page_title: Black Friday bushfires
section_title: Stretton Royal Commission and long-term consequences
hierarchical_section_title: Black Friday bushfires / Effects in Victoria / Stretton Royal Commission and long-term consequences
caption_attribution_description: English: Uniform trees in Victoria's Central Highlands, showing regrowth 69 years after the 1939 Black Friday fires. The foreground is an area devastated by recent logging.
context_page_description: The Black Friday bushfires of 13 January 1939, in Victoria, Australia, were part of the devastating 1938–1939 bushfire season in Australia, which saw bushfires burning for the whole summer, and ash falling as far away as New Zealand. It was calculated that three-quarters of the State of Victoria was directly or indirectly affected by the disaster, while other Australian states and the Australian Capital Territory were also badly hit by fires and extreme heat. As of 3 November 2011, the event was one of the worst recorded bushfires in Australia, and the third most deadly.
  Fires burned almost 2,000,000 hectares of land in Victoria, where 71 people were killed, and several towns were entirely obliterated. Over 1,300 homes and 69 sawmills were burned, and 3,700 buildings were destroyed or damaged. In response, the Victorian state government convened a Royal Commission that resulted in major changes in forest management. The Royal Commission noted that "it appeared the whole State was alight on Friday, 13 January 1939".
  New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory also faced severe fires during the 1939 season.
context_section_description: The subsequent Royal Commission, under Judge Leonard Edward Bishop Stretton (known as the Stretton Inquiry), attributed blame for the fires to careless burning, campfires, graziers, sawmillers and land clearing.
  Prior to 13 January 1939, many fires were already burning. Some of the fires started as early as December 1938, but most of them started in the first week of January 1939. Some of these fires could not be extinguished. Others were left unattended or, as Judge Stretton wrote, the fires were allowed to burn "under control", as it was falsely and dangerously called. Stretton declared that most of the fires were lit by the "hand of man".
  Stretton's Royal Commission has been described as one of the most significant inquiries in the history of Victorian public administration.
  As a consequence of Judge Stretton's scathing report, the Forests Commission Victoria gained additional funding and took responsibility for fire protection on all public land including State forests, unoccupied Crown Lands and National Parks, plus a buffer extending one mile beyond their boundaries on to private land. Its responsibilities grew in one leap from 2.4 to 6.5 million hectares (5.9 to 16.1 million acres). Stretton's recommendations officially sanctioned and encouraged the common bush practice of controlled burning to minimise future risks.
  Its recommendations led to sweeping changes, including stringent regulation of burning and fire safety measures for sawmills, grazing licensees and the general public, the compulsory construction of dugouts at forest sawmills, increasing the forest roads network and firebreaks, construction of forest dams, fire towers and RAAF aerial patrols linked by the Commissions radio network VL3AA to ground observers. The Commission's communication systems were regarded at the time as being more technically advanced than those of the police and the military. These pioneering efforts were directed by Geoff Weste.
  Victoria's forests were devastated to an extent that was unprecedented within living memory, and the impact of the 1939 bushfires dominated management thought and action for much of the next ten years. Salvage of fire-killed timber became an urgent and dominant task that was still consuming the resources and efforts of the Forests Commission a decade and a half later.
  It was estimated that over 6 million cubic meters of timber needed to be salvaged. This massive task was made more difficult by labour shortages caused by the Second World War. In fact, there was so much material that some of the logs were harvested and stockpiled in huge dumps in creek beds and covered with soil and treeferns to stop them from cracking, only to be recovered many years later.
  Further major fires later in the 1943–44 Victorian bushfire season and another Royal Commission by Judge Stretton were key factors in the founding of the Country Fire Authority (CFA) for fire suppression on rural land. Prior to the creation of the CFA the Forests Commission had, to some extent, been supporting the individual volunteer brigades that had formed across rural Victoria in the preceding decades.
  The environmental effects of the fires continued for many years and some of the burnt dead trees still remain today. Large areas of animal habitat were destroyed. In affected areas, the soil took decades to recover from the damage of the fires. In some areas, water supplies were contaminated for some years afterwards due to ash and debris washing into catchment areas.
caption: 69 years later: Eucalypt regrowth in an area affected by the 1939 fires. The trees make up a single cohort, with little diversity in age or size. The foreground includes part of a coup which has recently been logged and burnt.
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