The smile that still haunts Paul Featherstone, hero paramedic Paul Featherstone: Ambulance officers see the worst the world offers, and also the best. Photo: Anthony Johnson Bali. Granville. Thredbo. Beaconsfield. These disasters made paramedic Paul Featherstone the hero he is today. But it is the smile on the child he cut out of a nasty car accident in the Royal National Park years ago that often pops into his mind, Mr Featherstone, now retired after 41 years with NSW Ambulance, said on Thursday. There were five kids in the car. And the adult had taken them for a drive because the kids were getting restless and he was babysitting, and he lost it. While the car was reduced to a mess of metal and glass, nobody was killed, but there were serious injuries. After prying the car apart, Mr Featherstone remembers finding a child's car seat embedded in the front seat. So I got out my trusty Leatherman [to cut the straps], and all of sudden this beautiful little kid, all of 18 months old, popped out, and he turned around to give me a big grin. With a belief in "giving everything fate and destiny serves up 100 per cent," Mr Featherstone earned a reputation as the first paramedic to be sent to the worst disasters in Australia and overseas from Granville to Bali. He has been awarded the Distinguished Service Medal and the Australian Bravery Medal, and has twice been awarded the ambulance service's highest award for bravery. While ambulance officers "see the worst 3 per cent the world has got to offer," they also saw the best, Mr Featherstone said. He recalled examples of generosity, community spirit and the bravery of men such as Stuart Diver, who was trapped for 65 hours under concrete slabs during the Thredbo landslide. To celebrate his career, Mr Featherstone's colleagues and patients, including Mr Diver, came together last Saturday to salute him. "That crucial 11 hours at the end that we spent together was probably the most important 11 hours of my life," Mr Diver told the 175 guests. Mr Featherstone, now 64, responded by talking about how he got into Mr Diver's soul, who was cold and hungry: "With Stuart, I never let myself get warm, and I never ate because I wanted to relate to what he was going through." Mr Featherstone, a toolmaker, entered the ambulance service in 1972 when the only entrance requirements were a driver's licence and a first aid kit. He started work as an ambulance officer in the days before seatbelts and drunk driving laws, when Australia's rate of head injuries were the highest in the western world. Realising more people could be saved with better clinical care, Mr Featherstone co-pioneered - and graduated from - the first paramedic course, in 1976. He later developed the Special Casualty Access Team (SCAT) in 1986, which often uses helicopters to rescue people from rough, remote and previously inaccessible country and seas. The media and the public may remember accidents like Bali and the Granville, but Mr Featherstone said the life of a paramedic revolved around the thousands of little accidents they see every day. Only this week, a woman near his home in Sydney's south was hit by a car. To that person and her family, it was bigger than Thredbo because it happened to them. As for retirement, he plans to do some consulting in his field, but admits he wonders how he'll adapt. One of my sayings is that if you are standing still, you are going backwards. Therefore it's going to be a hard task to settle down and not be involved.