Four decades ago yesterday, Australia confronted what was its deadliest bushfire disaster to date, claiming 75 lives, injuring scores more and destroying almost 3000 homes.
On the morning of February 16, 1983, Heather Smith noticed a strange cloud looming above her Deans Marsh property in Victoria’s south-west.
She was doing her usual tasks, preparing cattle for market and looking after her young son Heath – but something felt wrong.
“It was stinking hot and very windy,” the mother-of-four recalls.
“There was a really strange cloud formation from the north, it was just like a big fan of cloud, I’ve never seen it before.”
But it wasn’t until 2.50pm that things started to go wrong.
The fire siren began to blare. Then the phone rang.
A bushfire was headed right for Heather’s farm.
She tried to call her husband, Max, who was working on a cattle property nearby, but she couldn’t reach him.
With the fire raging up the road, she grabbed her three-year-old son, and headed for the dam.
While low after 10 months of drought and heat, it would provide the safe haven for Heather and her son as fire swept over their property.
“We … played games in the water while watching the fire roar up,” she recalls.
“I was frightened, but … we just sort of made a game of it and watched – that’s all we could do.”
For the next two hours, Heather tried to keep her son entertained in the muddy water, while the fire burned just 100 metres away.
It then moved past her farm and into nearby forest, where it would go on to burn all the way through the Otway Ranges to the coast.
“I saw it hit the bush and it just exploded and I thought, ‘There’s no hope now’,” she says.
But Heather’s is a story of survival amongst the carnage of Ash Wednesday.
The first fire began in South Australia’s Clare Valley, followed by fires in the Adelaide Hills, and the state’s south-east.
By the evening, farmland and forests in Victoria were alight and firefighters were battling 14 major fires across both states.
Over a 24-hour period, more than 180 fires were burning, tearing through 400,000 hectares of land, an area four times the size of metropolitan Melbourne.
‘The tone of the fire changed’
In the north-eastern Adelaide suburb of Tea Tree Gully, Rob Sandford was home for lunch when the fire siren went off.
The 19-year-old volunteer, who had only joined the Country Fire Service (CFS) the previous year, soon found himself in the nearby Anstey Hill Recreation Park, fighting what he thought was the main fire front.
“It was quite surreal,” Rob says.
“We were actually fighting the fire and thought we were doing a really good job, but our crew leader said, ‘We need to go right now’.
“The fire had actually come around behind us … so we had to [hop] back onto the truck and … we actually had to drive through the fire to get out.
“That was my first experience of driving through fire.
“It’s as scary as people say it is.”
Rob’s older brother Jim, a volunteer firefighter with 16 years of experience, was with another crew.
“We were there for probably half an hour and all of a sudden the tone of the fire changed,” he says.
“It went from a crackling to a roaring in an instant and we thought ‘we’d better get out of there really quick’, which is what we did.
“[Then] the fire literally exploded out of the park.
“It sounded like a freight train coming up and that lasted for about five minutes as we lay on the ground, on the gravel road and that was pretty much the only protection we had.”
Multiple fires raged throughout the Adelaide Hills, killing 14.
News reporter Murray Nicoll delivered a harrowing live cross on local radio, as he watched his house burn to the ground.
“The air is white with heat and smoke and it’s red and there are women crying and there are children here and we are in trouble,” he said.
‘A day out of hell’
As the inferno in the Adelaide Hills intensified, a fire began on a farm near Greenways, in South Australia’s south-east.
Geoff Robinson was the fire control officer at Lucindale, the small farming centre nearby, and he could tell by the heat and wind it “was going to be a real bad day”.
The then 32-year-old had dispatched crews to the fire before going out himself to inspect the flank of the blaze.
But then the wind changed.
“Instead of fighting a flank … it turned into a 15-kilometre front which came directly over the top of us,” he says.
“I was luckily with another group of other people that were on the bridge and we had some protection when it went over.
“But it was that hot and that fierce that even the sheep manure was alight and just firing through like red-hot ashes.”
But three others fighting the fire weren’t so lucky, which was devastating for Geoff and his team.
Local deputy CFS supervisor Brian Nosworthy, CFS volunteer Andrew Lemke and truck driver P.J. O’Leary died fighting the flames.
The inferno in the south-east was every bit as lethal as what was happening in the Adelaide Hills, accounting for half the 28 deaths in South Australia.
“If we had of been aware that the wind was changing … we could have got all the people out,” Geoff says.
“This day was just a day out of hell.”
About 100 kilometres away, in Mount Gambier, 10-year-old Talie Teakle first noticed there was something wrong when she was riding her bike home from school.
“The sky itself wasn’t your typical, straight-out-of-school kind of sunshine,” she remembers.
“It looked like night-time, and it was kind of early afternoon.”
By the time she got home, the heavens had turned black from smoke and the nearby farming town of Tarpeena – where Talie’s grandmother lived – was under threat.
“When we got to Nanna’s house, the thing I remember most … was everyone wetting towels and lining the doorframes and the windows,” she says.
Four decades on, the embers of memory continue to smoulder.
The experience of Ash Wednesday and its aftermath – which included helping farmers deal with charred animal carcasses – left Talie traumatised.
“Memories are all full of smells, and I’ll never forget the smells of those burning, you know, rotten bodies,” Talie says.
Her grandmother’s home withstood the conflagration that ripped through Tarpeena and its pine plantation, but 21 other local properties were reduced to ash and rubble.
‘Sheer panic’
For Graham Simpson, who had only been made captain of the Cockatoo Country Fire Authority (CFA) brigade in Victoria’s Dandenong Ranges three months earlier, Ash Wednesday was a literal trial by fire.
The fire in his community, which would claim six lives, began about 7.30pm, the last major blaze to start on Ash Wednesday.
Graham went out to assess this new blaze while residents rushed to escape.
“On the night, people just didn’t know what to do. It was sheer panic,” he says.
Many people, including Graham’s wife and two children, were going to the local kindergarten to shelter.
The building is now an Ash Wednesday museum and bushfire education centre.
“They came in and sheltered in here along with a couple of hundred other people with their dogs and cats and goats, pets,” he recalls.
The other crews from the district, including six men on Cockatoo’s tanker, were already fighting a raging fire at Upper Beaconsfield, a blaze that claimed 21 of the 47 lives lost in Victoria – the worst toll of Ash Wednesday.
It meant the remaining volunteers at Cockatoo fought the fire alone with just their small truck, the brigade’s pleas for help on the radio going unanswered.
“No-one could get in – [there was only] one channel – no-one could talk,” Graham says.
“I was asking for help.
“But no-one could hear me because someone else would come in and talk over the top of me.”
‘Our ancestors knew where to burn’
Peek Whurrong elder Rob Lowe faced a nervous wait as fires burned east of Warnambool, with his teenage daughter returning from Ballarat on a bus.
“There was plenty of smoke around and we knew there was a big fire in the distance,” he says.
He and his wife were waiting at the shop in the small town of Purnim, near the Framlingham Aboriginal Mission where he had grown up.
While the bus was diverted as fires burnt along the banks of the nearby Hopkins River, it eventually made it through.
“It was a big relief. We couldn’t get out of the car quick enough to give her a big hug,” Uncle Rob says.
He remembers his parents and relatives employing Indigenous controlled burning around the mission, using wet hessian bags to stop the fire getting out of control.
Uncle Rob fears the historic area is at risk of being lost to another fire, because the traditional burning practices his family used have not been implemented in the area for many years.
“There’s always a time and a season to do it,” Uncle Rob says.
“We were told to do it when all the plants are dormant. Our ancestors knew when to burn.
“It’s sad to know it’s not still happening because I think we as Indigenous people lost control.
“We’re losing a part of our culture that’s been taught to us by our elders.”
Indigenous cultural fire management is increasingly being recognised and supported by governments around Australia, and is being reintroduced in some areas.
Some experts want to see an increase in controlled, or prescribed, burning to prevent a repeat of Ash Wednesday.
“The one area we are still lacking in is the prevention on the broad scale in the bush across Victoria, [and] a third of Victoria is bush,” says fire management consultant Ewan Waller, who was the Chief Fire Officer for the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment during the Black Saturday fires in 2009.
“That means we have to then manage that bush, actively manage it, and that means controlling the fuel build-up [with controlled burns].”
The practice remains contentious because of fears that fires may get out of control, emit damaging smoke or harm ecosystems.
Victorian authorities, for example, have responded to calls for more burning with a targeted approach that includes other forms of fuel reduction, such as mechanical slashing and clearing.
But Ewan fears another disaster is only a matter of time.
“It’s right on the cards as we go into El Niño, for example, into a dry period,” he says.
“There’s no reason why we won’t go into another bad summer and have large scale fires again – there’s nothing preventing it, really.
“We are very, very vulnerable to another Ash Wednesday, Black Saturday fire.”
© 2020 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved.
ABC Content Disclaimer
