianna can be found working on a fence side-by-side with a retiree Carol, a Barrie or a Bill.

This backpacker-boomer partnership (which makes for an average camp age right now of about 50) has been critical to the more than 200kms of new fencing the Braidwood teams have completed.

"[The backpackers] are the energy, the strength and the enthusiasm and they've been mentored by the older people with the knowledge," Carol says.

The current camp numbers about 27 volunteers, down from a peak of about 60 after the fires hit. The Braidwood camp is due to close at the end of the year, and so more volunteers are needed to help clear as many as possible of the remaining 55 properties on the waiting list.

Last week, crews were at work in Araluen Valley, a beautiful spot about half an hour from Braidwood that's, superficially at least, green again. While the mountain ridges are topped with skeletons of dead trees, down in the valley gums are covered in bushy coats of new growth and the gullys are green with grasses and wattle shrubs.

For a farming couple who grow veggies in a pretty spot along the Araluen Creek, the arrival of the BlazeAid team to rebuild fences for their horses is a godsend. The work would feel impossibly hard alone, especially after the loss and the trauma of the fires. But these strangers who arrive bring energy and positive change to their property.

Carol says her nine months running the camp have been incredibly rewarding, and nothing makes it feel more worthwhile than than seeing the change in the eyes of the farmers.

"They're a different person from when we started on the fenceline...we had someone who came in to dinner recently and he's just a different man to the one we first met," she said.