Written by Dr. Tom Griffiths
Senior Fellow - Convenor, Graduate Program in History.
Australian National University

So what is Black Friday all about?

This is the dramatic and moving story of the most terrifying fires since the European occupation of Australia. The 1939 fires still represent the ‘worst possible’ conditions in a continent of fire. Here you will discover just how deeply Black Friday burned into the national conscience, and how profoundly it changed attitudes to society and nature. It also savagely took lives and left survivors with enduring emotional and physical scars. Some of those stories are told here for the first time.

The Black Friday bushfires – the culmination of a week-long inferno, the climax of a long summer of anxiety – shocked Australian society to its core. Rampant flame humbled and terrified a people who felt they had brought civilisation to the bush. It was a moment in the environmental history of Australia when settlers had to confront – and reform – their whole relationship with nature.

Black Friday collapsed more than a hundred years of colonial history into one horrific event; it welded humanity and nature into a unique and bewildering amalgam; and it demanded greater understanding of the past of both people and trees, not only the shared past, but the deep past stretching back millions of years.

How do you tap personal memory?

I am full of admiration for the way that Moira Fahy, the producer, director and writer, has guided the research for this online documentary. Her intelligent curiosity and genuine compassion enables this presentation to glow with insight and feeling. Moira combines journalistic courage with scholarly empathy and, assisted by project manager Lisa Redlich, offers a gutsy and sensitive portrait of Black Friday and its legacy.

The project serves our hunger for first-hand testimony of the fires of our nightmares. Sixty-five years after the event, it is timely to tap personal memory. But people don’t speak about such things unless they see and feel you understanding. ‘To talk was torture’, wrote survivor Mary Robinson of the grief over the loss of her four children.

Sixty-five years later, talking is still torture to many of these survivors and witnesses. Over ten months, Fahy and Redlich, travelled to the homes of these people and sat with them as they unpacked their memories - their private tragedies.

The extraordinary bravery and dignity of these individuals infused Fahy and Redlich, with a scorching sense of obligation to communicate the unspoken, untrammeled burden of their grief with a similar dignity. And for the first time, the life-long trauma of the 1939 fires is truly revealed.

How do you share such isolating trauma?

If you find it painful to encounter some of the stories in this documentary, as I am sure you will, then think about what it would be like to ask the questions yourself, to sit opposite that person, eliciting their memories and recording them. Then think about what it would be like to be that person remembering, whose experience is both past and ever-present, whose memories still burn vividly so long afterwards.

What does it feel like to tell such stories, to see history being made of one’s personal pain? It is part of the great dignity of these people that they are willing to share such isolating trauma.

Other writers and historians have looked at the industrial history of forests and fire, or they have studied the ecological history or the political history or the intellectual history, and this documentary does all that.

But its special quality – heightened by this multi-media presentation – is to release the emotional history.

How is pain historical?

Judge Leonard Stretton’s Royal Commission into the 1939 fires, which is featured here, was admired for its fearlessness.

There is a kind of fearlessness in this documentary, too.

There is a willingness and determination to confront some of the most unpleasant and confronting details of this event. For example, what is the history of physical trauma? How is pain historical? How does it endure through whole lives, how is it unique to particular events, how is it shaped by society’s medical and social capacities to ease it? Burns surgeon, John Masterton, and CFA chaplain, John Rigby, help us to see these dimensions.

The research that has created this documentary is all the more humbling to me as someone who has spent ten years thinking about this fire and its historical legacy. I’ve written about Black Friday, and it has been my privilege to contribute to this project with historical research and advice.

But I did not imagine that some of these stories remained to be told. Perhaps I did not have the courage or vision to seek them out. But here they are, and they make a deeply moving document.

The parallels between 1939 and 2002-3 are uncanny...

There is another sense in which this documentary is timely. In the summer of 2002-3, fires engulfed large swathes of the Australian Alps and roared even into the heart of the national capital. Comparisons with Black Friday abounded. Even at the beginning of that recent summer, the parallels were uncanny. A dry winter followed a long drought, the summer began early and ominously, the bush was tinder dry. The shadow of overseas war lengthened.

In the late spring of 2002, Moira Fahy, Lisa Redlich and I travelled into the heart of the Victorian forests that burned on Black Friday 1939, and we talked and listened to people preparing for another horror summer. They were keenly aware of the parallels. When they walked in the forests, they could hear the sinister crackle of history underfoot. As Judge Stretton would have put it, people ‘who had lived their lives in the bush went their ways in the shadow of dread expectancy’.

We sought their advice for this project, and they turned gratefully to history as a source of wisdom – and also as a kind of therapy. In talking about 1939, they rehearsed their fears for 2003.

Esplin recalls that Stretton was a poet...

The striking historical parallels between 1939 and 2002-3 infuse this documentary. Bruce Esplin, Head of the Victorian Bushfire Inquiry of 2003, reveals here an acute sense of history. He can feel Judge Stretton looking over his shoulder!

He shares the judge’s sense of responsibility and privilege, and admires his fearless search for truth. And like Stretton in 1939, Esplin in 2003 found that the Inquiry put him ‘in touch with a part of myself that had been lost, my love for the country and Victoria’.

Esplin recalls that Stretton was a poet (he was known as Victoria’s judicial bard) and then movingly describes wood sculpture as his own method of catharsis. ‘I have taken some wood that has been badly burned in the fire and then carved into it to find the fresh, living, highly-polished wood.

There’s the burned shell and then, as a sign of regeneration and regrowth, the fresh, highly-polished, beautiful-looking timber.’ Esplin – like Stretton, and like Fahy – was, by the nature of his work, ‘taking on board some pretty strong emotions and a pretty palpable anger … I think we underestimate the cost of grief to our societies … A lot of people would have made the argument that time heals all – obviously it doesn’t.’

Interrogating the past on what is selfish and what is safe...

As well as exploring raw layers of the history of grief, the parallels between 1939 and 2002-3 extend to issues of political debate. The Black Friday fires and the ensuing Royal Commission demanded a new official respect for systematic fuel reduction burning as a form of fire management.

This constituted a judicial, urban and bureaucratic recognition of aspects of local, folk fire practices. ‘So the school of experience met the school of forestry in the field, if you like’ explains historian Peter Evans, whose outstanding research has supported this project. That struggle to find the right balance between local knowledge and state-wide management, between popular and learned ways of seeing nature, and between what is selfish and what is safe, remains at the heart of debates in the aftermath of massive fire, then as now.

In this online documentary, you can interrogate the past on these enduring issues by journeying into the 1939 Royal Commission transcripts. Key extracts from the two-and-a-half-thousand pages of testimony are presented here. That commission created one of the most important archives in Australian environmental history, and it has never before been made easily available to the public.

As I understand it, trees didn’t vote back then...

Towering over all these stories are the biographies of the trees themselves. Many of the mountain forests we know and admire today were seeded in the Black Friday fire. Indeed, the sheer scale of the 1939 fires forced scientists and managers to look seriously at just how these trees regenerated. After almost one hundred years of European settlement, and after half a century of intensive utilisation of the tallest hardwood in the world, settlers finally started to investigate the life cycle of the tree itself, its ecology.

The regrowth forests are now over sixty-five years old and are approaching, perhaps, a sawmiller’s version of maturity. Yet, since 1939, we have undergone a revolution in the way we value our forests. ‘As I understand it,’ muses fire manager Mike Leonard, ‘trees didn’t vote back then.’ The keys to the ecology and future management of the mountain ash forests are to be found in an understanding of Black Friday and its consequences.

Do we learn from history?

Fire inflames blame. In the aftermath of fire, people do not always have the patience for complex solutions. This documentary therefore makes a crucial contribution to public debate by taking the long-term view and by aiming to understand rather than to blame.
It resists the media-driven search for a scapegoat, and exposes us instead to vivid and subtle stories and reflections – and plunges us also into philosophy. There is a perennial question in human affairs that is given real edge and urgency by fire: Do we learn from history?

That vital question haunts all the narratives of 1939, and especially those which explore the parallels between the summers of 1939 and 2002-3. A Victorian fire manager reflects here on ‘the cyclic nature of fire and the short-term memory of communities’.

Could it happen again?

The superb expert testimony recorded on this website suggests that there is one thing we never seem to learn from history.

That is, that nature can overwhelm culture. That some of the fires that roar out of the Australian bush are unstoppable. ‘There are times’, Mike Leonard reminds us, ‘when you have to step out of the way and acknowledge that nature has got the steering wheel at the moment.’

It seems to go against the grain of our humanity to admit that fact, no matter how severe are the lessons of history. There seems some embedded human inability to acknowledge the true force of fire. This outstanding online documentary grimly continues our education.