am a forester by profession. I spent the last 25 years of my career in a fire protection branch, as a fire resources officer. I'm interested in history, and part of that interest covered the upper Yarra area, where I wrote a book in conjunction with three other people on the subject of the Powelltown tramway. That, of course, was affected by the 1939 bushfire, which went through that area. I was also stationed at Noojee, which was affected by the fires. I was working for the Forestry Commission and then the subsequent government departments.

The events of 1939 created a foundation for fire laws in Victoria. Judge Stretton's report set out the things that had to be done by the Forestry Department. The report also formed the basis for laws to control the use of fire, both in the Forestry Commission and within the CFA as well.

There is no doubt that because the sawmills were spread right through the forest, there was no adequate system of warning. All you had was a big cloud of smoke coming towards you. People didn't really understand the distances involved in fire-spotting ahead of the main fire. You had fires popping up in various places around you, with no real relationship to the fire front that was moving towards you. There are recorded cases recently in Victoria, for instance, where 30 miles in front of the main fire, you had spot fires lighting up. The conditions in 1939 would have been equal to or worse than that.

In those days the logs were hauled into the mills and milled in the bush, and then the finished product - the sawn timber - was shipped out. Following the '39 bushfires, the Department and the Government forced sawmillers to move out of the forest, so that there were fewer and fewer sawmills actually located within the forest. That reduced the dangers from wildfires of that sort. They also brought about legislation which said that you had to have a dugout and all the other things to protect yourself.

The legislation for requiring dugouts and moving people out of the forests came in after the 1939 fires, after Judge Stretton's report. There were definitely a few effective dugouts in the 1939 fires, and there were a few that weren't effective, but a lot of people didn't understand the objective of dugouts.

A dugout creates a cube, a certain amount of cubic metres of air which is not going to be contaminated by smoke and is protected from heat. The purpose of a dugout is defeated if you have ventilation in it. A number of people didn't understand this - that the purpose of a dugout was to actually create a volume of air that wasn't going to be contaminated by smoke.

The concept of the dugout, as conceived by Mervyn Bill and a number of other people since, was to produce nine cubic feet of air per person that the dugout would hold. That was supposed to keep you alive for a period of about 30 minutes or so. You've got to understand, they weren't actually sealed anyway.

The frame of the dugout was in the entranceway, and was designed to carry two blankets. They were wet, or wetted down once they were put there, and they were designed to fall together so that they formed a kind of seal. All the edges of the frame were meant to be corked. The aim was to prevent smoke getting into the dugout.

And they were effective, see. That's the thing about '39. There were a number of dugouts which were called dugouts, which weren't real dugouts. They didn't conform to this design, or anything like it. I'm not sure whether the design was actually available prior to '39, but I know that after '39 it certainly existed. It demonstrated that if dugouts weren't built in this way, they shouldn't be considered acceptable devices.

The real problem in '39 was the lack of communications. If they were lucky, they had a telephone between the sawmill and the community that lived away from them outside the bush. There were certainly no telephones connected to the log winchers or any of those sorts of people. They were totally isolated. And the fallers and so on would have lived in huts, up close to the winches where they were working.

In those days, before the days of power saws, the fallers would tend to work in pairs. If they were around Warburton, for instance, they would start work probably at daylight, and the first thing they would do would be to clear around the base of the tree they were going to work on. Then they would decide how far up the tree they had to go to cut it off, and they would put climbing boards in to go up to that height. After that they'd cut a scarf in the tree they wanted to fall. That's a v-shape cut which tilts the tree in the way that they want it to go. With most of them, the good fallers, you could put a peg in the ground and they'd knock the peg right in with the tree they were falling.

After the v-shape cut, they'd cut from the back. The back saw would be done with a cross-cut saw. Some of the cross-cut saws would be 8-10 feet, some would be longer. They'd cut above the scarf, and then the tree would tip over in the right direction.

The '39 fires were one of the key things that changed logging from being carried out on tramways, a rail system, to a road system. You have to remember that '39 was the start of the war. By 1945, bulldozers and things had come into the war because America introduced them. There were tractors around, but not many tractors had blades on them, which allowed you to build roads and do those sorts of things. They tended to pull ploughs rather than push things.

After the war, in '45, '46, '47 and into the 50's, the big road building project started. Basically all the tramways were burned, and they had to get access to a lot of the timber. They had access to earth moving machinery from the war, and so they utilised a lot of that for the road building and for salvage falling.

It came to the point where they stopped falling the fire-killed ash. They were thumping down so much of the seedling regeneration that it wasn't worth doing.

I think one of the major impacts of the fires was to move people out of the bush. That resulted in sawmill settlements being more closely related to the farming population on the edge of the forest. That was good from the point of view of schooling and so on, family life.

In the early forest camps, the bush mills tended to have a huge number of single men. Other men were married, but while they were up there working in the camp their family was living back in the town. In those days of course, they were working on Saturdays as well. If they knocked off at all, they knocked off at lunchtime on Saturday. In the Elliott sawmill, for example, up the road here in the early days, they worked through 'til midday on Saturday, then rushed off to play football on Saturday afternoon. They had a football team for the Elliott sawmill.

In 1939 there was no legislation controlling the people clearing or the people who were logging. In fact, the people who were logging to manufacture timber were expecting to burn the heads of the trees, and there was no legislation to control when they did so. Obviously, the best day to light a fire is when it is hot and windy, because the fire spreads and does the job you want it to do.

The problem I think exists today is that there are very few people in the community who really understand fire behaviour and its consequences. They don't understand that in fact you can't stand in front of a fire. There is no way you can stop a fire rolling at the sort of speed of the one that went into Canberra. That is not possible, you just cook yourself that way.

One of the great triumphs of this year's firefighting was that nobody got killed. They were in some pretty hairy situations at times, and you don't necessarily have to have a bad day, you just have to be in the wrong place.

What the last season of fires demonstrates is that when a fire gets to a certain size, and when you have got such a huge length of fire line, there is no way on earth you are actually going to stop it. You can control parts of it, but you may not win all the time.

When you're fighting a fire you try to establish a control line around it. You either build that on the edge of the fire or back from the fire. Then you burn out everything in between, and that brings the fire out to where you've decided you're going to be, where you're able to control it.

But depending on what happens, you often lose bits of that control line. It could be as simple as a hot rock rolling across the line. Or, for instance, if your line goes along the side of an escarpment, things slide down on top of you. I've seen a burning tree slide down and go about a quarter of a mile past where the line was. Then you go tearing down after it, and if you're lucky you catch up to it. If you don't, that means your fire line has got this great big loop in it, around that blasted tree.

Of course, a lot of things are different these days. In 1939 the majority of people didn't own motor vehicles. The population as a whole was much more dependent on railways, or buses. So firstly, you have a far more mobile population today, and secondly, back then there were no such things as four wheel drives. This meant you couldn't get to some of the places, and if you could get to them, you had to ride a horse, so it was slow. We didn't have any airplanes; we had no ability to drop people in on fires back of beyond. Access was a problem. And we had no communications.

I think the question is, could 1939 occur again? And the answer is yes, it could. But the chances of it occurring are lower than they were in 1939, because of the ability we have today to move people around, and to communicate to people what is going on. We have devices now that allow you to fly around the sky and see where the fire edge is. In 1939, those sort of things just didn't exist.