It is 35 years ago that Victoria and South Australia were devastated by the Ash Wednesday bushfires. At the time I was 12 years old and living in Moama, New South Wales, a small town on the Murray River almost directly north of Melbourne.
The Age has republished on its website their report from February 17th 1983.
My home was well away from the fire area, but I can vividly remember watching the news on television and my whole family worrying about relatives living in the danger zone. I can remember the red sunrises and sunsets, and a kind of half-dark during the day as the smoke shadowed the sun, even though we were over 100km away from the fires themselves. My family had an old chest freezer on the covered back verandah of our house, and my sister and I drew pictures in the layer of ash and soot that covered it.
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| Map of the Ash Wednesday Fires in Victoria |
At the time it was the third worst fire toll in Australian history, after the 1939 Victorian bushfires which killed 71 people and the 1967 Tasmanian bushfires killed 62. Highways were cut, thousands were evacuated, hundreds of homes and businesses burned. Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser declared a state of emergency. Over 4000 firefighters, many of them volunteers, were deployed and in South Australia over 600 army personnel were mobilized to help. In a country so prone to devastating bushfires, Ash Wednesday stands out for the devastation it caused.
Hard to believe it's 35 years ago, when I can still remember it so clearly. I was 10 at the time, and lived in the Adelaide Hills. I had even packed up my things in the car ready to leave ... but we stayed and kept water on the roof and put out spot fires which started from embers, and fortunately the house was saved.
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