he 1939 bushfires is really interesting to me, firstly because it is the first huge fire accurately recorded in Victoria and parts of SA. It’s also because of its size. People who were living in the bush lived in pretty primitive environments with lack of transport, isolation, a very primitive, tough life. And when you look at the old photographs, the way in which they actually did their work in logging - the wooden rail lines for transporting the wood. It was a totally different era. I’ve spoken to people who were involved in the 1939 fires and their fire fighting techniques were pretty basic. And the equipment that they had, you might has well have not had it.

The enormity of the fires, the intensity of it - when you drive now through the Black Spur or Tallangatta or right down through Gippsland, they’re mountain ash forest. Every one of those trees are the same age. They were devastated in 1939 and they have reseeded. They’re beautiful forests and good timber. Even the old Forest Commission in those days, who took on the massive replanting exercise, is now huge. For those reasons I’ve always regarded the 1939 bushfires as the base line of where we’re at now.

I don’t think that we learnt from this situation, because when you read the books, from 1939 onwards we still continued the European way. I don’t think too many experts would argue with that. Let’s look at Victoria for example; we have constantly introduced European processes. We tried to manage the Australian bush, particularly in the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s with a European perspective.

I spoke to a fascinating guy, an Aboriginal ranger in Queensland, who just laughed when we had an AFAC conference. He said Aboriginal communities were conducting fuel reduction burning thousands of years ago. They used different types of fire techniques, low intensity fires at the right times of the year and all of these things, and they actually controlled it. We didn’t.

The 1939 fires created the CFA (through the legislation of Stretton’s Royal Commission) and in my view, you would find it very, very difficult to recreate the CFA in the same way today. It was almost an accident. Because of the 1939 fires, the political environment was right, and it was the first fire agency in Australia that actually came together as this statewide agency to look after all private property and private land.

Local Government gave away their rights to the CFA, which created one centralised control – with brigades being accountable under the legislation to an operational group of people. That was probably the most significant political and organisational decision arising out of the 1939 fires. Thank God!

The difference between 1939 and now is the isolation. People were living in the bush with a lack of communication, lack of transport, lack of equipment, lack of organisation, and because of this, people died. Firstly, with our current suppression techniques we are infinitely better off than they were in 1939 because of the equipment we now have and the strategic planning available to us through the GIS Infrared scanning, the trucks and aircraft etc.

Secondly, the safety concept which is all the Occupational Health and Safety practices and the legal liabilities associated with fire-fighting. We had five fire-fighters killed at Linton and that has completely changed the culture of fire fighting in Australia. After Linton, we had a 12- month coronial inquiry that has fundamentally changed the safety concept of fire-fighting, however, that’s not the most significant difference.

About eight years ago, the CFA recognised - and we led Australia in this - that while suppression in wild fire is important, it is probably not as important as community preparedness, community education and community partnerships. So we created a whole department and now have about one hundred people working out in Victoria preparing the communities, talking about community partnerships, making them aware that the CFA can't be everywhere. And it’s not our job alone; they’ve got a responsibility themselves.

We used to call it risk management, now we call it community safety and community partnerships. The thing that has impressed me most, even above the logistical management and the fire-fighting, is the way in which the CFA has worked with the communities, preparing them for this season’s fire event. They started months before the fires, because we knew that this was going to be a very, very bad year, with the drought and fuel build-up. So if you went to Omeo or Bendock or Bright, the communities were fully involved and fully prepared.

This approach significantly reduced property loss and loss of life and that in my view is probably one of the most significant achievements today compared to 1939.

In 1939 in regional Victoria, there was nothing else there but those mill communities. These were really remote isolated areas and they were the outposts. The tragedy of it was they didn’t understand long-term drought. If you went back and looked at the three years preceding 1939, you’ll see that it was almost identical to what we have now.

However in terms of the climatic patterns, there would have been no one out in those mill settlements that understood the dangers associated with litter build-up and the increasing fuel loads. They were there for the commercial reality of cutting down trees and it’s just like out back Australia, the women really had it tough.

Those mill communities were so important to the story of the 1939 bushfires, because they were the only people there. The timber was for the expanding Australian market, now bearing in mind that we were also going into the Second World War, so all of those issues became significant. This was a fledging community in isolation, with very poor communication in terms of fire who didn’t understand the climatic patterns and had no effective fire-fighting techniques and no organisation.

I’m a lawyer. I grew up in the SEC, and my first involvement in fire really was in the ’70s with the SEC, who were a major cause of fires in Victoria in ’62, ’69, ’72, ’77 and of course ’82, they were mainly SEC fires in those days, a conductor clashing and so on. I was working in England, the SEC had sent me over to work at insurance brokers and at Lloyd’s, and they decided that the SEC should have bushfire insurance which we hadn’t had previously.

We brought bush fire insurance in about 1981 for about a million dollars, pretty cheap, and then we had Ash Wednesday in ’82. So I was a hero. My career was upwardly mobile for about three months because after three months I had a visit, and I can remember this day for as long as I live.

I had a visit from a loss adjuster from England who said that we had a problem because the broker that we used in England had not declared a material fact that the SEC had filed this in 1977 and the underwriters - because we’re looking at about a 300-million-dollar claim in 1982 dollars - were denying the claim.

We then had nine months legal action and we got back about 90 million dollars, so I remained buoyant. But I got involved in all the legal actions and the operational studies in the High Court in London, which really examined the whole range of issues about fire and then I also got involved and managed the compensation claims for all the bush fire victims in ’83 which was just absolutely horrific. Not only the legal actions, but also because of the sociological issues.

It impacted on people who were burned out, it will happen again here as well. If you were just to go to Mount Macedon, the divorce rate just went boom, people who were just teetering on a marriage that wasn’t all that secure, just tipped them over the edge. So we had all the sociological issues, and in Victoria from ’82 onwards, the SEC went through a multi-million-dollar program in bushfire prevention; in upgrading all of its assets and its lines.

We had things called private service lines which were lines going across private property which were never adequately inspected. There was no tree clearing going on around the lines. I can remember a week after Ash Wednesday when half of Mount Macedon was just burned out, we’d sent bull dozers in to clear easements to put new power lines in and get all of the trees out of the way and people were actually lying in front of the bull dozers to stop it, stopping the bull dozers from coming in and that’s two weeks after the fires.

That was the start of the environmental movement, so I was involved in that and then when I was Director General of the then Conservation Forests and Lands I had all these state forests and National Parks to look after and part of that was fire. During that period the CFA has gone from pretty much a cottage industry into a very professional organisation.

I came from being director general of the then Conservation Forests and Lands, which was then Natural Resources and Environment - now Department of Sustainability and the Environment to the CFA about 15 years ago and in those days there was a dual role of Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. So I had the title of Executive Chairman. That existed for about 13 years and because of the change in corporate government, they decided to separate the roles of Chairman and CEO.

So the sequence of events has been Executive Chairman, to Chairman, now Chairman and CEO of the National Coordinating body which we have in Australia, called the Australasian Fire Authorities Council.

I was the inaugural president of the Australasian Fire Authorities Council and we started to realise around the country that we needed to have a national perspective in both urban and wild fire rather than just a state or even an agency perspective. So I and another couple of guys created this national body, which 10 years ago was nothing more than about 10 people coming together on a regular basis to discuss certain issues.

It’s grown to a point now where every fire agency in Australia, and there are 26 of them, - there’s 88,000 of them in the USA, and 26 in Australia - and all the urban, rural and land management agencies in Australia are now members.

New Zealand is a member, Hong Kong, Singapore, PNG, Western Samoa, Fiji, Vanuatu, Mauritius is now joining, so the national body has now become international, we’re now organised to the extent that we can significantly influence the Commonwealth Government.

This year we pulled off a 120-million-dollar cooperative research centre for bushfire research in Australia, which is starting in July. The Commonwealth Government put in nine million dollars of Commonwealth funding, even though they don’t have constitutional power or responsibility for it. And for the first time I’ve been able to convince the fire agencies - the rural and land management fire agencies around Australia - to move towards a national aircraft strategy.