Yeah awesome. You should post more of your photos @Toast
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Extraordinary photos. Talk about capturing the moment. The colours and the detail. Amazing.
I have never felt so small and insignificant as standing in front of a bushfire in full fury.
We build this illusion of control and power as humans living our urban technological lives, that gets torn down in a hurry.
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These photos should be spread far and wide. A lot of people naively feel they could put up a decent fight against a fire but have no idea of the reality of what a fire brings with it. They expect the heat, flames and wind but have little understanding of the power, the unpredictability, the gagging smoke, the embers, the sucking away of all breathable oxygen, the speed and size of a huge fire front. Most importantly they donât know how they are going to react in these situations. Panic? Freeze? Run?
The more we see of these photos, the better weâre informed of our own capabilities or lack thereof.
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Donât want to be too negative but I still canât see the end of this until we get a major rain event and prolonged cool/damp weather, and I canât see anything in the forecast for at least a month - and it may be much longer. The perimeters are so large and in such heavily farm/hamlet/town populated areas the CFA must be stretched super thin. Every wind direction - even a falsely reassuring cool southerly/westerly - threatens somewhere. And if a big northerly gets up again itâll be serious trouble.
They arenât even really discussing the fire in the back-blocks that has run about half way from east of Mt Howitt around Wonnangatta to Bairnsdale. Not sure what stops this going through Dargo/Hotham/Harrietville without some serious rain.
In Melb at least Iâve seen this a pattern for the part few years - cool and very wet spring well into late November and even December, then after New Year, very very long dry stretch. Last year at my place in the outer east we had ONE day of significant rain between New Yearâs and June, and we just got improbably lucky that it happened on the day a dangerous bushfire broke out in Montrose and was starting to head up Mt Dandenong.
Not sure to what degree that pattern has also been followed north of the Divide, but with every year it happens it looks uncomfortably like a ânew normalâ climate change shift rather than just some fluky weird weather.
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Mate with farm at Alex was calling it a âfailed Springâ into October. Then late Oct and Nov they got about 4 times long term ave rain - maybe early Dec but canât recall. And then it stopped. They had heaps of hay/silage and paddock feed. It was looking great regardless of any more rain - until wiped out Friday.
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Yeah, I live on a remnant bush block in the outer east, and I lost a scary amount of mature gums to the dry in the first half of 2025. Rain was well below average until October or so when we had a few absolute bucketings. But nothingâs flowering at the right time of year, too many plants were stressed from the first half dry, then there was a false spring with some warm weather in August/September which led many plants to flower before the pollinating insects were around to do anything about it.
October rains saved us this year, but the whole structure of the ecosystem is clinging on by its fingernails.
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I fear NSW may in this position soon, been dry for many months and super hot.
Take care all.
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Yeah, although I think Eucs in particular, while they do have âmost commonly flower inâ periods, if you look at various books, many species have always been reported to flower months away from those periods. And some can not flower for several years, or flower in consecutive yearsâŚ
Yeah, the eucs will cope with the disrupted flowering (if they manage to survive the dry, of course). ITâs the shrubs and understorey that suffered. My daviesia were almost wiped out over summer and the few survivors had no resources left to spend flowering, the bush peas (including one incredibly rare specimen that Iâve got the Botanic Gardens botanists all salivating over) produced about a 10th of the usual amount of flowers and it was all too early. Cherry ballarts copped it hard, so did blackwoods, I lost a lot of both, hakeas flowered scarcely, there were almost no sun or onion orchids, many many others. My bushland management guru reckons that on my property weâre seeing an ecosystem zone change as the climate changes, from bundy woodland to a more open grassland type thing where the canopy disappears cos the bigger trees will all eventually succumb to one of the more regular dries, and the mosses and shade-dependent small plants die out once theyâre exposed.
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They should get a decent control line in the grasslands during the cooler weather. Probably take a week of effort to black out the more forested edges. The more days without strong winds, the more chance the control lines will hold.
What people donât appreciate is the majority of work comes in the weeks after a fire. Every ember, every branch, every stump needs to be raked over and soaked for 30m back from the edge of the burn. Scale that up over how many kilometres the fire edge runs and you get a truly enormous physical effort.
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These fires have potential to wipe out rare trees directly. Mate who had evacuated Lima Sth is one of only a few private properties with Eucalyptus Alligatrix sub sp Limaensis. Most are in Torresâs or nearby crown land. Theres only 300 ish trees in total, all in that area, and the botanists working on it reallllly struggle to grow from seed and get those seedlings that do germinate to last. If this fire gets over the strathbogies that far, the sub-species could plausibly disappear.
Yeah - mate at Delatite today described to me a fire that broke from a stump days after he had doused it over a long period and it had no smoke or heat as deep as they could feel. Turned out it was smouldering underground in the long dead roots. He said when they took a thermal camera to other depressions where long dead redgums had been burnt out, they found many deep hot spots capable of reigniting, even more days later.
Hopefully you are right and control is possible for significant areas. None of that applies to the remote deep forest south from Wonnangatta.
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Such sad news. You canât outrun the beast.
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You cannot outrun a bushfire
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Flog of the highest order. Didnât he proclaim himself a sovereign citizen?
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