We are not really into New Year celebrations any more and on New Year’s Eve we were in bed by 10.00 pm. Regardless of whether we were awake or not, Midnight would come and the calendar would click over to 2026. As expected, we awoke to find the new year had arrived and the newspapers were full of images of the spectacular display of fireworks from the rooftops of Melbourne’s tall buildings.
Today, we enjoyed our first picnic of the year. We travelled to Castella Park at Toolangi. It has some nice picnic facilities with tables both undercover and outdoors. There are BBQ facilities and well-maintained public toilets. We have always found it easy to find a picnic table there and today was no exception. This spot is in a forested area that encloses it nicely although there is some noise from vehicles travelling past on the Melba Highway.
We had two choices for our return trip to home – turning left to travel through Healesville, or turning right to come home via Kinglake and Whittlesea. Strangely, there is no lake at Kinglake, nor is there any sea at Whittlesea. Kinglake was named after British historian Alexander William Kinglake, who wrote an eight-volume history of the Crimean War. Whittlesea was named, by a surveyor, after the town of Whittlesey in England. It was originally known as Upper Plenty.
Along the road Whittlesea, we came acrosss a simple roadside local memorial to the devastating bushfires of February 7, 2009.The fires on that Black Saturday were a series of bushfires that either ignited or were already burning across the state on that day. They were one of Australia’s all-time worst bushfire disasters. The fires occurred during extreme bushfire weather conditions and resulted in Australia’s highest-ever loss of human life from a bushfire with 173 fatalities.
Since then, February 7 has become widely referred to as Black Saturday.A week before the fires, a significant heatwave affected southeastern Australia. Melbourne broke temperature records by experiencing three consecutive days above 43 °C (109 °F), with the temperature peaking at 45.1 °C (113.2 °F) 30 January – the third hottest day in the city’s history.The fire at Kinglake was just one of the 400 individual fires that were recorded on that day.
The fire near here was the largest of the many fires burning, ultimately destroying over 330,000 ha (820,000 acres). It was also the most destructive, with over 1,800 houses destroyed and 159 lives lost in the region.A later investigation found that the fire was started by high winds that felled a 2 km section of power lines owned by SP AusNet in Kilmore East (about 60 km away).
The ferocity of thos fires resulted in a change of risk ratings for bushfires. Previously they were graded from Low – Moderate – High – Very High. The new ratings (moderate – high – extreme – catastrophic) are evident in the warning sign that is next to the memorial.
The fire was so bad that the tree trunks in the surrounding forest are still blackened even though they have recovered with new leaves and branches. On the top of the nearby hills, the ridges are covered with skeletons of trees that can be seen against the skyline.
Summer has finally arrived here after a cool and wet spring. The weather for today and the next foreacst period has temperatures ranging from today’s 28C to highs of 35C. We are looking forward to more days like today.
A lovely way to celebrate the New Year.
It looks very calm and peaceful.