NSW Meteorologist Mr Newman said a heatwave covered the southern half of Australia in which the temperature over great areas of Victoria, South Australia, and New South Wales exceeded 40 degrees.

There were many bushfires, with record March temperatures in all states except Queensland. Melbourne experienced five consecutive days of around 40 degrees; Adelaide, six. Bega reached 40 degrees; drought conditions prevailed over all of NSW except for the North Coast. It was March 12, 1940. It was also the continuation of conditions prevailing in late 1938 that led to the catastrophic ‘Black Friday’ Victorian fires on January 13, 1939.

New South Wales was not spared. On Thursday, January 12, 1939, Mr Underhill died in the Bega Hospital from burns received while fighting a grass fire near Springdale. In the district, 11 homes, a school, and three churches were lost. Firefighters saved the farms and homes of Jack Hergenham and Les Hetherington in Coopers Gully. The Pericoe School and Post Office were destroyed; women and children sheltered in the bed of the Towamba River. Bourke experienced 27 days over 40 degrees. Canberra’s official temperature was 42.5 with five days over 40; Queanbeyan reported 43.3 degrees.

Except that 46.1 degrees was reported in Bega on January 11, the fires of 1939 was a re-run of those in 1866, 1875, and 1884. The 1939 fires were also a re-run of the 1929 fires that destroyed the village of Numbugga, its school, teacher’s residence, Post Office, and thousands of acres of farmland.

In 1940, it repeated again. There were fires around Cobargo. Five houses and a general store were lost in Tathra and a police car was destroyed. Many residents escaped by sitting in the sea and under the wharf.

Same drought, different year – in 1946, 200 people fought desperately to save Wolumla from a fire that had been raging in the hills for a fortnight. They won. On January 7, Sydney experienced the hottest night in its then history – hundreds camped on beaches up and down the coast, three people died of heatstroke and 40 collapsed.

On January 25, 1952, fanned by strong, hot westerly winds, flames came out of the mountains to the north and almost burnt-out Bemboka. As reported on December 1, 2015, in the Bega District News, some people still remember fighting those fires. One told of flaming cow-pats hurling past like Catherine-wheels as their fire truck retreated from the advancing flames.

The 1952 fire claimed four lives including the Otton Sisters of Upper Brogo. Hundreds of people fought to save the Bega Hospital. At least three-quarters of the farmland in the Bega district was burnt out. Butter production was suspended for months.

There have been others in between, but then came 2013 when we all remember being advised to exercise our ‘fire plans’ in January when fire broke out near Brogo, and two homes were lost near Millingandi west of Merimbula. Then the Tathra fire in 2018, then the ‘Black Summer’ fires in 2019-20 that threatened Eden, Mallacoota, Mogo, and decimated the village of Cobargo.

The common theme of these disasters was several years of good forest and pasture growth, another year or two of average to below average rainfall, followed by a protracted dry winter-spring and early summer.

Under slow-moving high-pressure cells that sit over Alice Springs for days and weeks, searing temperatures radiate from a dry landscape larger than half of Europe. As they move slowly east, southeastern Australia is exposed to strong, dry, hot westerly winds that turn southwesterly and fan out into the Tasman Sea into a trough.

If Mr Newman knew this in 1940 and it was reinforced by Joseph Gentilli in his book Australian Climate Patterns (Nelson) in 1972, why don’t Australia’s current crop of ‘climate scientists’ also know the drivers that lead to bushfire disasters as have recently recurred in Victoria? What dumbo approved fencing each side the length of the Hume Freeway with wire-cable barriers which, in my opinion, cuts off escape routes and makes road reserves unmanageable fire traps?

The recipe for fire-disasters in Victoria, southern and central NSW, and the South Coast has been known for generations. There have been Royal Commissions, inquests, and inquiries galore – nevertheless a few good years and everyone goes to sleep, then as if they have never happened before, overwhelming bushfire disasters recur over and over again.

Putting out fires is high risk and no fun. The time to act is not after the systems form, but well before. It’s one thing to demonise forest industries and lock up millions of hectares in order to ‘protect’ biodiversity and ‘store carbon’ – it is quite another to manage the risk so it doesn’t turn into a summer fireball, which decimates everything as it has so many times in the past.

Dr Bill Johnston, scientist and former Bega Valley landholder. Bill’s submission to the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements is available here…