Fire! Fire!
Posted 13 February 2009 // Jock Phillips
Burning the bush, Taranaki
The appalling news of the bush fires in Victoria invites the question as to whether New Zealand and not Australia is the lucky country.
It is true that we have never lost such huge numbers of people in fires. As the 1966 New Zealand Encyclopaedia records, the two fires with the greatest loss of life in our recorded history were fires in buildings, not bush fires. The worst was the fire in Ballantyne’s department store in Christchurch in November 1947. Forty-one people died, many trapped in the upper storeys.
Almost five years before, in December 1942, fire broke out in a locked ward in Seacliff Mental Hospital in Dunedin. The ward held ‘difficult women’ and only two of them escaped. Thirty-nine suffered terrible deaths.
There have been famous bush fires in New Zealand. Farmers often used fire to clear scrub. In his book New Zealand’s burning Rollo Arnold described the drought in the summer of 1885–86 that provided the dry timber for the burning of large areas in Canterbury, Hawke’s Bay and Taranaki. The town of Raetihi was also razed in a bush fire which sent up huge billows of smoke in 1918. But few died in these rural conflagrations.
Fireman in the wreckage after the Napier earthquake
Yet, before we get too smug, it is worth pondering the news comments that the recent bush fires are Australia’s greatest ‘natural disaster’ in terms of loss of life. Of course the New Zealand fires were not ‘natural disasters’ – they were very much man-made. But, as the horrifying death toll in Victoria approaches 200, we should recall that the Napier earthquake in 1931 cost 258 lives and the Tangiwai rail disaster in 1953 caused by a lahar resulted in the deaths of 151. Even these numbers are small by comparison with the greatest death toll in one day in New Zealand history, which was very much man-made, not natural – 12 October 1917 at Passchendaele, when some 845 New Zealanders lost their lives.
So when in Australia beware of the bush, in New Zealand beware of earthquakes and volcanic activity, and in both countries beware of war.
