've been in park and forest management for a long time, but only fire for the last few years. I trained in forest science originally for the then Forest Commission. In the five years of training, the '39 fires loomed very significantly. They had major impacts in the organisation that I worked in, and they were still at the surface in the early 70s, when I did my training.

For the first decade of my working career, forests and parks were still out way beyond the tram lines, if you like. They didn't rate politically all that much. That has all changed, and there are a lot of reasons for that. These days we can't only be good at putting out fires, we have to engage with the community so the community understands what we are doing and why we are doing it.

The current arrangements in rural Victoria for fire management go back to royal commissions which followed the '39 bushfires and then the extensive grass fires in 1944. The two royal commissions by Judge Stretton basically brought the Country Fire Authority into existence. Prior to that, the Forest Commission had been pretty well the rural fire service, with ad hoc use of volunteers.

The CFA came into existence and the Forest Commission got a lot more power to deal with more aspects of fire management. The arrangements and the legislation are still intact today from that era.

The other thing that stuck in my mind was that the first couple of people killed in 1939 were officers of the Forest Commission. Up until 1982, we had no further related bushfire deaths amongst our staff.

We had two in December '82, which was the lead-up to the Ash Wednesday 1983 year. Tragic circumstances. You never want to be smug about this, but we thought we did a pretty good job not only in dealing with bush fires, but in also keeping our people safe while we did that. So it was something that was important to the agency - that history, that legacy.

As I understand it, trees didn't vote back then, and the funding and political priority for forest management and bushfire management was pretty low. What Judge Stretton did, in my view, was to give the community and the political masters and mistresses a real cold shower. He said, "You cannot continue to mess around with this issue".

Clearly in rural Victoria you need an agency that is properly staffed and resourced to deal with the fire issue, and that's what followed. Of course, after '39, World War Two started, so there were some complications at the time, but the Government got the legislation in place, which as I say, has survived to this day.

Probably the most significant improvement today is our ability to know what's going on in a longer-running bush fire. Back in 1939, you had few roads in the mountains - you had tram lines. If commercial radio stations existed, they were down on the plains - they didn't broadcast into the mountains. Two-way radios were largely unheard of, and they had significant parts of public land still not mapped, or at least not to the extent it needs to be.

Aircraft were limited in their use, so while there was a lot of smoke around - I understand prior to '39 there had been fires for weeks and people knew they were there - you didn't know until the last minute where or how the fire was going to come at you.

For example, take the big alpine fire we recently had. It took 59 days to contain, and that is our biggest fire since 1939. We had good maps, good radio communications, mobile phone communications, satellite phones, aircraft with infrared equipment to tell you where the fire was, roads, and satellites at times - the CSIRO trail project helped us find a few hot spots using satellite technology. It wasn't always perfect - a 59-day fire puts up a lot of smoke that restricted our ability to look - but, by and large, communities knew well in advance what was coming. I think there were nearly 80 community meetings held across eastern Victoria. 9,000 people attended.

CFA specialists were able to say, "Look, if you're going to stay and defend your property, here is what you can do to help that survive. If you decide to go, go well in advance."

We still had problems. Because of smoke, we didn't always know in the more remote country where the fire exactly was, and a couple of times we were surprised at how quickly it moved.

But those surprises would have been nothing like the situation back in 1939. Then you had sawmill towns and other communities either embedded in the mountains, or close to them. You had no real knowledge of what that fire was doing until it was pretty much knocking on your door, and you often had only one way out.

Fires had been burning for weeks. People thought maybe they would burn for weeks and then go out and never bother them. I'd imagine sawmill owners weren't all that keen to shut the mill down. Times were tight, so you'd keep working. Smoke had been around for a while and, in the past, hadn't worried them.

In 2003, for the first time in Victoria, we also had our website. We were updating it a couple of times a day with written material and with maps. The maps of where the fire was were not an easy thing to download, but we were working with shires and other community groups. They were often able to download the maps and distribute them to hotels and milk bars and the like. We were issuing community newsletters twice a day, both using e-mail and other forms of distribution.

We had telephone trees in place. I guess telephones weren't in 1939 what they are now. In the remoter areas around Bonang, Benambra, for example, other forms of communication couldn't reach all that well. A person at our incident control centre would ring 'X' and then 'X' would ring two people, and those two people would ring two more people, and fairly quickly you spread a bit of information using the ground based telephone system.

We also had commercial radio, ABC radio and television, and all were terrific in terms of being prepared to break into their programming. If there was urgent information that needed to be conveyed to people, we could do that.

ABC regional used to go off the air late in the day and throw to state, and on two occasions at least, a situation developed that we needed the community to know about.

Mark DeBono got the regional station back on air and started to broadcast, cutting into the state programming. That's probably about as good as it gets in terms of a radio network. So there were a lot more options in terms of knowing what was going on now than I imagine there would have been in '39.

At its height, there were nearly 3500 people involved in the recent alpine fires. For the first time in Victoria we used a significant number of interstate personnel, and for the first time in Australia we used overseas personnel. We had people from New Zealand and from the US here. Also, in Victoria we have a fixed wing aircraft with an infrared mapping capability that can fly at night and see through, not all smoke, but a lot of smoke.

It's almost two different worlds if you think back again to 1939. Few or no roads, primitive maps at best, very limited radio communications of any form. You look at that footage of people in not what we would call protective equipment - it must have been scary back then. It is scary today with all the support that I have been talking about, to find yourself in a real fire.

In the 2003 fires, we would regularly have 40-degree temperatures, we'd have significant wind from the north and we'd have humidity drop to single figures. When you combine that with the fact that we'd had several years of less-than-average rainfall in the mountains, and there was therefore less moisture in the system - you can see why the fire behaved very frighteningly.

In 2003, with all the assistance and intelligence and the like, we still sometimes only got fire crews out after we should have done so. So how do you make that call back in 1939? How do you get them out quickly? You can't. It was a big ask in those days.

The bush is pretty, and in the last 20 years people have quite rightly wanted to live near it. A flight in an aircraft will reveal lots of assets mixed up with the forest. Now, arguably, there are some similarities with the asset and forest mix that existed in 1939.

In Ash Wednesday we saw one fierce day of fire and a very large number of houses lost, and sadly many fatalities. You don't want to be an alarmist about this, but you'd have to wonder about Victoria's situation now, and the Blue Mountains in NSW, and Canberra.

My view is that we live in a culture where blame is very much to the fore. People think, can't someone throw a switch and make these fires go away? That seemed to be part of the media comment after the recent alpine fires.

We sent crews to Sydney a couple of years ago, and they came back saying something I thought was a bit scary. A lot of people up in the Blue Mountains expected when the fire came that the authorities would be there to look after them.

Now for much of our history, country people have assumed in a fire that they're on their own. If the agencies have turned up, that is a bonus.

But if you're going to reverse that and have an expectation, it gets dangerous. The CFA of Victoria are now increasingly saying to people, "Look, don't assume we'll be there. If you choose to live in these environments, and there are all sorts of good reasons for doing that, you cannot assume a volunteer-based organisation is going to have a truck at every gate."

The other problem we have is the cyclic nature of fire and the short-term memory of communities.

We have to keep advancing the skills of our people, and improving the technology. But like any other area of government, we have to compete with other areas for funds.

I reckon 1939 told us that we are going to get whacked every now and again by big fires. It was a commentator from another state who said in the recent fires that the '39 fires were a 'one in 1000 years' event, and that the alpine fires were a 'one in 1000 years' event. Now, my statistics are not that flash, but 60 years is about it.

The recent fires were in the east of the state. There is a lot of forest in the Otways, a lot of forest in the midlands. A third of the state has got forest on it, potentially huge amounts of very volatile fuel. You only need an ignition source and the right kind of weather, and there are times when we won't stop these fires.

We need to understand that, and '39 gave us a huge wake up call. You could say that society was politically sophisticated enough to deal with it. They set up a royal commission with grunt, and had the good sense to take that advice from the royal commissioner. And we are still benefiting from that advice.

After years of drought there is less moisture in the system now. The high temperatures, strong winds and low humidity will keep combining from time to time. Yep, we can do a lot of useful work, but we cannot stop the head of a fire in many situations when that all comes together.

I get the feeling there is a belief out in the community that if technology hasn't solved it yet, it must be round the corner.

We sent a big helicopter to Sydney a few years ago. Bob Carr, the premier at the time, said, "Look, it's not Afghanistan. We can't bomb it into submission."

There are times when you have to step out of the way and acknowledge that nature has got the steering wheel at the moment. When we get to night time, and the wind drops and the humidity comes up and the temperature goes down, yep, we'll get in and we'll do some good work. But at 3pm, nature is in control here.

In my head, I used to think '39 won't happen again. The 2003 summer proved that this was a pretty silly view of mine. The fuels are still there, and you still get the weather conditions. It is those areas where the assets and the people are mixed up in the forest where we'll get the headlines.