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The forgotten inferno: Victoria’s Great Fires of 1926 and the lessons that shaped a nation

6 February 2026 / 4 Comments

The bushfires that swept across Victoria in 1926, a hundred years ago, are not as ingrained in Australian folklore as Black Friday in 1939 or Black Saturday in 2009. There are no monuments, no school references and no shorthand name etched into the national psyche. One reason is that there was no royal commission or formal inquiry to investigate what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again.

The 1939 fires – a blame game

“And of course there were ignitions by the fistful. Lightning kindled some fires, but most emanated from a register of casual incendiarists that reads like a roster of rural Australia: settlers, graziers, prospectors, splitters, mineworkers, arsonists, loggers and mill bushmen, hunters looking to drive game, fishermen hoping to open up the scrub around the streams, foresters unable to contain controlled burns, bush residents seeking to ward off wildfire by protective fire, travellers and transients of all kinds.