Our First Responders aims to acknowledge and give thanks to the people who fought the fires all over Australia, but particularly in the Upper Murray and North East.

Originally planned as a public exhibition on High Street, Wodonga, Our First Responders has instead been launched initially as a website, which went live on Monday.

Curator Aimee Chan said the project had intended to give people a place to stop and reflect.

"As much a tribute as it was also a way for the community to kind of process some of the mental and emotional trauma around what happened," she said.

When limits on gatherings began, Dr Chan still wanted to continue somehow.

"The feedback I got from the first responders that I interviewed was that they were concerned that they were being forgotten about," she said.

"That what had happened would just sort of disappear from living memory because of what's happening now with COVID-19."

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Our First Responders comprises photographs by The Border Mail's James Wiltshire and six podcasts of interviews with firefighters Ian Avage, a Splitters Creek Rural Fire Brigade member, and Wodonga West's Dave Rossiter and Brent Jackson.

Mr Avage, also a Southern Border group officer, completed about eight deployments between September and February in Queensland as well as closer to home.

He was injured in the Green Valley fires, which also claimed the life of volunteer Samuel McPaul.

"It was probably the worst fire conditions 30 and 40 year veterans have seen, it was just phenomenal," he said.

"The amount of fire that was in the landscape and the size of the fires and fire behaviour, it just rewrote the rule book, or rewrote history."

Listening to the finished podcasts "brought a bit of the rawness back".

"Like everything, we tend to get on with our lives but there's little things that trigger it off again and you start to have a think and reprocess it all," he said.

But the firefighter saw merit in ensuring such experiences were not overlooked.

"Volunteers, the community, everyone involved, there's still a lot of people got a lot of processing and a lot of recovering to do, they've got a long road ahead, a long, long road ahead," he said.

And the present crisis might only add to the impact.

"It's probably just compounding a lot of people's issues that they've had as a hangover from the fire season," he said.

Dr Chan hoped the physical exhibition could take place in the future, but felt the online version had value in being accessible beyond the Border.

"Maybe it's a way for us to have our small voices in the Albury-Wodonga community reach out much, much further than just our little area," she said.

"That message of 'let's not forget'.

"There are people who have lost their houses, their livelihoods, who didn't have any income for several months while they were volunteering, doing firefighting.

"So while it's definitely important that we pull together as a community during this COVID-19 time, let's also make sure that we don't forget that there are people who are having a double impact this year."