How Victoria's largest bushfire on Black Thursday shaped the state

Detailed summary

It shaped colonial-era Victoria and is remembered as being a "baptism of fire" for the Garden State. But few today know about the Black Thursday bushfire.

"The country from the Murray to the sea was brown with desiccated herbage, and forests charged with resinous matter baked to the verge of conflagration," Henry Gyles Turner wrote in History of the Colony of Victoria.

As temperatures soared into the 40s across the state, fires took hold of what was then the Port Phillip colony.

Five million hectares of land burned from the Wimmera, south to Mount Gambier and Portland, across to Port Fairy, Geelong and Barwon Heads and through the Macedon, Plenty and Dandenong Ranges around Melbourne's north and east.

Black Thursday is believed to have killed 12 people and more than 1 million livestock.

While Victoria has faced deadlier fires since, the state has never seen a bushfire of such widespread intensity.

The blaze prompted changes to government, policy and even post-colonial society, shaping Victoria as we know it today.

The Port Phillip District was only months away from separating from New South Wales and becoming Victoria when Black Thursday reduced huge swathes of it to ash.

Melbourne University School of Culture and Communication lecturer Fiannuala Morgan said the impact of that fire could be seen in stories, poems and paintings of the time.

"The fire itself is tied up with the birth of [Victoria]; a baptism of fire, of sorts," Dr Morgan said.

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