(Including early fire protection)

John Williams, Treasures of Nhill & District Facebook page 7th February 2025, Nhill Free Press & Kaniva Times. Images from Nhill & District Facebook page.

“The black clouds had been building up all day. It was going to be a dry storm and the air was full of heat and electricity.

The rolling clouds tumbled over a solid layer of still air. You could hear the pods of the desert banksias popping as the temperature soared to 42 degrees.

In the shrub southwest of Nhill the lightning sought out a standing box tree and tore it apart. The burning debris scattered through the surrounding scrub and was fanned by a slight breeze and with the vortex created by its own progress, the fire spread.

Fire is terribly destructive of plants, animals and property. It is also an eyesore. But it is not until the effects of fire are fully understood that its beauty can be appreciated.

For the animals and plants, the survivors that live in the desert it is a bonanza of feed and a new chance to begin all over again to create an ecological system of incredible variety”.

“Burnt is beautiful” by Daryl Guppy writing in Hemisphere magazine 1983.

Records of bushfires in Victoria go back to 1851. And the events of that year convinced people that bushfires could no longer be regarded as a normal hazard of pioneering and something had to be done about them.

The 1851 Black Thursday bushfires burnt out a quarter of Victoria with temperatures higher than 43 degrees and in the Wimmera region they burnt on huge fronts down to the sea and across to South Australia. So what we’ve seen recently is nothing new.

It took another 50 years before fire protection was offered for rural areas. Previously protection was only offered for cities and towns and rural areas had to fend for themselves.

However entire settlements would unite to battle a fire in “farmer Jones” paddock and out of this grew town fire brigades, for example the Nhill Urban Fire Brigade was established in 1888 to mainly fight town fires, but would venture out to farms if required and were known to travel to Kaniva to put out a haystack fire.

While the early brigades could deal with a haystack or local pub fire, they were no match against a roaring bushfire.

It was finally realised that the resources of the entire State were required to fight, bush/ scrub fires so in 1928, 106 rural brigades were amalgamated with this number growing to 768 in 1944 and the creation of the Country Fire Authority. The CFA now covers 1,211 brigades in 21 districts.

Unfortunately bushfire fighting has been hampered by poor and inadequate equipment. For too many years the fire trucks were surplus WW2 Army Blitz trucks and volunteers were only armed with knapsack sprays, shovels and wet canvas fire beaters on a stick.

Many of the old Army 4x4s were fitted out by local brigades under the beg, borrow and steal principle.

Today the trucks have improved on the blitz, but now over 200 are more than 30 years old.

While some argue that you can’t beat boots on the ground, a significant amount of money is now directed to aerial fire-fighting in Victoria with a range of more than 50 assorted  aircraft from large air tankers, Skycranes to Blackhawk helicopters.

Aerial firefighting has been around for years, but much of it was experimental.

First came fire spotting and then in the 1940s RAAF Liberator and Lincoln bombers including Mustang fighters were used to drop fire retardant bombs in tests.

In 1958 Tiger Moth crop dusting aircraft were successfully trialled for dropping water and retardants and this continues today in much more up to date agriculture planes such as the Air Tractor with two based in Nhill.

These days Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being utilised in the early detection of bushfires, but back in the day a much more primitive device was used called the “hazard stick” which determined the flammability of an area.

It consisted of Pinus radiata on a wire platform and placed on the ground with its moisture content compared to a fire hazard table.

Victoria has had a long history of catastrophic bushfires with significant fires given labels such as black red and ash. The deadliest was the Black Saturday fire in 2009 claiming 173 lives.

Victoria together with NSW, Tasmania and South Australia are regarded as one of three landscapes on earth prone to bushfires. California and the Mediterranean coast are the other two.

With rapidly falling volunteer numbers over recent years one can only hope the CFA can in future provide the so-called asbestos curtain to extinguish the perpetual enemy with the flaming headdress.

Footnote: 1/2/2025 This morning the smoke from the Grampians and Little Desert Fires rose to a great altitude, formed into a beautiful bank of snow white cloud, and floated to he west choking Adelaide and the Adelaide Hills with smog. See BOM map.

This article appeared in the Nhill Free Press & Kaniva Times, 19 February 2025.