Forests burn and reason goes up in smoke: a family memoir

Fire burns through the stories of my family.

Workers leaving the Noojee area in Gippsland
after the 1939 Black Friday bushfires.

My Dad was still a boy when he set a bushfire roaring in 1933.

My great-grandfather got caught in a fence and was roasted in the Black Friday bushfires of 1939 that razed his family’s home. He lived. Wet hessian bags tossed upon his scorched back were his only relief for weeks.

In the 1980s my wife and I tossed children, dog and a neighbour who couldn’t walk into our car and screamed down the footpath ahead of a bushfire that had leapt a road and was clamouring at our house (firefighters, bless them, saved the day).

Read the opinion piece from The Age by Tony Wright - “Forests burn and reason goes up in smoke: a family memoir.”