It’s now Monday night in Melbourne. On Saturday morning I scratched around on a post about our capacity to forget the past as the Premier claimed this was the worst weather ever, and we faced the possibility of a bushfire day more extreme than Black Friday, on January 13th, 1939.

I’ve worked on a project about that disastrous day, and constructed a timeline of the details, and sat with some of the survivors as they told their story. It seemed to me that nothing could match that experience, when the state burnt from the Otways to Mt Kosciosko, and 71 people died. I watched Daphne Fowles, now an elderly woman, roll down her stockings and show us the scars from burns that have left cinders in her legs to this day. She was ten when her family’s house exploded, and the car burst into flames as they escaped, and rescuers carried her down from the mountains on a wheelbarrow, and then a truck, a journey that took twenty four hours of horrible suffering.

These days, I thought, you get helicoptered out if you are injured, and we all know that you stay indoors until the fire front has passed and everything will be apples, thank you very much.

Last Saturday afternoon at least 130 people died, and 21 are still in intensive care in The Alfred Hospital across the park, some not expected to survive. The bush roads are littered with wrecked cars, whole towns have been levelled, historic places reduced to ashes, families have lost their children, and we have all in a strange way lost our innocence.

I commend to you two stories which stand for the greater whole. Simon Mann describes the destruction of Strathewen, a town of two hundred with at least thirty dead.

“Many who stayed were condemned to a living hell: families caught cowering in their homes, people stranded in cars. One couple sought sanctuary in their cellar, but above them the house was blown to bits. Another are thought to have huddled futilely in their bathroom. Another couple fled their home in separate vehicles. The woman survived. Her husband’s car sits abandoned on Eagle Nest Road above the once picturesque oval that lies beneath Sugar Loaf Mountain. His body was found in its barren centre. CFA volunteers would later cut up what was left of the synthetic pitch to cover him respectfully….”

Gary Hughes, a senior writer for The Australian, survived by bundling his family into the car and sitting outside his blazing home.

“They call it “ember attack”. Those words don’t do it justice.

It is a fiery hailstorm from hell driving relentlessly at you. The wind and driving embers explore, like claws of a predator, every tiny gap in the house. Embers are blowing through the cracks around the closed doors and windows.

We frantically wipe at them with wet towels. We are fighting for all we own. We still have hope.

The house begins to fill with smoke. The smoke alarms start to scream. The smoke gets thicker.

I go outside to see if the fire front has passed. One of our two cars under a carport is burning. I rush inside to get keys for the second and reverse it out into an open area in front of the house to save it.

That simple act will save our lives. I rush back around the side of the house, where plastic plant pots are in flames. I turn on a garden hose. Nothing comes out.

I look back along its length and see where the flames have melted it. I try to pick up one of the carefully positioned plastic buckets of water I’ve left around the house. Its metal handle pulls away from the melted sides.

I rush back inside the house. The smoke is much thicker. I see flames behind the louvres of a door into a storage room, off the kitchen. I open the door and there is a fire burning fiercely. I realise the house is gone. We are now fighting for our lives….”

I am moved by the tension here between his personal experience, and the clumsiness of language to make sense of it. And touched even more when I found this interview with him and his wife, sensitively done with Kerry O’Brien from the ABC.

In 1939, the mountains were thinly scattered with timber communities built from raw wood, in valleys surrounded by chopped gullies choked with trees. There was no scientific theory to explain the fires, no early warning system, no aircraft, no fire brigades speaking by radio. Many of these towns were connected to the outside world with nothing more than a wooden tramline, down which horse drawn jinkers carried supplies. The men worked with axes, fought fires with rakes and shovels and hessian bags, organised into rough gangs by the necessary tasks.

For six days, in savage heat, as the wind tugged back and forth across the ranges, the fires hid in the gullies, came out to join up, lurked behind the ridges, to explode in one massive set of fires when the wind came up and the temperature passed 114.1°F in the old numbers.

People fought as families. Amazingly, almost everyone survived, though 71 deaths, many of them children, was a terrible cost. They sat in the rivers, crouched under bridges as hot tar dripped on them, hid in the myriad of mine shafts in this gold bearing country, or climbed into dugouts inspired by the trench systems on the Western Front.

The subsequent Royal Commission established the basis of the system still used today – a volunteer Country Fire Authority linked by a communication system, learning as it can from advances in fire science.

In 1983, we thought we were better prepared. But 73 died in Southern Australia in one day, and seventeen of them came from fire crews. Organisation didn’t save the bush, nor the new-fangled tankers with their hoses and red paint. That year, on the West coast, communities stood in the sea and watched their towns burn. The fire invaded towns on the outskirts of Melbourne, created by suburbanites looking to commune with nature, living at the end of firetrap roads, the trees scratching the skins of their houses.

After 1983, better financed scientists examined the effects of bushfires much more systematically. They became fascinated by the patterns. Why did some houses survive, and others not? It turned out that buildings caught fire because the micro-storm of the firefront spread embers on either side, which caught in roofs and torched houses while the main front was far away. From this, they developed a theory based on choice: if you decide to stay, you can save your house as long as you put out the spot fires and duck inside as the front passes. But if you decide to leave, you must go early, because the roads fill with smoke, cars have accidents, and the escape routes can be blocked.

Steadily from that time on, the system has improved. Radios and mobile phones, fire trucks with sprays to keep the crews alive if they are trapped, better training and community awareness, a steady increase in equipment.. all pushed on by some dreadful years in which the bush burnt in patches all summer, and other places like Canberra and bits of Sydney had their own crises in turn. The death of five firefighters at Linton was especially bitter.

Crews now travel across the world to fight fires, to learn and practice. Wild fires have become more common in North America, and are increasing around the Mediterranean. With some justification, Victorian bureaucrats now claim we have the best system in the world. The CFA has no less than 1300 employees, and 58,000 volunteer firefighters.

But on Saturday, we had the worst fire day of all. As if we have learnt nothing from history, and the scientific advances are futile against the power of nature. We will spend a long time working out what went wrong, but some things are obvious, if you have any feeling for the history.

This fire occupied much less ground than 39 or 83, but killed more. The land is more heavily populated, has become more suburban, so many more people were threatened. We should be heartened by the fact that none of the fire crews died, even though they danced with the flames for a full day. The communications system seems to have worked, and trucks were deployed effectively, in convoys.

The trouble is, people had no time. The hours when the fire was supposed to approach, when families assembled the pets and kids and remembered to pack the family albums turned into a few minutes as the front burst onto the paddocks.

The Bureau of Meteorology had been predicting a disaster for a whole week, and pinpointed it to the very day. The weather was tracked with radar, and helicopters dashed across the smoke, and the data was phoned to incident rooms and laid out on maps. But these fires seem not to have come from anywhere else; I guess they spotted from sparks into a blazing line in minutes, to pounce from the fence-line as families watched the horizon.

When residents stayed in their houses, and switched on the diesel generator and whacked the embers, the places burnt down anyway, so families were forced into the open, and their cars, to try and get away on roads so smokey they were blacker than night. Some of those burnt out vehicles drove headlong into each other.

After 1983 the scientists and architects made recommendations about bush housing. Make sure there are no eaves for embers to enter. Heavy curtains keep out radiant heat. The hoses should be flameproof. Consider shutters, a sprinkler system on the roof, a thirty metre cleared cordon round the house, and a diesel generator to keep going when the power goes. I suspect a lot of people were not quite that prepared.

I know in our own bush house, now gone from our lives, that we cleared obsessively but kept the trees near the house – tall enough to reach the sky, new growth after the 39 fires. And there were corners for embers and the whole thing was cedar and the drought limited the water supply. But then, on a forested hillside, we never thought we could stand and fight.

Many people, bushies and scientists and historians, remember those stories of survival in 1939. I bet we will see a resurgence of those underground bunkers. They are still around in the bush, but not in the towns, and they would have saved lives in Marysville, and Kinglake, and St Andrews.

The footage of the 1939 fire is almost identical with the news images this weekend – it looks like the same shots, colourised. But there is one extraordinary difference.

In late January 1939, a lone cameraman flew across the firescape and recorded take after take of the mountains burnt to their geological bones. The trees are laid in orderly rows, like corduroy. Ancient forests, seeded around 1600, are combed flat, harvested by some hurricane. Now the choppers flit across the devastation, but the stumps and trunks still stand like black masts. This fire could have been worse.

From 1939, there are many photographs of dazed men wandering the wreckage, wrapped in blankets, uncomprehending and totally alone. A few weeks later, the burnt schools came together in tents, which sometimes froze in that cold winter just before the War. As a society, we now have far better mechanisms of compassion, and understand more of the nature of trauma.

I wonder what they think in Narbethong, and up the Acheron Valley, on the hills above the Yarra where Daphne Fowles still lives in a farmhouse? All those communities were burnt in 1939, and have been burnt again. It is going to take a long time to heal this catastrophe, and I think we will be more fundamentally mistrustful of those gentle rolling hills around the city, and the bird-filled forests with their ferns and Mountain Ash. There are times when nature wipes those hills clean of us, and we cannot survive. And if you let your imagination take the stories of the last few days into your heart, you will go cold with the knowledge that this was a terrible way to die.

I am drawn back to one story from 1939, part of the extensive website hosted by The ABC on the fire. It speaks of the grief shared by so many people today, and how they will feel in the years to come.

The Robinson family, who lived around Colac, had nine children, with one away working. The fire came terribly unexpectedly, the house went up, and they were caught outside. While the parents held four of them under their bodies until their clothes caught fire and the soles were burnt off their shoes, the other four ran for it up the track. They were found dead on the road, in the order they used to walk to school. Many years later, Mary Robinson wrote to the children they saved to explain what happened. This is part of what she said:

“The terrible sorrow; I wished I could die and that I had some awful disease, that my time would be short. My husband kept falling backward, but God must have had pity on us or else we would have lost our reason, and day by day we lived. And the people around us were very good and kind, they brought us clothes, food and money, and poor old pensioners offered us their pension.

People came and talked to us, but to talk about the fire was torture. I wanted to hide and die in the bush and again I wanted to walk and walk with terrible thoughts we had. But faith in God slowly returned and brought with it a great peace, and we lived again but life was different.”

The Robinsons were a poor family. The cost of the graves was raised by children in surrounding schools. They are still there today, silent in one corner of the Colac cemetery.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 1:27 am and is filed under history, ideas and society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.