Thank Gawd the scientists weren't about in 1851. There would have been a lot of soiled underwear.
1851: Black Thursday bushfires devastate the colony of Victoria
On ‘Black Thursday’, 6 February 1851, European settlers in Victoria faced their first catastrophic bushfires, which burnt a quarter of the colony.
James Fenton, in Bush Life in Tasmania Fifty Years Ago, recalled how the Victorian fires appeared to an observer on the north coast of Tasmania:
Prelude 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.
