The Black Range

"Forester D. Murray Thompson saw the pall of smoke pass overhead as he was playing tennis at Narbethong."

On the afternoon of Sunday 8 January, the main body of the Toolangi fire, pushed along by the strong south-westerly wind, burnt into the Lower Acheron Valley through the head of Stony Creek in the Narbethong plantation. Forester D. Murray Thompson saw the pall of smoke pass overhead as he was playing tennis at Narbethong. After travelling along the Black Range, the fire crossed the valley near Buxton and burnt along the Cathedral Range. The front was a continuous wall of flames thirty miles or more in length.

At midnight, the wind died and the fire front remained almost stationary. There was now a lull in the wind for about thirty-six hours. Harry Whiteley, then a child living at the Buxton Sawmilling Company's mill near Buxton, remembers the whole length of the Black Range aflame "just like thousands of jewels in the night time". While there were narrow escapes at several sawmills, particularly those of Norman Padgett at Narbethong and the Erica Harwood Company's mill near Murrindindi, no-one died on that Sunday apart from the two foresters killed at Toolangi.