2001
The fire engulfed the forests and farms from the Murray River in the north to the Princes Highway in the south, sweeping across the wedge of mainly mountainous land in eastern Victoria. Fire also broke out in the west of the state, in the Otway Ranges, in the Grampians, along the south-western coast around Warrnambool and Portland, and in South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory. The arithmetic of disaster, impressive as it was, hardly captured the enormity of the experience: 1500 people were left sheltering in temporary camps and homes; 69 sawmills were destroyed and another 14 damaged, most of them in the ash-milling belt where the greatest volume of sawn timber was then being produced; 126 kilometres of bush tramways were lost; 55 bridges, 80 horses and 700 houses were burnt, as well as a hospital and ten guesthouses and hotels; Narbethong, Noojee, Woods Point, Nayook West and Hill End were completely gutted, and Warrandyte and Yarra Glen partially destroyed; 1.4 million hectares were burnt; and 2070 million super feet (nearly 5 million cubic metres) of timber were destroyed in the central highlands alone, representing 20 years of potential sawmilling in that area.
Another catalogue of disaster can be compiled: one of stories and images, visual and sensual experiences, the words people used as they stumbled out of the blackened forests, the hooks upon which they later hung their memories. There was the strange behaviour of matches, which served as both warning signals and telltales, for they burnt white for days before the great fire, so they said, and blue afterward in an atmosphere charged with carbon dioxide. There was the thick pall of smoke that turned day into night, the ash that fell at sea, in Tasmania and in New Zealand. There were the deafening roar and blasting windstorms of a freak forest fire, the tornadoes that ripped trees off at the ground, the explosions of gas, the fire leaping kilometres ahead. There was the vulnerable innocence of those who did not know the scale of what they were fighting until it was too late. There was the machinery at bush sawmills that became a molten mess. There were the dugouts that became tombs for some and saviours for others. People told stories of taking it in turns to hold wet blankets across the dugout doors until the skin on their hands and faces curled back. There was the dead silence of the day after, with not a bird or animal or leaf to stir, and the creeks running black as ink. And there was the mist that seemed for years afterwards to hang low over the forests of ash, a mist made up of bleached, dead spars, the skeletons of the forest. The Red Cross, ‘concerned about the health of the bush fire refugees’ as they emerged from the smoking forests, appealed to the public for ‘gifts of tobacco’.
Black Friday was not a freak event – it was one of those catastrophes endemic to the ash forests – but it had distinctive European dimensions. It was a cultural creation, a culmination of a century of white settlement and environmental practice. There had been warnings, which had been gathering apace in the inter-war period. The fires of 1926 and 1932 had been severe ones, and there had been those of 1898, 1905, 1908, 1914 and 1919 before. In the forests of ash it was the frequency – and not so much the intensity – of fires that was a result of European settlement.
Black Friday was also a European creation in a more immediate sense: ‘These fires were lit by the hand of man.’ These were the words of Judge Leonard Stretton, who conducted the Royal Commission into the causes of the 1939 fires that was set up within two weeks of the disaster. A film made by the Forests Commission soon after Black Friday was titled The Hand of Man, and the camera zoomed in on Stretton’s single sentence indictment, underlined. It was society and not nature that was under trial. Stretton highlighted ‘the indifference with which forest fires, as a menace to the interests of all, have been regarded.’ Fire was someone else’s responsibility. It was, as one witness to the commission put it, ‘nobody’s business to put out’.
And who were the firebugs? Rarely were they malevolent arsonists. Mostly they were farmers and bush workers, and their fire-lighting was sometimes casual and selfish, sometimes systematic and sensible, and increasingly clandestine and rebellious. They were ordinary people going about their lives who had not learnt the potential of fire and were careless with it, or who feared wildfire and wanted to pre-empt it. They were settlers burning to clear land, graziers firing the grass to promote new growth, miners blazing a path to a new reef, jackeroos signalling their whereabouts to their bosses. Burning was a rite – and a right. They were home owners who, when they saw smoke on the horizon, threw a match over the back fence. A newly burnt home paddock was like a safety blanket, a protective measure.
In 1855 William Howitt had described the Victorian gold-rush populace as ‘this fire-scattering race of rude men’. The diggers, he said, ‘burn up the country wherever they go, as they say, to get rid of snakes.’ Almost a century later, sawmiller Jack Ezard used the same language: ‘There is always somebody foolish enough to light fires. I have seen people burn snakes.’ But he reminded the commission that ‘These people have to burn the scrub to live.’ Although Ezard, born and reared in Gippsland, acknowledged that lighting a fire at the wrong time could be a criminal act, he also insisted that ‘I think it is almost as criminal an act not to light a fire at the right time’. When travelling from Powelltown to Yarra Junction it was normal to see ‘half a dozen fires on the sides of mountains’. ‘The whole Australian race’, summed up one witness to the Royal Commission, ‘have a weakness for burning.’
Forests of Ash: An Environmental History,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001