Ash Wednesday

Tucked away near the bottom of the world, the island of Tasmania is an Australian state more or less renowned as the home of Errol Flynn and the Tasmanian wolf. Beyond that, it serves mainland Australia 150 miles to the north as a market garden, raising crisp fruits and vegetables on its tidy farms and in its verdant apple orchards. Inland from the quaint, Georgian-styled capital of Hobart (pop. 116,000) the island is windy and rugged, forested with towering oaks and giant eucalyptus trees, which rank among the world's tallest hardwoods. Last week those forests brought Tasmania some unwanted renown: the most disastrous fire in Australian history.

It came with awesome speed. At one moment on Ash Wednesday morning, there were a few isolated bush fires guttering on the slopes of Mount Wellington above the capital; the next minute it seemed that all Hobart was ablaze. Fanned by winds that rose to 70 m.p.h. and abetted by 102DEG temperatures, the bush fires formed an 80-mile-long scythe of flame that slashed toward the coast, cutting off the entire southern half of the island. The flames trapped busloads of tourists in the apple country and carloads of fleeing farmers; they swept into Hobart's suburbs, blowing up a dynamite factory, gutting a brewery, and raising a thick, acrid pall of smoke that shut down the Hobart airport. In fact, the fire wiped out three of the island's burgeoning industries: a brewery, a fish cannery and a carbide plant. Trees exploded in the heat. Gutted paddocks sent up a stench of incinerated livestock. Houses melted. Autos burst into heaps of twisted black junk.

Weird and tragic turns of fate marked the fire's progress. Two men climbed a gum tree to escape deceptively low flames in the tinder-dry grass; the resinous tree erupted like a match, gluing their bodies to its trunk. In the coastal resort of Snug, villagers ran into the sea and watched neck deep as their town disappeared. An elderly man and his wife ran for their lives as the river of flame roared toward their house; the fire changed its course, and their bodies were found 100 yards from their untouched home. When the flames neared a touring circus, keepers freed the elephants so that they could escape to the bush. The elephants were more sensible: they went to a water trough and doused themselves, then returned to their vans. The bush caught fire, but the vans pulled out just in time.

By week's end, the blaze had burnt itself out, leaving much of the island a wasteland of charred chimneys. At least 52 Tasmanians died in the fire, and more than a thousand homes were destroyed; total damage was estimated at $500 million. Flying into Hobart when the smoke cleared, Prime Minister Harold Holt walked amid the rubble of what he called "the nearest thing to a blitzed city that I hope we ever see in this country." Some stunned survivors thumbed through Old Moore's Almanac for 1967 and laid the blame on the stars. Said Moore's: "From January to July, there are unfavorable signs relating to the timber industry. These are expected to manifest themselves in a number of almost disastrous forest fires when Mars forms a square to Jupiter."

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