Views of the Bunyip Forest Fires:

These panoramas are from the lookout on the Main Neerim Road just south of Neerim, looking west. The Bunyip forest stretches some 40-50km west from here to the Dandenong Range just east of the Melbourne metropolitan area.

These pictures chart to progress of the fires at the eastern edge of a blaze that has burned out at least 25,000 hectares so far.

These panoramas are up to 4500 pixels wide. They are set to open in a new browser window. How a picture open depends on your computer but it might open fitted to the window, in which case you should be able to click on it to zoom in, or it might open full size in a window where you will need to scroll around to see all portion of the picture.

9/2/09: Two days after the main fire disaster, with widespread fires caused by spot fires driven north after the wind change later on 7/2/09.

11/2/09: Fires still burning, moving down from the hilltops towards the Tarago valley.

12/2/09: Fires whipped up by strong and gusting easterly winds (most unusual direction for here)

13/2/09: Two small helicopters are sucking water from the farm dam on the right and dumping it on the hotspots. One is hovering over the dam and the other is flying back towards the forest.

14/2/09: A quieter day in relation to wind but fires are still going.

24/2/09: This may give some idea as to the intensity of the fire. This was a patch of bush in Drouin West. It was not caught by the major fire front. This was a spot fire that jumped kilometres ahead of the main fire. The photos were taken 17 days after the fire. (1.6 Mb file)

NB:  Rain in mid-March 2009 was sufficient to to put out the remaining fires. However, fires were smouldering for at least 5 weeks after the major outbreak.

Aftermath

11/2/10: The same spot as the site in the photo above but one year later. It is hard to find the exact place since a number of trees killed by the fire had been removed to stop them falling on the road. It took several months for any regeneration to start (and indeed we thought the ground might have been sterilised by the heat of the fires). However, it is now covered with young wattles and eucalypts, well on the way to recovery. Even a significant proportion of the large eucalypts have trunks covered in new shoots.  (1.2Mb file)

1/11/09: Up on the ridge of the Bunyip Forest on a strange sort of misty day. In this region of the forest, all of the Mountain Ash eucalypts were killed by the fire. These were huge trees and the only sound here was that of the strips of dead bark several metres long rubbing against the white dead trunks in the wind.