Bushfires

Melbourne is the capital of possibly the most fire-prone territory in the world, and smoke and ash have often descended on Central Melbourne and flames have engulfed its suburban edges. Victoria is heavily forested with volatile eucalypts, has extensive pastures of long grass and is exposed to hot northerly winds from the inland, an incendiary combination. The massive inlet of Port Phillip Bay projects the city into the centre of its combustible hinterland. Aboriginal peoples transformed the landscape with their 'firestick farming', creating open woodlands of mature, well-spaced trees which colonists described as like a 'gentleman's park'. Tens of thousands of years of Aboriginal burning cultivated a squatter's dream. Settlers, by contrast, suppressed fire, and the dry forests thickened, unleashing wildfires of catastrophic proportions. Elsewhere, particularly in the wet mountain forests north and east of Melbourne where Aboriginal fire management was always minimal, such periodic holocaust fires were endemic.