The Ash Wednesday bushfires, known in South Australia as Ash Wednesday II, were a series of bushfires that occurred in south-eastern Australia on 16 February 1983, which was Ash Wednesday. Within twelve hours, more than 180 fires fanned by winds of up to 110 km/h (68 mph) caused widespread destruction across the states of South Australia and Victoria. Years of severe drought and extreme weather combined to create one of Australia's worst fire days in a century. The fires became the deadliest bushfire in Australian history until the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009.
In Victoria, 47 people died. There were 28 deaths in South Australia. This included 14 CFA and 3 CFS volunteer fire-fighters who died across both states that day.
While the full extent of the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires is yet to be measured, there have been a number of large scale bushfires recorded in Australian history. The widespread 1938-9 fires in Victoria, NSW, South Australia and the ACT similarly gained international headlines when the fires entered the Sydney suburbs, as did the 1994 eastern seaboard fires. The 1851 Black Thursday bushfires shocked colonial Australia with their ferocity, burning a quarter of what is now Victoria (around 5 million hectares (12 million acres)). Lesser known is that about 117 million hectares (290 million acres), or 15 per cent of Australia's land mass, experienced fire in the summer of 1974–5. NSW was again badly affected, and three people killed, however the fires were mainly in sparsely populated inland areas.
The five most deadly blazes were:
Black Saturday 2009 in Victoria (173 people killed, 2000 homes lost); Ash Wednesday 1983 in Victoria and South Australia (75 dead, nearly 1900 homes); Black Friday 1939 in Victoria (71 dead, 650 houses destroyed), Black Tuesday 1967 in Tasmania (62 people and almost 1300 homes); and the Gippsland fires and Black Sunday of 1926 in Victoria (60 people killed over a two-month period).
The plaque at the site reads:
To commemorate the volunteers who gave willingly of their time and service in a day of devastation.
Ash Wednesday 16th February 1983
"The day when a fiery inferno enveloped hundreds of houses and farms, thousands of sheep and cattle, pine plantations, even family and friends"
Your task: Take a photo (options below) at the Ash Wednesday Memorial Monument and INCLUDE the photo with your FOUND log.
Failure to complete the task will see you log discreetly deleted.
PLEASE DO NOT message the photo, upload photo with your online log
You may choose one (or more) of the following options:
- A photo of yourself (no face required)
- A piece of paper with your team name
- GPS or personal item (TB, etc) with team name
Virtual Rewards 2.0 - 2019/2020
This Virtual Cache is part of a limited release of Virtuals created between June 4, 2019 and December 31, 2020. Only 4,000 cache owners were given the opportunity to hide a Virtual Cache. Learn more about Virtual Rewards 2.0 on the Geocaching Blog.