Black Thursday, 6th Feb 1851
The weather reached record extremes. By eleven it was about 47 °C (117 °F) in the shade. The air cooled to 43 °C (109 °F) by one o'clock and rose to 45 °C (113 °F) around four o’clock.
Survivors claimed the air was so full of smoke and heat that their lungs seemed to collapse. The air was so dark it made the roads seem bright.
Pastures and plains became shrivelled wastelands: water-holes disappeared, creeks dried up, and trees turned into combustible timber. Clouds of smoke filled the air; forests and ranges became one large "sheet of flames".
The hot north wind was so strong that thick black smoke reached northern Tasmania, creating a murky mist, resembling a combination of smoke and fog.
Homes, crops and gardens were consumed by the rushing fire leaving a quarter of Victoria in a heap of desolate ruins. The community fled to water to escape the suffocating air around them, returning after everything was over to the sight of "blackened homesteads" and the charred bodies of animals that could not escape.
The weather at sea was even "more fearful than on shore". The intense heat could be felt 32 km out to sea where a ship came under burning ember attack and was covered in cinders and dust.
Overall, the disaster resulted in the death of twelve people, one million sheep, and thousands of cattle with 5 million hectares burnt.
The Picturesque Atlas of Australia (published 1866) noted;
The year 1850 had been one of exceptional heat and drought. Pastures had withered; creeks had become fissured clay-pans; water-holes had disappeared; sheep and cattle had perished in great numbers, and the sun-burnt plains were strewn with their bleached skeletons; the very leaves upon the trees crackled in the heat, and appeared to be as inflammable as tinder.
As the summer advanced, the temperature became torrid, and on the morning of the 6th of February, 1851, the air which blew down from the north resembled the breath of a furnace. A fierce wind arose, gathering strength and velocity from hour to hour, until about noon it blew with the violence of a tornado.
By some inexplicable means it wrapped the whole country in a sheet of flame —fierce, awful, and irresistible. Men, women and children, sheep and cattle, birds and snakes, fled before the fire in a common panic. The air was darkened by volumes of smoke, relieved by showers of sparks; the forests were ablaze, and, on the ranges, the conflagration transformed their wooded slopes into appalling masses of incandescent columns and arches.
Farm houses, fences, crops, orchards, gardens, haystacks, bridges, wool-sheds, were swept away by the impetuous on-rush of the flames, which left behind them nothing but a charred heap of ruins, and a scene of pitiable desolation. The human fugitives fled to water, wherever it could be found, and stood in it, breathing with difficulty the suffocating atmosphere, and listening with awe to the roar of the elements and the cries of the affrighted animals.
Many lives were lost, and the value of the property and live stock destroyed on "Black Thursday " can only be vaguely conjectured. Late in the evening a strong sea-breeze began to blow, driving back the heavy pall of smoke that had deepened the darkness of the night, and the next day dawned upon blackened homesteads, smouldering forests, charred carcasses of sheep, oxen, horses, poultry and wild animals, and the face of the country presented such an aspect of ruin and devastation as could never be effaced from the recollection of those who had witnessed and survived the calamity’’.
