RSCH.016.001.1136 - 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission

RSCH.016.001.1143
Bushfires 3
limited. Tools included the rake, hoe, axe, water bag and a box of matches. Roads were
poor and vehicles were scarce. Fuelbreaks doubled as means of access and as points from
which crews could backfire. Staff were few, and settlers were unorganised. Graziers
considered that it was better to set forests alight as frequently as they would burn, rather
than protect them for many years so that leaf litter could accumulate. Against this
background of ‘ordinary citizens’ conducting their own fuel reduction burns, foresters
proposed a systematic alternative, and also burned off extensively. However, the leading
cause of fire in reserved forests was the Forestry Commission’s own fire practices, and its
often loosely conducted burning off. Serious bushfires broke out in 1929, and it soon
became obvious that managing the reserved forest areas was not enough, and that forestry
also had to establish a fire protectorate over adjoining lands. 8
Pyne argues that NSW demonstrated a pragmatic evolution of order, both of law and
practice, amid its composite of environments and social classes. He continued that this
process might have continued indefinitely had not crisis, in the form of the great holocaust
of 1939, intervened. NSW had lacked a coherent fire strategy or rigorous practices because,
in part, it had lacked a coherent fire problem. However, the 1939 fires and the continuing
crisis of World War Two dramatically changed that perception.
Black Friday
An intense weather system that pushed hot dry desert air across eastern Australia ultimately
led to Black Friday, January 13, 1939. Grasslands, which were dry and dusty due to
drought, escaped, but forests had high fuel loads that were ready to burn. There were
multiple sources of ignition:
Lightning kindled some fires, but most emanated from a register of casual incendiarists
that reads like a roster of rural Australia: settlers, graziers, prospectors, splitters, mine
workers, arsonists, loggers and mill bushmen, hunters looking to drive game, fishermen
hoping to open up the scrub around streams, foresters unable to contain controlled burns,
bush residents seeking to ward off wildfire by protective fire, travellers and transients of
all kinds. Honey gatherers lit smoking fires. Campers burned to facilitate travel through
thick scrub. Locomotives threw out sparks along their tracks. A jackeroo tossed lighted
matches alongside a track so that his boss would know where he was. Residents hoping
to be hired to fight fires set fires. Possibly a third of the documented fires had no known
cause. A self styled bushman shrugged off the multiple sources by explaining to a royal
commission that “the whole of the Australian race have a weakness for burning.” 9
Black Friday fires caused 71 deaths. Royal Commissioner Stretton, investigating and
writing about the fires stated:
Generally, the numerous fires which, during December, in many parts of Victoria, had
been burning separately….reached the climax of their intensity and joined forces in a
devastating confluence of flame on Friday, the 13 of January. On that day it appeared
that the whole State was alight. At midday, in many places, it was dark as night…the full
8
9
Pyne,S. Burning Bush. A Fire History of Australia. Allen and Unwin, 1991, at 278.
Pyne,S. Burning Bush. A Fire History of Australia. Allen and Unwin, 1991, at 310.