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Christine Ogilvie was in the living room of her Upper Plenty home, busy sewing a 1950s-style dress to wear swing dancing.
Except for a spy movie marathon on the TV casting light around the lounge, it was dark, the blinds drawn to keep out the February afternoon heat. Gordon, her husband and dance partner, was napping in their bedroom.
Suddenly, a neighbour rang, speaking quickly. Ogilvie tried to make sense of her harried tone.
“What do you mean you’re leaving?” said Ogilvie. “What fire?”
She opened the front door to see the dense bush around her home ablaze, a thick smoke descending.
Ogilvie was shocked: she had heard nothing from emergency authorities. Later, she would learn communication lines had been wiped out earlier in the day.
Her family had lived in the bush for a long time and were confident they could protect their home and lives when faced with a bushfire. But this fire was different; it was Black Saturday.
As Victorians leave behind another summer of powerful bushfires, the painful lessons from February 7, 2009 have been credited with saving lives.
Though the bushfires in January were similar in scale to Black Saturday (400,000 hectares in 2026, compared with 450,000 hectares in 2009), just one person was killed this bushfire season, while 173 lives were lost in 2009.
Experts partly attribute this to improvements in emergency communication, a focus on early evacuations, and cultural changes – three things that could have prevented the Ogilvies ever confronting the fire raging outside their front door.
These were also the top recommendations of the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission after it determined there was insufficient emphasis placed on evacuations and the focus had been on personnel and trucks, not communicating with the public.
Although there are many other differences between the 2026 and 2009 fires, the disparity in deaths was “certainly evidence of the efforts that have been made on a number of fronts to learn the lessons of Black Saturday”, said CFA chief officer Jason Heffernan.
“The notion of public information and warnings has been a real focus for fire and emergency services across the country. And as we know, unfortunately, it was the genesis of the Black Saturday fires in 2009 that really put a strong focus on what we are telling the community when we’re telling them.”
In 2009, the advice for Victorians threatened by bushfires was to “stay or go”: that the two safest options were to defend a well-prepared property or leave before the fire drew close and roads became dangerous. In its findings, the commission noted this policy “did not tell people they risked death and serious injury if they stayed”.
This meant many people believed they were equipped to defend their homes, only to find themselves overwhelmed and unprepared. Two-thirds of the dead perished inside their homes.
The CFA’s inept communication also left many oblivious to the size and speed of fires. In Marysville, although the nearest fire began at 3pm, the local restaurant was still taking bookings at 4pm.
On that day, Killian and Robyn Fitzpatrick were caught completely unaware. Robyn had been monitoring updates online, but when the power cut out, “communications in the town just came to a dead end”, Killian said.
The first sign of trouble, Killian said, was when he was up a ladder filling his gutters with water, and they were “hit with this red tsunami”.
The fire was on them in an instant. The couple sheltered inside as parts of their home began to melt around them. They say they prayed as they gazed at the fire outside their window.
Eventually, the inferno passed over them. They were able to rebuild. Now living in Yackandandah, Killian said in the many bushfire seasons they had lived through since, communication had improved by “more than 100 per cent”.
“Very few people die in fires 1772875877,” he said. “That is, I think, mainly because of communications.”
A survey by the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre of 301 survivors found that before the 2008-09 bushfire season, only 33 per cent of respondents said they received information on how to prepare.
Now, the CFA is clear: leaving early is the safest option. The organisation is also much more effective at spreading that message. The CFA ran a $200,000 bushfire safety advertising campaign in 2024-25, and more than 200,000 people were reached through community safety initiatives such as open days and school incursions.
From the state control centre’s headquarters, more than 2000 emergency warnings for bushfires and grass fires were issued this fire season straight to people’s phones, and on January 9 alone, 291 warnings were issued – the most ever on a single day. The VicEmergency app now has almost 6.4 million active users.
Combined, these improvements meant that in the recent fires, many threatened towns were fully and safely evacuated.
“As I talked to our firefighters on the ground, a lot of them recounted to me on the main fire days … people had heeded the advice of authorities and actually got out,” Heffernan said.
“Many of them describe places like Yarck and the like as ghost towns, which in a lot of ways really put them at ease in the fact that they could then really focus on fighting the fire.”
The CFA now intentionally provides limited advice on staying to defend properties, and Heffernan says people who do so increasingly say they regret it.
“A lot of them say they weren’t either physically prepared, or, more importantly, mentally prepared, for what they experienced … the fact that it all turns to darkness, you can’t hear anything for the roar of the fire,” he said.
Susan Pascoe, one of the commissioners for the Black Saturday royal commission, said improvements in policy were underwritten by a cultural shift.
“There does seem to be a change in mindset,” Pascoe told The Age. “That’s part of it, that if the behaviour of you and your neighbours is that you stay and defend that’s an expectation, then that’s the norm. But in fact, I do think the norm has been changed and [there’s] a much greater understanding … of the risk.”
She said the royal commission was by no means the “final, definitive word” on improving Victoria’s bushfire policies, but “I think we were an important part of that journey of coming to full maturity on what we’re dealing with in an era of climate change, in relation to fire”.
She also said the devastation of Black Saturday still loomed large in the minds of Victorians, and “there’s enough trauma”, which keeps people wary going into fire seasons.
For Christine Ogilvie, Black Saturday forever changed her perspective. She had always believed her family would defend their Upper Plenty home. On finding their house surrounded by flames, she woke her husband Gordon from his nap, and he sped up their driveway in his ute to try to fight the fire using a water tank he had slung onto the tray.
But when the flames reached their back paddock, Christine decided they had to leave, and jumped in another car to race up the driveway to warn her husband. But amid the chaos and smoke, she drove into him, pinning his legs between their vehicles.
Her son quickly helped lay Gordon into the ute’s tray, and the three of them tore out of town, eventually making it to safety at a relative’s house in Whittlesea. The family’s home, and Christine’s collection of hand-sewn dancing dresses, were lost. But the family survived.
Now, Christine says if faced with another fire, she would leave immediately and early, and that Black Saturday had “cured” a lot her community of its bushfire bravado.
“I think everybody else would just leave because none of us are equipped to defend our homes properly,” she said.
However, Heffernan said that despite the clear improvements in emergency preparedness, CFA research indicated “there has been a potential degradation of the community’s understanding of … the impact of bushfires”.
In part, this is because several relatively calm bushfire seasons have caused the mental scars of Black Saturday to fade for some. Research has also suggested Australians are still ignoring warnings to leave their homes on catastrophic fire days.
Pascoe, who spent 18 months forensically examining the state’s failings and the danger of bushfires, also urged vigilance, but because of a global threat.
Increased temperatures and drier vegetation due to climate change mean bushfire seasons are lasting longer and threats to communities have extended.
During the royal commission in 2009, Pascoe was shown CSIRO modelling that forecast that fires would become increasingly severe, all of which has “sadly come to pass”.
“It just points to the need now for hypervigilance and, really, a very high level of preparation because of the likelihood that we will see more of these extreme weather events, and they are really going to start to strain, I think, the tolerance and capability of people to manage them,” Pascoe said.
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Angus Delaney is a reporter at The Age. Email him at angus.delaney@theage.com.au or contact him securely on Signal at angusdelaney.31Connect via email.From our partners
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