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What Changed?

Stretton’s 1939 Inquiry, conducted in just four months (and weighing-in at a mere 39 pages!) was, arguably, the most profound and far-reaching report of its kind yet published in Australia.

Well into the 1970s Stretton’s 1939 report, and its strategic analysis of the landscape fire challenge, in an area these days known internationally to be one of the three most fire-prone regions on Earth, was still playing a major role in the education of future forest managers, and was still informing related public policy making, and associated government funding arrangements.

Initially however, the delivery of Stretton’s report was quickly overrun by Australia’s involvement in World War Two, and the related debate stalled in the Victorian Parliament. In 1944 serious fires in West Gippsland, near Yallourn, prompted a public outcry and the State government tasked Stretton with the conduct of a second fire-related Royal Commission. In that report Stretton returned to a number of his earlier themes.

In summary, the impacts of Stretton’s investigations were to see initiatives that included:

• The first major public debates about the need to actively use (prescribed) fire, to help control the bushfire menace; with the use of prescribed fire subsequently becoming a major component of forest and woodland management in south-eastern Australia
• Changes to the Victorian ‘Forests Act’ with the Forests Commission taking complete responsibility for fire suppression and prevention on all public land including State forests, unoccupied Crown Lands, water catchments, and National Parks; plus a buffer extending one mile (1.6 km.) beyond public land boundaries onto private land. The change was huge and the Forests Commission’s related responsibilities grew from 2.4 million to 6.5 million hectares, or to around one-third of the State
• The movement of sawmills and associated small settlements to beyond the forest estate
• Stringent regulation of burning and fire safety measures associated with sawmills, grazing licensees and the general public
• The compulsory construction of ‘dugouts’ at forest sawmills, expansion of the forest road and firebreak network, and the construction of forest dams
• A much greater role for surveillance through the expansion of the fire tower network, the FCV’s communication system, and through the increasing use of aircraft; and
• The establishment of a single firefighting authority for ‘country Victoria’ (i.e. the non-metropolitan rural areas), bringing together the previous volunteer Bush Fire Brigades and Country Fire Brigades. A new ‘Country Fire Authority’ commenced operations in April 1945

Some 66 years later, in August 2010, a national Inquiry by the Australian Senate described itself, in its final report, as the nineteenth major bushfire-related inquiry to be conducted in Australia since 1939, and the third to be conducted federally since 2003. In evidence to the 2010 Inquiry, Professor Peter Kanowski (an author of a 2004 COAG Inquiry report, the first such national Inquiry in the nation’s history) said that his earlier Inquiry had identified:

‘….a repeated cycle of response by governments and the community to major fire events: first, suppression and recovery processes are always accompanied by assertions, accusations and allocations of blame, even while the fires are still burning; second, inquiries are established and report; third, recommendations are acted upon, to varying degrees; fourth, the passage of time sees growing complacency and reduced levels of preparedness... and the cycle begins again with the next major bushfire event…’ (COAG, 2004) ¹

Expanding on this theme, in what was to subsequently become an award-winning essay, and written within days of Victoria’s 2009 ‘Black Saturday’ fires - the deadliest peacetime disaster in the nation’s history - the Australian National University historian Professor Tom Griffiths sought to remind his readers of how Judge Leonard Stretton’s seminal Inquiry, in Victoria in 1939, had sought to find words adequately to describe how:

‘…rampant flame had scourged a country that considered itself civilised’,

and how Stretton went on to define,

‘an active, half-conscious denial of the danger of fire, and a kind of community complicity in the deferral of responsibility….’

Griffiths observed that,

‘…In the seventy years since 1939, we have lived through a revolution in scientific research and environmental understanding and we have come to a clearer understanding of the peculiar history and fire ecology of these forests. We have fewer excuses for innocence. We knew this terrible day would come. Why, then, was there such an appalling loss of life?...’ ²

¹Australian Senate. 2010. The incidence and severity of bushfires across Australia. Report of the Agricultural and Related Industries Select Committee. Commonwealth of Australia. 255 pp.
²Arguably the best recent summary of the fire threat faced by the community in S.E. Australia is found in the essay "We have still not lived long enough" by Griffiths, T., which was published by Inside Story on 16 February 2009. The essay won the Alfred Deakin Prize in the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

Resources

Report of the Royal Commission - The Commissioner, L. E. B. Stretton, submitted his Report on 16th May 1939.

Interstate Bush Fire Conference - Melbourne, August 1939

The Disastrous Forest Fires of January 1939, in Victoria - AV Galbraith (Empire Forestry Journal, Vol. 18, No. 1, July 1939)

The Hand of Man - The FCV produced a film about the fires and the post-fire recovery and timber salvage operations.

The 1939 Bushfires, Sun News-Pictorial - A paper was produced on or about the 17th January 1939 illustrating the impacts of the fires in a number of communities. The sale proceeds were to go to the Lord Mayor's 1939 Bush Fire Relief Committee. Note that in this publication the circumstances of the deaths of two FCV people, Charles Isaac Demby and John Hartley Barling, are not accurate.

Ordeal by Fire - The Week a State Burned Up.  WS Noble, 1977.

Black Friday. - An award-winning on-line documentary that was produced in 2003. It includes interviews with  Black Friday survivors; expert opinion and analysis; an interactive map that tracks the path of the fires; a timeline that places the fires in a local and international context; a media archive; and transcripts from the subsequent Royal Commission into the fires.

Victorian Year Book, 1938-39 (Extract)

Paper by C Irvine via B Marsden - looks incomplete. Part of submission to Royal Commission?