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Overview
‘Dry heat and hot, dry winds worked upon a land already dry, to suck from it the last, least drop of moisture. Men who had lived their lives in the bush went their ways in the shadow of dread expectancy. But though they felt the imminence of danger they could not tell that it was to be far greater than they could imagine. They had not lived long enough.’ — Report of the Royal Commission into the bushfires of January 1939
With the start of every bushfire season and the first threatening hints of burning eucalypt in the air, we are reminded, no matter where we live, that bushfire is an inescapable reality in this country. In Burn Paul Collins tells the epic story of bushfire in Australia, drawing on accounts of the most devastating conflagrations in Australia’s European history — from the 1851 Black Thursday fire (which burnt out one quarter of Victoria) to the 1939 Black Friday fires (which took many lives and destroyed thousands of hectares in Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania), the Canberra inferno of 2003, and the Black Saturday fires of February 2009.
Frightening, compelling, vivid, and provocative, Burn reveals stories of heroism, stupidity, political incompetence, and environmental vandalism. This is the grand narrative of bushfire in Australia, the most fire-prone land on Earth.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781922072443 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Scribe Publications Pty Ltd |
| Publication date: | 09/28/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| File size: | 999 KB |
About the Author
Paul Collins, a religious commentator and historian, is the author of thirteen books. He has a strong interest in environmental issues and lost a house and 425 hectares of bush during the January 2003 fires that swept through large parts of the Snowy Mountains.
Read an Excerpt
Burn
The Epic Story of Bushfire in Australia
By Paul Collins
Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Copyright © 2006 Paul CollinsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-922072-44-3
CHAPTER 1
BLACK FRIDAY, 13 JANUARY 1939
No one in Noojee knew exactly where the fire came from originally. The rumour was — and, as the police later established, it proved to be partly correct — that it had begun almost a fortnight before, somewhere near Kinglake East, and that it had been lit by a farmer who thought he could do some burning off in the worst fire weather ever experienced in the European history of south-eastern Australia.
For the one hundred or so people still left in Noojee on 'Black Friday', 13 January 1939, all that was irrelevant now. What mattered was that the tall mountain ash forests that surrounded the town were fiercely ablaze. Everywhere people looked, to the south-east, east, north, and north-west, there was a massive fire burning. Even though it was just after midday, the sky was so black that people needed lights and torches to be able to see. Flames leapt over 35 metres into the air above the tree-line and the wind direction changed constantly as the fire created its own wind patterns. The noise was deafening and smoke blinded both people and animals and choked them as they tried to breathe. The heat was so intense it blistered any exposed skin. There was only one narrow escape corridor, which fortunately paralleled the railway line and dirt road, both of which ran due south out of the valley in which Noojee nestled, and up over steep hills towards Neerim Junction, 8 kilometres away, in cleared and open dairy country.
Early that Friday afternoon, for the second time in its short history Noojee was totally destroyed by fire. It all happened very suddenly. Between 11.00 am and midday tremendous fires, whipped up by an almost hurricane-force wind, descended on the town from the north, west and east. Just before one o'clock the local policeman requisitioned several cars to take as many of the women and children, most of whom were vomiting from heat and nervous excitement, through the still unburned forest to the south out to safety at Neerim Junction.
Besides the policeman, several other people remained on duty. Among them was the assistant postmistress, Mrs Gladys Sanderson. She continued to work in the wooden post office, keeping contact with the wider world by phone and telegraph until just after 2.00 pm when the building itself caught fire. Most phone and telegraph lines had already burned down, but those connecting the town with Warragul were still open. Mrs Sanderson was the custodian of the only fireproof safe in Noojee and people in panic had mobbed her, begging her to put their valuables in it. Her final telegram to her superior, the Warragul postmaster, testified to her calm and stoic self-possession: 'I am about to close down now as the flames are licking the building. I have locked valuables in the safe and am going to the river. If the worst comes to the worst, you will find the keys of the office and safe strapped to my wrist.' She then ran the short 20-metre distance to the Latrobe River, which flowed besides Noojee's main street, and joined other remaining residents of the town sheltering in the relatively shallow water.
As the fire surrounded the town there was still a train standing at the platform of Noojee station. By 1.30 pm it had built up sufficient steam to depart, although it was not due to leave until 3.10. It consisted of a dirty grey-black steam engine, six dark-red and battered four-wheeled open freight wagons, four of them filled with logs and other goods, and a six-wheeled, freshly painted bright-red guard's van. The guard, Arthur Armstead, was becoming increasingly concerned and afraid. The 21 women and children who were left behind after the requisitioned cars departed went straight to the station, begging Armstead to get them out of Noojee by train as quickly as possible. The guard got them to climb aboard the two empty freight wagons.
The situation was getting worse by the minute with increasing heat, smoke and darkness. Armstead decided to call the stationmaster at Warragul to ask what he should do and in turn the Warragul stationmaster phoned Victorian Railways headquarters at Spencer Street in Melbourne for instructions.
Just before 2.00 pm the reply came from Spencer Street. 'Get the train out of Noojee immediately and take it to Warragul', Armstead was told, to save the rolling stock. He responded immediately. Reassuring as best he could the women and children sheltering in the last two wagons, Armstead waved his green flag and blew his guard's whistle and when the train began to move, jumped toward the running board and open swing-door of the guard's van. The train slowly gathered speed, pulling out of the station.
It was a nightmare journey. The single track ran up a long, gradual incline out of Noojee through thick forest which was by then beginning to catch fire. John Woolstonecraft, the Noojee postmaster, later complained that the Victorian Railways had been repeatedly asked by the Progress Association to cut the bush back from the track, but the railways had cited lack of funds and nothing was done. The driver pushed the 120-ton N-class locomotive uphill as hard and as fast as he could, but both he and Armstead knew they had to get to 'bridge number seven', a massive wooden structure standing on nineteen trestles over a deep, narrow gully just under two kilometres out of Noojee, before the fire did — or at least before the bridge's structure was weakened so badly that it could not carry the weight of the locomotive and the cargo-laden freight trucks. They also knew that the train had to cross six other wooden bridges on the way to Neerim Junction.
By now the ground itself seemed to be alight and the wooden sleepers were catching fire. Burning branches and leaves were falling all around the train or being blown into the freight trucks. 'Several times the blaze raged furiously around the trucks, only a few yards behind us', Armstead was to recall later. 'We were afraid the train would catch fire.' The red guard's van in which he was riding was a wooden construction built on an iron frame attached to two-wheel bogies, and it easily could have caught fire.
When they got to the 'cobweb ladder', as the 102-metre-long and 21-metre-high number seven bridge was called, the driver stopped the train. He and Armstead ran ahead to try to check the state of the structure by leaning over the edge and peering through the dark and choking smoke to see what was happening down at the base of the wooden piles. It seemed safe enough, although there was burning vegetation down at the bottom of the bridge. Gingerly, the driver eased the train across.
They made it, but less than a kilometre up the track they stopped again to check another smaller bridge. It was a terrifying process and they were not safe until they finally broke out into the cleared, open country just to the north of Neerim Junction. Several of the women and children had suffered burns to their faces and almost all were suffering from smoke inhalation and some from smoke blindness. Less than fifteen minutes after their crossing the trestle bridge caught fire and was completely destroyed. One of the classic photographs of the Black Friday fires is of the still-smouldering remnants of the bridge and pylons, with the contorted steel track and burning sleepers hanging across the narrow valley, suspended 20 metres in the air.
The train and its passengers might have escaped, but the town didn't. Once the flames got a grip, Noojee was destroyed in just twenty minutes. The station was burned to the ground and the four freight trucks left standing on a siding were completely consumed. Only the Noojee Hotel, the butcher's shop and a house remained. This was even worse than the disastrous 'Black Sunday' forest fires of 14 February 1926 when most of the town had been destroyed, and 31 people were burned to death in nearby Warburton.
In 1939 there were about 60 people left in town when the fire arrived and most of these, mainly women, children and exhausted firefighters, took final refuge in the Latrobe River. They were there for four hours with the fire burning on the banks on both sides. The river was not particularly deep. It would have afforded some protection from the flames, but not from the heat and the smoke. There they stood huddled together near a water-wheel, covered with wet blankets. The Age reported the following day that the group included 'a mother with her nine months old baby, and Mrs Padgett, who is 92 years of age, who had been discovered in a state of collapse in her home. Sewing machines, wireless sets, bedding and other miscellaneous household goods, which had been hurriedly collected from their homes by the fleeing townsfolk, were thrown into the river, and three motor cycles and a motor car were driven into the water for safety.' The Herald reported that Mrs Padgett and her daughter were in a car to be driven to Warragul but 'before they could be driven away ... fallen electrical wires blocked the exit. [So the driver] ... drove the car with the passengers straight into the river.' After the fire, three Noojee men were taken to Warragul Hospital with severe burns and were listed as 'critical', but all survived. Mrs Sanderson emerged unscathed from the river and was back on duty as soon as phone and telegraph lines were restored. She was awarded the Order of the British Empire for devotion to duty.
After the fires died down later that night another heroine emerged to rival Mrs Sanderson. Mrs Chamberlain was a survivor of the 1926 fires and was the licensee of the Noojee Hotel. She turned it into a refugee centre. The hotel was inundated with people suffering from burnt hands, scorched faces, partial or total smoke blindness, and others vomiting from nervous excitement. The Argus wrote glowingly about her generosity:
Suffering from blisters on the face and with one eye bandaged [she] has been on her feet for sixty hours giving assistance to all who have requested it. She has provided scores of refugees and volunteers with excellent meals, and has resolutely refused to accept payment for one of them. Nursing babies so that their mothers could rest and comforting sufferers from smoke blindness, she has won the admiration of the district. (16/1/39)
While no one in Noojee was killed, a terrible tragedy occurred 24 kilometres away near the village of Tanjil Bren where Alfred 'Ben' Saxton and his brothers, Eric and John Godfrey Saxton, ran a successful timber mill in the midst of mountain ash country. The fire descended on the Saxton mill at about the same time as it hit Noojee. At the mill site there were three dugouts, covered trenches cut into the earth that were usually from 4 to 7 metres long and between 2 and 4 metres wide, and deep enough for people to stand in, covered by about half a metre of earth dumped on top of a cast-iron or occasionally cement roof built over a timber frame. Dugouts could also be cut into the sides of hills or embankments and were protected from the flames and radiant heat by waterlogged blankets or hessian strips at the entrances or occasionally by steel doors, although any exposed timber was still in danger of catching fire in the intense heat. Containers of water were stored in dugouts to cool those sheltering inside and to keep the protective fabric wet. Sometimes containers of oxygen were left to assist breathing.
Just after 2.00 pm on Black Friday it was almost pitch dark and of the 39 people at Saxton's mill, 30 crammed into an unusually big dugout (15 metres long, 7.25 metres wide and 1.8 metres high) and six into a smaller one (7.6 metres long, 3 metres wide and 1.8 metres high). Over near the house, Ben, his wife and nineteen-year-old Mick Gorey, who had gone over to help Mrs Saxton clear valuables out of the house, clambered into another tiny dugout. The big dugout was well stocked with food and water. By any standards it was safe. The same could not be said for the other two.
The main fire front hit the mill just before three o'clock. 'Impelled by a roaring north-west wind flames leaped across the [mill] clearing. Big lumps of wood flaming against a sky as dark as night ignited everything they touched', an Age reporter wrote on 16 January 1939. 'Four mill horses and a pony, which were free, dashed around the clearing screaming with pain, but after enduring the heat for half an hour they went mad and galloped off into the timber where their charred remains were found later.' On the mill site itself some 350,000 super-feet of timber burst into flame. This generated extraordinary heat — hot enough to melt iron. Meanwhile in the big dugout wet blankets were held over the entrance, but often they fell in charred pieces even before the water on them was dry. The heat was so intense that men could only hold the blankets for two minutes before they had to be replaced, and those who ventured outside with soaked hessian bags to protect the timber supports of the dugout could only stand it for a minute until, reduced to semiconsciousness, they were forced to retreat once more. Two men broke down completely under the terrible strain and several were blinded by the smoke. The wind and the noise were so bad, the Age reported, that 'it seemed like the concussion of great trees falling all around'. For more than three and a half hours the men were stuck in the two dugouts farthest away from the house. At one stage the smaller dugout caught fire, but a tank collapsed on top of it, pouring water over the burning supports. The six men there scooped up the mud from the ground to fill in the cracks and keep out the fire, eventually taking refuge at one end, burying their faces in the wet dirt.
But over near the house, which quickly caught fire in the surrounding inferno, the Saxtons and Gorey were already dead. Ben Saxton had been hit with a falling beam near the dugout's entrance when the supports caught fire and his neck was broken. When his wife and Mick Gorey went to his rescue they were overcome by smoke and quickly suffocated. When the men from the big dugout were finally able to run across the mill site to the tiny Saxton dugout, they found the three occupants dead. Red-hot pots and pans were lying at the entrance, and the dugout was still far too hot to enter.
Just over three kilometres away, out on William Rowley's farm, another tragedy had struck a whole family. Fifty-six-year-old Rowley was overconfident. He had survived the 1926 bushfires, and the area surrounding his farm had already been lightly burned in a fire in December which had dried out the undergrowth, but left the leaves dead on the trees. John Saxton described it as 'a tinder box and the whole thing would go like gunpowder'. Although the Saxton brothers had strongly advised Rowley to dig a dugout, or retreat to the mill as soon as a fire threatened, Rowley refused. He was sure that he and the family were safe, despite the fact that they were surrounded by forest and undergrowth as dry as tinder.
Some time after five o'clock some of the mill hands pushed through the still-burning forest to the Rowley homestead. They found everyone dead. The family had obviously tried to shelter in the house, but when it caught fire Mrs Rowley had made a run for it with her six-month-old baby, Agnes. Her body, burnt beyond recognition, was found lying against a tree with the infant still in her arms. Her husband's body was at her feet. The remains of four-year-old John Rowley and two-and-a-half-year-old Benjamin Rowley were found in the ruins of the house. Not far away the body of 30-year-old Frank Poynton, a paling-splitter from Saxton's mill, was found in the burnt-out forest where he had died alone.
Almost 65 years later Noojee is still rather isolated, nowadays with less than a hundred residents, even though it is only 107 kilometres by road due east of the centre of Melbourne. It is one of those places that you have to make up your mind to visit. Established as a timber town in 1919, it was burnt out first in the bushfires of 1926 and then in 1939. It lies well off the beaten track in a shallow valley surrounded by tall eucalypt-clad mountains. The predominant tree in these forests is mountain ash, the tallest hardwood trees in the world, highly valued for their fine timber, with the appropriate botanical name of Eucalyptus regnans — reigning eucalypt. Most of the highest and oldest of these kings of the forest, some of them more than 500 years old, had already been felled by 1939. There is much debate about their exact height, although there is little doubt that a number of the very oldest of them grew to over 100 metres. The explorer and botanist Baron Sir Ferdinand von Mueller reported one as high as 480 feet (146.3 metres) and a fallen tree in the Dandenong Ranges measured just over 400 feet (121.9 metres). Nowadays mature trees average 60–80 metres in height. These tall, straight trees are held in place by a massive root system and a broad, bark-covered lower trunk. From this base the white or light green-grey barked spine of the tree tapers upward like a thin marble column to a very high but comparatively small and sparse leafy crown. From about a third of the way up the trunk, ribbons of bark peel off and hang like discarded skin.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Burn by Paul Collins. Copyright © 2006 Paul Collins. Excerpted by permission of Scribe Publications Pty Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,Maps,
Introduction,
PART 1 A NATION OF FIRE-LIGHTERS,
1 Black Friday, 13 January 1939,
2 Over a century of fires, 1788–1938,
3 'Burn, burn, burn', 1939,
PART 2 AFTER STRETTON,
4 Black days, 1939–66,
5 Ablaze, southern Tasmania, 1967,
6 On the urban frontier, 1968–2002,
PART 3 THE GREAT FIRES OF 2003,
7 'Stinking hot and windy': the Snowy Mountains and Victoria, 2003,
8 A perfect fire day, Canberra, 17 January 2003,
PART 4 THE GREAT FIRE DEBATES,
9 To burn or not to burn?,
10 Fire thugs,
11 Fireproofing Australia?,
Notes,
Bibliography,