Listed below are selected extracts from the Royal Commission report written by Judge Leonard Stretton, who was selected to lead the inquiry into the 1939 Victoria bushfires.

You can read about the cause of the fires, the evidence given, the role of the Forest Commission, and other general findings in the Report.

Judge Stretton’s was instructed to specifically inquire into the causes of and measures taken to prevent the 1939 bushfires, and to protect life and property and the measures to be taken to prevent bushfires in Victoria and to protect life and property in the event of future bushfires.

The final report into the 1939 bushfires was presented to both Houses of Parliament by His Excellency’s Command in Victoria in 1939.

Of the Forests Commission, the Chairman, Mr Alfred Vernon Galbraith, alone was called to speak for the Commission. He found himself in the embarrassing position of being the truthful sponsor of what he thought was a bad case. He is a man of moral integrity.

If he were freed from the preoccupations attendant upon a life of enforced mendicancy on behalf of his Department and if his Commission were placed beyond the reach of the sort of political authority to which he and his Department have for some time past been subjected, he would be of greater value to the State and would be enabled to devote his attention more closely to (inter alia) what should be the first consideration of every forester, the problems of fire prevention and suppression.

To enable a report of full effect to be made, it would be necessary to … expose and scotch the foolish enmities which mar the management of the forests by public departments who, being our servants, have become so much our masters that in some respects they lose sight of our interests in the promotion of their mutual animosities.

The field staff of the Commission is ludicrously inadequate. It must be stated as an objective fact that the Forests Commission has failed in its policy of fire prevention and suppression.

The Commission's officers regard the forest as a producer of revenue and for this reason and because their education appears to lead them to demand that no tree or seedling be destroyed except in the course of silviculture, they are averse to burning of any sort.

It has been found that the Commission has been too closely pre-occupied with questions of revenue production to the comparative exclusion of considerations of reclamation and rehabilitation.