'The monster': a short history of Australia's biggest forest fire

On the afternoon of October 26, an unseasonably warm Saturday following a run of hot days, the wind picked up over the Blue Mountains and lightning stabbed at the ranges. One bolt made ground near a disused airstrip at Gospers Mountain, a densely grown area of the Wollemi National Park, and prickled the kindling into life. It would become the epicentre of the biggest forest fire to have started from a single ignition point that Australia has ever known.

Ken Mackett observed a plume of smoke curl above the ridge line from his home in Putty, about 30 kilometres north-east of the lightning strike, with a sense of unease. A volunteer with the Rural Fire Service, he knew that initially the National Parks and Wildlife Service would be responsible for putting it out. He also knew how difficult that task would be. Deep into the mountains, in country fractured by creeks, chasms and vertiginous escarpments, it was virtually inaccessible by land, and the bush had never been so brittle. After 10 years of below-average rainfall, the soil had become so dry that gum trees were keeling over and stacking up like a giant bonfire waiting to be lit.

By the end of the day the blaze had expanded to an area of 521 hectares, but in residential areas surrounding the park there was still nothing to see but smoke. A week passed and then another. "It sat there for a really long time," Mackett says. "And then it suddenly decided to come south-east."

The Gospers Mountain fire has now destroyed an area seven times the size of Singapore - more than 444,000 hectares from the western border of the Blue Mountains to the Central Coast hinterland, north to the Hunter Valley and south to the Hawkesbury and past the Bells Line of Road. Three weeks ago it combined with several fires to form a vast complex that has been dubbed "the mega fire". To those living in its shadow, it is known as "the monster".

But on November 12, it was just one among 300 fires that gripped the state on a day that conditions were rated catastrophic. Fanned by strong winds and temperatures in the mid-30s, the eastern seaboard from the Illawarra to Taree was ablaze, and the Gospers Mountain fire tore towards the coast like a beast on holiday. It was voracious.

Mellong, St Albans and Upper MacDonald were evacuated. Mackett was protecting properties with his brigade when the firefront approached. He heard a roar that first sounded like the wind in the trees, but got louder and louder.

"You can see the treeline 100 metres in front of you and then suddenly you can't see the treeline," he says.

"It's like a big black storm going past, but it's not a thunderstorm; it's a fire.

"What happens in fires, they create their own winds and they create their own weather patterns. The flames are in the smoke and they're up in the air. There's nothing for them to be burning in the air. They're just up there."

An aerial fire was now floating independently of the surface fire, and everything in its path would be obliterated.

By the end of the day, the fire had wiped out more than 30,000 hectares and presented peril in every direction. When the wind blew from the west, the fire blasted east. When it blew from the south, the fire swung north, its path jumbled only by the complexity of the valleys.

"People will say, 'This is a good wind change for us'," says Sarah Hyde, a volunteer with the Mount Irvine and Mount Wilson RFS. "And you know that a good wind change for us is a bad wind change for somebody else."

The Gospers Mountain fire on November 15.Credit: Nick Moir

In a residential area near the firefront, Kristi Bryant and her two children of Upper Colo spent the day in refuge at the library. They returned home after the southerly arrived in the afternoon. But when the wind changed again some days later, she bundled the family into the car and went on a road trip interstate, leaving her husband behind to fight the fires. The worst part of this fire, she says, is the waiting.

"We know it's coming, but we don't know what form it will take when it comes," she says. "Will it be slow when it comes? Is it going to be extreme? Is it going to give any warning?

"We've lived at Upper Colo for almost 20 years now and I haven't been on high alert for this amount of time, with such a massive fire coming. It's so huge and it's so hungry and it's so angry and the wind is volatile. I haven't seen anything like it."

By November 16, the fire had trebled in size to 90,000 hectares and was spreading south towards Colo Heights and west towards Glen Davis. In the Capertee Valley west of the mountains, the three local brigades prepared for the fire's advance by bulldozing a 100-kilometre ring of bushland at the bottom of the escarpment for trucks and helicopters to park. The townships of Glen Davis, Glen Alice and Bogee are situated at the bottom of the sandstone curtain, and peering up the cliff at night the blazing ridge was almost beautiful. "It was like someone had lit candles the whole way round the valley," one resident remarked.

Firefighters battle flare ups at Colo Heights on November 19.Credit: Dean Sewell

An air tanker dropped fire retardant over the valley to slow the fire's western advance on November 17. But the blaze would take its pound of flesh. On the southern front, it picked off a house at Colo Heights, retreated and returned three days later to destroy several more in its first serious advance into suburbia. It pressed east. On December 6, having destroyed 250,000 hectares, it joined the Little L and Paddock Run fires south of Singleton, the Three Mile fire on the Central Coast and the Thompson Creek fire in Yengo National Park to form a 60-kilometre front burning out of control.

By this time the Gospers Mountain blaze had set an Australian record for a fire lit from a single ignition point. "There's been bigger grass fires but, by any stretch, it's the biggest forest fire in Australian history," says Ross Bradstock, director of the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires at the University of Wollongong.

It was double the size of the Kilmore East fire that destroyed 125,000 hectares in Victoria's Black Saturday bushfires in 2009. It was significantly larger than California's 2018 Woolsey fire that burnt 39,000 hectares or the 2013 Rim Fire that burnt 104,000 hectares. Only the boreal forest fires that break out in Alaska, Siberia and Canada, which can expand to millions of hectares, have been larger.

"We're in a very different environment to Canada and the expanse of forest in Canada is enormous compared to Australia," Bradstock says. "Within the forests of mid-latitude regions - and this fire exceeds anything ever seen in the Mediterranean - this is a very significant fire."

Last Sunday, when the fire had grown to 350,000 hectares, a backburn went out of control near Mount Wilson and destroyed several houses in that town and Bilpin. It is now marching towards the Mount Piper power plant and Springvale coal mine, which would take months to extinguish. The irony of the coal-fired power station being destroyed by a bushfire that was partially the product of a drier climate is summed up by Bradstock as "the ultimate climate change feedback loop".

Firefighters at Mount Tomah on Monday.Credit: Nick Moir

Alpaca farmer Wendy Williams, whose property at Bogee in the Capertee Valley is just beyond the fire's western frontier, feels its advance is inevitable.

"Even at my place you've got six inches of dry gum leaves underfoot," Williams says. "It's so dry the eucalypts are falling over and you've got rows and rows and rows of trees that are fuelling the fire. The biggest fear is always that a fireball will blow across national park escarpment and right across the valley."

Mackett's home town of Putty has been taunted by the fire since October 26. "People just want this to be over," Mackett says. "The thing that's going to make it stop is when there's nothing left to burn. There are landowners saying, 'I just wish it would come through here now,' because then they don't have to wake up and worry about it again."

Eight weeks after the lightning strike, the Gospers Mountain fire burns brighter than ever. Its southern flank is divided by about 20 kilometres of bushland from the Ruined Castle and Green Wattle Creek fires west of Campbelltown - roughly the same distance that embers can travel on the wind.

NSW Fire and Rescue attempt to hold the Gospers Mountain Fire from crossing the Bells Line of Road on Thursday. It roared over the road, destroying power lines.Credit: Nick Moir