Rubicon

"When rescuers finally managed to make their way to the site two days later, even close relatives were unable to identify individual bodies, so fierce had been the inferno."

When the wind rose from the north-west on morning of Tuesday 10 January, a large number of people working in the Rubicon Forest were under threat. What had been a thirty-mile flank on the Black Range turned into a thirty-mile front that roared into the exposed north-west corner of the Rubicon Forest with a gale behind it. In its path lay eight sawmills. Luckily, many people were absent on their Christmas break. Those that were left behind were about to undergo a terrible and testing ordeal.

Twelve men died in the Rubicon Forest on that Tuesday. Four of them were killed after cramming the recently-built sawmill dugout with their furniture and fleeing down a narrow tram track and into the face of the fire. They were trapped by a sudden burst of flame about 400 metres below the mill and, cut off from the only escape route, perished. They were Baden Johnston, Alfred Neason, Peter Murdoch, and a Forests Commission foreman, John West. For months afterwards it was possible to see where they had died as the rain refused to soak into the fat-drenched earth.

Another eight died in a futile struggle to save a winch high on the Blue Range. They were: Joseph Cherry (in charge of the party), George Brundrett, Vivian Argent, Archibald Payne, Geoffrey Wyatt, Lemuel Sims, James Cain, and Thomas Le Brun. The winch was sited on a small flat, and they would not have been aware of the fire until it was almost upon them. The winch driver had started to build a dugout, but it was far from finished. Consequently, there was no place of refuge when the fire roared up from the Rubicon Falls. When rescuers finally managed to make their way to the site two days later, even close relatives were unable to identify individual bodies, so fierce had been the inferno.

Read more about the Rubicon tragedy in the Oral History section