am an historian who is interested in the relationship between people and the environment, and so I look for moments and events when attitudes to nature have been most clearly distilled. The 1939 fires is one such moment in Australian history, when the European settlers of this country were forced to confront their relationship to the bush, urgently and practically.

Fire seems to be entirely a natural element, yet it is also a cultural artefact, and so you need both science and history to understand it. When you are studying fire and forests, it is sometimes hard to say where nature ends and culture begins. I was intrigued to find that Judge Stretton and many of the witnesses at the Royal Commission were also challenged by that question: Was Black Friday natural or cultural?

When I was growing up in Melbourne in the 1960s, I remember my parents taking me for drives in the mountain country and talking about Black Friday. We could see the effects of Black Friday all around us. There was something vaguely sinister about the stark trunks of dead giants rearing above the regenerating forest. I knew 1939 as the year of the great fire well before I knew it as the beginning of the Second World War.

Then, a couple of decades later, I got to know the mountain ash forests intimately. In the late 1980s I had a wonderful job as Historian in the Historic Places Branch of the Victorian Department of Conservation. I remember the excitement of walking through what felt like a wilderness of ferns and discovering the foundations of a century-old settlement, or the boiler from a mine or sawmill. It was then that I knew I wanted to write a book about these forests – and about the fire that so encapsulated their dramatic history.

When we visit these forests today, they are mostly uninhabited at their heart. We enjoy their beauty and remoteness and we walk along tracks that snake into their centres, sometimes forgetting that these beautifully graded paths were once the timber tramlines, the lifelines of remote bush settlements. These isolated sawmill communities were terribly vulnerable to fire. On a hot summer’s day, with a northerly wind whipping the tree-tops and the smell of smoke in the air, these men, women and children had no-where to go but down … into the dug-outs that should have been provided at every sawmill.

The story of the 1939 fires is so bound up with the fate of these communities? Did they realise their extreme danger? Were they prepared? How did they behave when the fires bore down upon them? Some of the most powerful stories from that January come from these communities, because these were families at the mercy not only of the elements, but also of a society that had them working in high summer in the most dangerous forests in the world. Black Friday eventually led to the removal of sawmills and their communities from the heart of these forests.

The Black Friday bushfires of 1939 were a long-term natural rhythm exaggerated by a period of intense human utilisation. Post-war ecological research, especially by David Ashton, revealed that mountain ash forests perversely needed periodic holocaust fires to reproduce; they need Black Fridays. But history and ecology also combine to reveal just how unusual that particular fire was.

The first half of the twentieth century produced a dramatic concertina effect of change in the forests of mountain ash. The 1939 fire occurred after decades of intensive sawmilling in the Victorian mountain ash forests, and was the culmination of serious fires in 1898, 1905, 1908, 1914, 1919, 1926 and 1932. This rapid succession of fires meant that Black Friday burnt a human forest legacy, and it was more ferocious as a consequence.

The peculiar fire ecology of the mountain ash is, I believe, one of the keys to understanding Black Friday. There is a fatal and intriguing paradox that we must explore: it is that such impressive natural vegetation can be so prone to self-destruction. These noble forests, however magnificent, can be described as ‘transient fire weeds’.

I am fascinated by how well bush settlers understood the distinctive ecology of the ash in the 1930s. In the Royal Commission we see a struggle between different forms of knowledge: between the folk knowledge of forest workers (who had to live with fire and ash) and the imported understandings of educated urban people (many of whom still hoped to eliminate fire entirely from Australian forests). Judge Stretton, proud of his own rural affiliations, does what he can to empower the voice of the bush.

In the spring of 2002, I gave a number of talks about the 1939 fires in or near the forests where they wrought such destruction. It was a hot November following a dry winter – the same pattern as 1939 – and bush residents were anxious about what the coming summer might bring. They welcomed the chance to talk about Black Friday and to make the parallels with today. I was struck by how history is a kind of therapy – that is, people wanted to hear about 1939 so that they could better confront their own fears about today. The audiences included many distinguished and thoughtful experts on forests and fire, and they used the discussion of history to respectfully educate one another about how to better prepare for the immediate and worrying future.