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= Black Friday bushfires =
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Introduction
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The Black Friday bushfires of 13 January 1939, in Victoria, Australia,
were part of the devastating 1938-1939 bushfire season in Australia,
which saw bushfires burning for the whole summer, and ash falling as
far away as New Zealand. It was calculated that three-quarters of the
State of Victoria was directly or indirectly affected by the disaster,
while other Australian states and the Australian Capital Territory
were also badly hit by fires and extreme heat. This was the
third-deadliest bushfire event in Australian history, only behind the
1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires and the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires.
Fires burned almost 2000000 ha of land in Victoria, where 71 people
were killed, and several towns were entirely obliterated. Over 1,300
homes and 69 sawmills were burned, and 3,700 buildings were destroyed
or damaged. In response, the Victorian state government convened a
Royal Commission that resulted in major changes in forest management.
The Royal Commission noted that "it appeared the whole State was
alight on Friday, 13 January 1939".
New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory also faced severe
fires during the 1939 season. Destructive fires burned from the NSW
South Coast, across the ranges and inland to , while Sydney was ringed
by fires which entered the outer suburbs, and fires raged towards the
new capital at Canberra. South Australia was also struck by the
Adelaide Hills bushfires.
Conditions
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Eastern Australia is one of the most fire-prone regions of the world,
with predominant eucalypt forests that have evolved to thrive on the
phenomenon of bushfire. However, the 1938-9 bushfire season was
exacerbated by a period of extreme heat, following several years of
drought. Extreme heatwaves were accompanied by strong northerly winds,
after a very dry six months. In the days preceding the fires, the
Victorian state capital, Melbourne, experienced some of its hottest
temperatures on record at the time: 43.8 °C on 8 January and 44.7 °C
on 10 January. On 13 January, the day of the fires, temperatures
reached 45.6 °C, which stood as the hottest day officially recorded in
Melbourne for the next 70 years. (Unofficial records show temperatures
of around 47 °C were reported on the Black Thursday fires of 6
February 1851).
The subsequent Victorian Royal Commission investigation of the fires
recorded that Victoria had not seen such dry conditions for more than
two decades, and its rich plains lay "bare and baking; and the forest,
from the foothills to the alpine heights, were tinder". The people who
made their lives in the bush were worried by the dry conditions, but
"had not lived long enough" to imagine what was to come: " the most
disastrous forest calamity the State of Victoria has known." Fires had
been burning separately across Victoria through December, but reached
a new intensity and "joined forces in a terrible confluence of
flame...".on Friday, 13 January.
Effects in Victoria
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The most damage was felt in the mountain and alpine areas in the
northeast and around the southwest coast. The Acheron, Tanjil and
Thomson Valleys and the Grampians, were also hit. Five townships -
Hill End, Narbethong, Nayook West, Noojee (apart from the Hotel),
Woods Point - were completely destroyed and not all were rebuilt
afterwards. The towns of Omeo, Pomonal, Warrandyte (though this is now
a suburb of Melbourne, it was not in 1939) and Yarra Glen were also
badly damaged.
The Stretton Royal Commission wrote:
An area of almost 2 e6ha burned, 71 people killed, and whole townships
wiped out, along with many sawmills and thousands of sheep, cattle and
horses. According to Forest Management Victoria, during the bushfires
of 13 January 1939:
Major fires
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There were five major fire areas. Smaller fires included; East
Gippsland, Mount Macedon, Mallee and the Mornington Peninsula. The
major fires, listed roughly in order of size, included;
# Victorian Alps/Yarra Ranges
# Portland
# Otway Ranges
# Grampians
# Strzelecki Ranges
Towns damaged or destroyed
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; Central
*Dromana
*Healesville
*Kinglake
*Marysville
*Narbethong - destroyed
*Warburton
*Warrandyte
*Yarra Glen
;East
*Hill End - destroyed
*Nayook West - destroyed
*Matlock - 15 died at a sawmill
*Noojee - destroyed
*Omeo
*Woods Point - destroyed
;West
*Pomonal
*Portland
Stretton Royal Commission and long-term consequences
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The subsequent Royal Commission, under Judge Leonard Edward Bishop
Stretton (known as the Stretton Inquiry), attributed blame for the
fires to careless burning, campfires, graziers, sawmillers and land
clearing.
Prior to 13 January 1939, many fires were already burning. Some of the
fires started as early as December 1938, but most of them started in
the first week of January 1939. Some of these fires could not be
extinguished. Others were left unattended or, as Judge Stretton wrote,
the fires were allowed to burn "under control", as it was falsely and
dangerously called. Stretton declared that most of the fires were lit
by the "hand of man".
Stretton's Royal Commission has been described as one of the most
significant inquiries in the history of Victorian public
administration.
As a consequence of Judge Stretton's scathing report, the Forests
Commission Victoria gained additional funding and took responsibility
for fire protection on all public land including State forests,
unoccupied Crown Lands and National Parks, plus a buffer extending one
mile beyond their boundaries on to private land. Its responsibilities
grew in one leap from 2.4 to. Stretton's recommendations officially
sanctioned and encouraged the common bush practice of controlled
burning to minimise future risks.
Its recommendations led to sweeping changes, including stringent
regulation of burning and fire safety measures for sawmills, grazing
licensees and the general public, the compulsory construction of
dugouts at forest sawmills, increasing the forest roads network and
firebreaks, construction of forest dams, fire towers and RAAF aerial
patrols linked by the Commissions radio network VL3AA to ground
observers. The Commission's communication systems were regarded at the
time as being more technically advanced than those of the police and
the military. These pioneering efforts were directed by Geoff Weste.
Victoria's forests were devastated to an extent that was unprecedented
within living memory, and the impact of the 1939 bushfires dominated
management thought and action for much of the next ten years. Salvage
of fire-killed timber became an urgent and dominant task that was
still consuming the resources and efforts of the Forests Commission a
decade and a half later.
It was estimated that over 6 million cubic meters of timber needed to
be salvaged. This massive task was made more difficult by labour
shortages caused by the Second World War. In fact, there was so much
material that some of the logs were harvested and stockpiled in huge
dumps in creek beds and covered with soil and treeferns to stop them
from cracking, only to be recovered many years later.
Further major fires later in the 1943-44 Victorian bushfire season and
another Royal Commission by Judge Stretton were key factors in the
founding of the Country Fire Authority (CFA) for fire suppression on
rural land. Prior to the creation of the CFA the Forests Commission
had, to some extent, been supporting the individual volunteer brigades
that had formed across rural Victoria in the preceding decades.
The environmental effects of the fires continued for many years and
some of the burnt dead trees still remain today. Large areas of animal
habitat were destroyed. In affected areas, the soil took decades to
recover from the damage of the fires. In some areas, water supplies
were contaminated for some years afterwards due to ash and debris
washing into catchment areas.
Fires in other states
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Other states also suffered severely in the extreme heat and fires. In
New South Wales, suffered 37 consecutive days above 38 C and hit a
record 49.7 C on 10 January. In mid-January, Sydney was ringed to the
north, south and west by bushfires - from and Port Hacking to the
Blue Mountains.
; New South Wales
Following the weekend of Black Friday, 'The Argus' reported that on 15
January, fierce winds had also spread fire to almost every important
area of New South Wales, burning in major fronts on Sydney's suburban
fringes and hitting the south coast and inland: "hundreds of houses
and thousands of head of stock and poultry were destroyed and
thousands of acres of grazing land".
On 16 January, 'The Sydney Morning Herald' reported that disastrous
fires were burning in Victoria, New South Wales and the Australian
Capital Territory as the climax to the terrible heatwave: Sydney faced
record heat and was ringed to the north, south and west by bushfires
from Palm Beach and Port Hacking to the Blue Mountains, with fires
blazing at Castle Hill, Sylvania, Cronulla and French's Forest.
Disastrous fires were reported at Penrose, Wollongong, Nowra,
Bathurst, Ulludulla, Mittagong, Trunkey and Nelligen.
; Australian Capital Territory
Canberra was facing the "worst bushfires" it had experienced, with
thousands of acres burned out and a 45 mi fire front was driven
towards the city by a south westerly gale, destroying pine plantations
and many homesteads, and threatening Mount Stromlo Observatory,
Government House, and Black Mountain. Large numbers of men were sent
to stand by government buildings in the line of fire. While five
deaths in New South Wales were reported, in Victoria the death toll
had reached more than sixty.
; South Australia
In South Australia, the Adelaide Hills bushfires also swept the state,
destroying dozens of buildings.
Comparison with other major bushfires
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Internationally, south-eastern Australia is considered one of the
three most fire-prone landscapes on Earth, along with southern
California and the southern Mediterranean. Major Victorian bushfires
occurred on Black Thursday in 1851, where an estimated 5 e6ha were
burnt, followed by another blaze on Red Tuesday in February 1898 in
South Gippsland when about 260000 ha were burnt, 12 people died and
more than 2,000 buildings were destroyed. The deadly pattern continued
with more major fires on Black Sunday on 14 February 1926 sees the
tally rise to sixty lives being lost and widespread damage to farms,
homes and forests.
Considered in terms of both loss of property and loss of life the 1939
fires were one of the worst disasters, and certainly the worst
bushfire event, to have occurred in Australia up to that time. Only
the subsequent Ash Wednesday bushfires in 1983 and the Black Saturday
bushfires in 2009 resulted in more deaths.
In terms of the total area burnt, the 1974-75 fires burned 117 e6ha,
equivalent to 15% of Australia's land.; the Black Friday fires burned
up 2 e6ha, with the Black Thursday fires of 1851 having burnt an
estimated 5 e6ha.
See also
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*List of disasters in Australia by death toll
*Ash Wednesday bushfires
*Black Saturday bushfires
*Black Thursday bushfires
* Country Fire Service (South Australia)
* Country Fire Authority (Victoria, Australia)
* New South Wales Rural Fire Service (Australia)
* Adelaide Hills bushfires
*Book: 'Forests of Ash' by Tom Griffiths, published in 2002
External links
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*
*McHugh, Peter. (2020). Forests and Bushfire History of Victoria : A
compilation of short stories, Victoria.
https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2899074696/view
*
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20070315021352/http://abc.net.au/blackfriday/home/default.htm
Black Friday site on the ABC] ABC site with comprehensive coverage of
all aspects of the fires.
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20090320164054/http://www.dse.vic.gov.au/CA256F310024B628/0/AFE65A57CCF095F8CA257062002ED35B/%24File/1939%2BBlack%2BFriday%2Bfires.pdf
Map of the area burnt by the 1939 bushfires]
*[http://guides.slv.vic.gov.au/bushfires/ State Library of Victoria's
Bushfires in Victoria Research Guide] Guide to locating books,
government reports, websites, statistics, newspaper reports and images
about the Black Friday fires.
*[http://catalogue.slv.vic.gov.au/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=27854 Royal
Commission to Inquire into the Causes of and Measures Taken to Prevent
the Bush Fires of January 1939] Digitised copy of the Royal Commission
report, available from the State Library of Victoria's catalogue.
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Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_bushfires