214 AUSTRALIAN PICTURES. 



But the year 1886 unexpectedly witnessed a 'Black Thursday' on a 

 small scale. In one corner of Victoria are situated the Cape Otway ranges, 

 which are covered by fine forests and are the scene of a new and sparse 

 settlement — hardy pioneers venturing in advance of the railways which they 

 expect in due course to come up to them. The summer of 1886 opened 

 with great heat: ioo° F. was registered in the shade, and over 150 in the 

 sun. And soon the news spread in the towns and cities of a disaster at 

 the Otway. Steamers coming into port reported that they had passed 

 through a pitchy darkness in the straits. One of their log records reads : 

 ' Off Cape Otway at noon the darkness became so intense that it was 

 necessary to light the binnacle lamp. The gloom was caused by smoke. A 

 considerable quantity of ashes and charred sticks fell upon the deck.' This 

 smoky volume rolled across the straits to Tasmania, and it proclaimed the 

 fact that the forest was on fire. Fortunately to the south there is nothing 

 behind the forest but the sea. The northerly wind, which alone fans these 

 conflagrations, blew smoke and fire, not over parched tracts ready to burst 

 into flame, but across the straits towards Tasmania, and the enveloped ships 

 were not put in jeopardy, as hamlets would have been. At first it was 

 almost forgotten that the forest was no longer lonely, but was showing here 

 and there patches of occupation ; but so it was, and a sad tale of ruin was 

 soon told. Mr. S. H. Whittaker, who was on the heels of the flames as 

 an 'Argus special,' kindly supplies the following narrative: 'The night 

 before the great fire was an anxious one in the forest. There was an 

 ominous deep-red glow at sunset — a redness deepened by smoke rising from 

 distant hills. The settlers, as they watched the smoke from the highest 

 points near their selections, fervently hoped for a change of wind, for the 

 country, scorched by the heat of midsummer, was ready to burst into a 

 blaze. Daybreak brought with it the fierce north wind, fiery as the blast of 

 a furnace, and strong as a gale. The bush fires could be plainly seen from 

 many a homestead, but there was at first no apprehension of a general 

 calamity. Some damage is done in the forest every year by fire, but never 

 before has one hundred miles of country been left a smoking ruin. Never 

 before have the selectors been driven half-blinded from their houses, which 

 they had vainly sought to save, to find refuge only for their lives in their 

 small green patches of cultivation. The settlers had seen brushwood fires, 

 had fought the flames and conquered them after suffering some loss, and, 

 profiting by the experience, had cleared the brushwood around their home- 

 steads. The whole forest ablaze, the sky red with lighted fragments flying 

 before the high wind over cleared spaces, creeks, and roads, and igniting, 

 like the torches of a thousand incendiaries, fences, orchards, farms, crops, 

 and buildings in many places at once, had happily never been seen before. 

 The people vividly remember the scenes of that terrible day — how the 

 smoke made the day blacker than night, until the flames got nearer ; how 



