Black Saturday: Yarra Valley Cricket Association secretary Keith Thompson looks back and reflects on cricket’s rebuild

Ten years after the devastation of Black Saturday, Yarra Valley cricket administrator Keith Thompson looks back on the day and cricket’s recovery in the region.

On February 7, 2009 Victoria was scarred by the worst bushfires since European settlement.

As temperatures soared to 47 degrees, a firestorm fanned by scorching gales swept across more than 45,000ha and claimed 173 lives while injuring more than 400.

Whole communities were wiped from the map.

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Aerial photograph of the cricket club rooms at Marysville, destroyed on Black Saturday Picture: Kelly Barnes

A decade on, the Yarra Valley, which felt some of Black Saturday’s worst, paused to look back on the disaster and the Yarra Valley Cricket Association’s long-serving secretary Keith Thompson was among them.

Most Saturday mornings during summer, cricketers would be packing their kitbags and heading to an oval ready for five hours at the crease or in the field.

With temperatures climbing and the wind as hot as a blast furnace, it was soon apparent that player safety demanded the association enact its extreme heat policy and postpone play for the day.

It was an early call that stopped many players heading into potentially dangerous situations.

“At the time, you have to make the decision early about what you’re going to do,” Thompson said. “The kids played in the morning. I can’t quite remember what time we called the afternoon off, but we normally try to do something by 11am.”​

As well as the heat policy consigning cricket to the sheds, a large number of players from Yarra Valley clubs are CFA volunteers and, on a day like Black Saturday with conditions as they were, many were on standby and unavailable for cricket.

“Certainly you’ve got Warburton, Powelltown and Marysville,” Thompson said. “Obviously they have people on call. A small town like Powelltown has three or four guys (from the team) on call, so they can’t be more than a few kilometres away.”​

Like most, Thompson said he’d been unaware of the full scale of the disaster with information very slow to trickle in from the devastated areas.

He said he spent much of the afternoon piecing together what he could from the radio and television coverage.

“I personally was with a couple of cricket people at my club, Seville, and I was in the club facilities throughout the day,” he said. “We spent the afternoon there so we could keep an eye on what was going on and so we could open up the ground as a public reserve (if it was needed as a fire refuge).”​

But as the full extent of the disaster became clear through Sunday, Thompson said it was soon apparent that many cricket clubs had been destroyed as indeed their entire communities had been.

The new Marysville Cricket Pavilion. Picture Ian Currie.

“The communities at St Andrews, Strathewen, Flowerdale, Kinglake, Marysville, from a cricket point of view it meant they had to start all over again,” he said. “Kinglake and Marysville certainly lost club members and had to start again.”​

Since then, the resilience of the devastated towns has been inspiring and part of the recovery process has been the rebuilding of the region’s sporting clubs.

Thompson said the YVCA was back on the park as soon as was humanly possible.

“It was business as usual,” he said. “Obviously we had to take into account the clubs that had been so drastically affected. And then it was what do we as a community and cricket need to do to help.

“It’s important for a community to have sport. Anything. Cricket, footy, the lawn bowls, a scouts club, anything.

“It’s important that cricket is there as well. (Marysville) has got some junior teams and a senior team and we really want to see that continuing.

“It’s fantastic for clubs in those towns to have teams going in any sport. It’s so hard to get them started again.”

Kinglake fought back to play in the 2009 YVMDFL grand final

Mount Evelyn veteran and YVCA scribe Christopher Anderson also reflected on the day.

“Senior cricket was called off, either late the day before or very early on the day. Not due to any fires that had started, but more due to the extreme heat and the involvement of many players in the CFA,” he said.

“The juniors did in fact complete their play in the morning with the temperature soaring into the mid to high 30s before they were finished at midday.

“For me, coach of Mt Evelyn at the time, we had organised to meet at the club around 2pm for a beer etc.

“The fires had just taken hold in Wandong when I left for the club and by the time I had left, about 4-5pm, there were fires everywhere through Kinglake, Yarra Glen and parts of Coldstream to the east. Melba Hwy and Maroondah Hwy were closed on the other side of Coldstream.

“Living in Coldstream, I was anxious to get home. We were on alert as parts of the land the tip is on was also ablaze.

“With conditions still extreme through the following week and clubs and members affected, the following weeks play was an unofficial round of T20 games.”

Black Saturday at Dixons Creek