If you look at The Hand of Man, produced by the FCV following the 1939 fires, you will see the rudimentary nature of the equipment available to those facing the fires. In 1939 an incomplete document prepared by CJ Irvine also gives some insight into the level of equipment available at this time.

During the 1950s the FCV was developing and evaluating fire equipment at its Fire Protection Workshop in North Altona. The program was led by Assistant Fire Protection Officer ED (Ted) Gill and Fire Equipment Officer, James (Jim) Hennessy. These were early days and the many pumps introduced into the FCV manufactured either locally or overseas at that time have now long gone and been replaced with more efficient and less cumbersome water delivery systems. The attached document by ED Gill provides some insight into the fire equipment that was developed and introduced during that time.

Certainly, from the 1950s, there were rapid advances in the equipment available to Victorian forest firefighters at all levels. This blog is designed to provide an insight into those developments. There are some articles in the blog below that cover major equipment, but there were also many other innovations that are worth noting. These Fire Equipment Notes (42MB) describe many of these innovations.

Barry (Rocky) Marsden
Dec 2009
Photo: N Fraser