How 1851's Black Thursday helped shape Victoria

In 1850, drought had ravaged the lands now known as Victoria.

"The country from the Murray to the sea was brown with desiccated herbage, and forests charged with resinous matter baked to the verge of conflagration," Henry Gyles Turner wrote in History of the Colony of Victoria.

"It wanted but some slightly careless act of man to set in motion a devastating fury against which no human intervention could stand."

That "devastating fury" arrived on February 6, 1851.

As temperatures soared into the 40s across the state, fires took hold of what was then the Port Phillip colony.

Five million hectares of land burned from the Wimmera, south to Mount Gambier and Portland, across to Port Fairy, Geelong and Barwon Heads and through the Macedon, Plenty and Dandenong Ranges around Melbourne's north and east.

About one-quarter of the state was reduced to a blackened landscape.

Black Thursday is believed to have killed 12 people and more than 1 million livestock.

While Victoria has faced deadlier fires since, the state has never seen a bushfire of such widespread intensity.

The blaze prompted changes to government, policy and even post-colonial society, shaping Victoria as we know it today.

Victoria's 'baptism of fire'

The Port Phillip District was only months away from separating from New South Wales and becoming Victoria when Black Thursday reduced huge swathes of it to ash.

Melbourne University School of Culture and Communication lecturer Fiannuala Morgan said the impact of that fire could be seen in stories, poems and paintings of the time.

"The fire itself is tied up with the birth of [Victoria]; a baptism of fire, of sorts," Dr Morgan said.

"In some accounts at the time, some journalists even associate [Black Thursday] directly with the gold rush.

"The damage was so extensive it opened up a huge amount of the landscape, it opened up areas for pastoralists but also for prospectors alike … there's even a suggestion it opened up gold seams."

And in its wake, Victoria introduced its first bushfire legislation, which effectively mirrors today's "fire danger period" laws in the state.

Indigenous care and place in Black Thursday

Black Thursday had huge ramifications for Victoria's Indigenous populations, though one white colonist was perplexed by what he perceived to be a relaxed reaction to the fire at the time.

According to the paper "Aboriginal fire-management practices in colonial Victoria", the Boon Wurrung people of the Western Port region south-west of Melbourne calmly watched the fire surge across the plains.

"[They] betrayed not the slightest concern at the fires, but on the contrary seemed pleased at the gratuitous food it presented, birds, opposums [sic] and other animals might be seen gathered in great quantities," the paper said, quoting an account from William Thomas, Victoria's "Guardian of the Aborigines".

This was not the case in other areas, where Indigenous people helped battle fires and save lives; other accounts note how Indigenous groups helped save an oat crop near Ballan, east of Ballarat, and how a Gunditjmara couple saved a family in Portland by leading them away from the fire to a nearby watering hole.

While the Indigenous peoples of Victoria had practised numerous fire prevention techniques, many of which are being revived and used today, Black Thursday was a devastating and uncontrolled fire that no amount of management could have predicted or controlled.

Perhaps even more devastating for Indigenous Victorians was what followed.

The fire-ravaged bushland opened huge tracts of agricultural land for a swarm of colonising pastoralists; tens of thousands of prospectors flooded the regions in search of gold, and lands that were once home to dozens of groups of Australians for thousands of years became a frontier of a bloody war.

Black Thursday and a changing climate

One of the legacies of Black Thursday is that it helps fuel the notion among climate deniers that bushfires have always been a problem in Australia, and therefore are not getting worse because of anthropogenic climate change.

Australian National University emeritus professor of History Tom Griffiths rejects this argument.

"One of the arguments deployed to dismiss global warming and the seriousness of the summer is that Australia has always had bushfires," Mr Griffiths said in his essay, Past, Last and Future Summers: How History Can Help Us Live on the Fire Continent.

"Fire experts are stressing that in the face of climate change, modern bushfire behaviour is very different."

It's a sentiment echoed by Hamish Clarke, an associate professor from Melbourne University's science faculty.

Last year Dr Clarke undertook a fellowship on decision support for climate-adapted bushfire risk mitigation.

"Fire is a big, complicated phenomenon; that's before you even take humans into account," Dr Clarke said.

"We know the climate is warming. That is unequivocal. There is no question it is getting hotter."

More heat means more fire, but Dr Clarke said "it's much more complicated than that", especially in south-western and south-eastern Australia.

"That's where a lot of the higher impact fires have been," she said.

"We know there's quite a lot of fuel there with forests. As things get hotter and drier, that fuel becomes more available to burn and there is the potential for more extreme conditions."

Recording bushfire history

Another inheritance of Black Thursday, and indeed all the major bushfires that followed, is the lessons they can provide for today's firefighters.

Dr Morgan is part of a team researching historical documents from Country Fire Authority (CFA) branches across Victoria to digitise so-called "fire books" spanning from 1875 to the late 1980s.

"The history of firefighting, especially in Victoria, is a voluntary firefighting force," Dr Morgan said.

"The CFA itself is relatively new."

There is even a school of thought that Black Thursday was the catalyst for the first iterations of the CFA.

"Castlemaine is potentially the oldest, going back to 1854," Dr Morgan said.

"They did keep records; handwritten records of fires that they responded to as a voluntary organisation.

"But then from the 1890s onward, there were more standardised ledgers that other brigades adopted but Castlemaine kept theirs, which is unbelievable, incredible."

Dr Morgan is calling for Victorian residents to check for any historical information that may be collecting dust.

"There are 72 other brigades that predate the 1890s across Victoria that potentially still have their records as well, either at the brigades or maybe in a shed," she said.