It later transpired that the Churchill fire, which started in a pine plantation, was deliberately lit and a 39-year-old Churchill man was arrested on suspicion of arson. On that particular Saturday - which later became known as Black Saturday - the Central Gippsland fires in and around the Latrobe Valley (just a 45 minute drive from where I grew up) burnt 32,860 hectares and killed 11 people. One-hundred and eighty people lost their lives, making them the deadliest fires in Australian history. Ten years ago, on 7 February 2009, in unprecedented hot weather conditions, a series of bushfires - 400 separate fires giving off the heat equivalent of 500 atomic bombs! - raged across the state of Victoria, wiping out everything in their path, including whole townships and hundreds and thousands of hectares of farmland and bushland. Non-fiction – paperback Hamish Hamilton 272 pages 2018.
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