Remembering Black Saturday

Yesterday marked one year since the Black Saturday bush fires that killed 173 people.

I have to say, it’s left me a little on edge. There’s a lot of hype about fire safety and preparation this year and it’s given me a kind of quiet paranoia. We live about 20km from the edge of where the Kinglake bush fires reached last year. A lot of our friends lived in badly hit areas, but thankfully they all managed to survive, and most of their homes did as well.

We were lucky last year. The suburb we live in is basically the first real, densely populated suburb before all the proper bush areas start, and the fires didn’t spread that far. They easily could have though. So I’m quietly a little tense at the moment while we hit the hot period that caused so much trouble last year.


On what ended up being Black Saturday last year, we knew it was going to be a hot day so we headed into the city before sunrise to take some photos. I shot this one at about 6:30am, and even though the colours are pretty wild, it doesn’t really do justice to the intense colour of the sunrise. Everything was bathed in this incredible red and yellow light. The whole city was glowing.



It’s really just odd how a day that started out with something so beautiful could turn into something so nasty. I shot this one at about 7am, and not long after this, it had gotten so hot that we had to head home.



I think in the end it reached about 47 degrees C (117 F) and the wind speed was about 100km/h plus. But at 6am it was a beautiful, balmy, calm morning.

So you can’t help but be a little paranoid when you wake up to a beautiful morning and the forecast is for high temperatures and you just want to close all the curtains and turn on the air conditioning so you can’t see what’s going on outside. I suspect it will be a long time before the paranoia subsides.