DEFINING MOMENTS
Black Thursday bushfires1851: Black Thursday bushfires devastate the colony of VictoriaPrelude to the Victorian bushfires
Permanent European settlement in Victoria began at Portland in 1834, and at Melbourne in 1835.
In February 1851, only a few months before the area achieved its status as a colony independent of New South Wales, the settlers confronted their first cataclysmic bushfires.
The fires followed a period of unusual and erratic weather. 1848 had seen heavy rainfall, followed by drought.
Then high temperatures in the summer of 1848–49 led to significant bushfire risk. The following winter Europeans saw snow for the first time in Melbourne, followed by deluges and floods.
High rainfall in 1849 encouraged the build-up of vegetation throughout the colony, only for further drought in 1850 to dry it out.
The following summer of 1851 was long and hot. For weeks before Black Thursday, bushfires raged uncontrolled in the Plenty Ranges, north-east of Melbourne.
There were also fires on Mount Macedon to the north and in the Pyrenees to the west. A newspaper proposed a ban on smoking on the road to Sydney, to minimise the risk of starting new fires.
Black Thursday
Thursday 6 February 1851, the day which would become known as ‘Black Thursday’, was the hottest day the European settlers could remember. It was 110 degrees Fahrenheit(43.3 degrees Celsius) in the shade.
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/black-thursday-bushfires
