Black Friday bushfires

Eastern Australia is one of the most fire-prone regions of the world, with predominant eucalyptus 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: on 8 January and on 10 January. On 13 January, the day of the fires, temperatures reached , which stood as the hottest day officially recorded in Melbourne for the next 70 years. (Unofficial records show temperatures of around 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 plains lay "bare and baking; and the forest, from the foothills to the alpine heights, were tinder". 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==

The damage was most severe 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 (Now a stub of Melbourne) and Yarra Glen were also badly damaged. The Stretton Royal Commission wrote: 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 . Stretton's recommendations officially sanctioned and encouraged the common bush practice of controlled burning to minimise future risks. to ground observers. 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==

Other states also suffered severely in the extreme heat and fires. In New South Wales, suffered 37 consecutive days above and hit a record 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. 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. == Comparison with other major bushfires ==

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 were burnt, followed by another blaze on Red Tuesday in February 1898 in South Gippsland when about 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 , equivalent to 15% of Australia's land, while the Black Friday fires burned up and the Black Thursday fires of 1851 having burnt an estimated . ==See also==