By Kath Gannaway
FORESTS Commission employees Charles Demby from Toolangi and John Barling from Pascoe Vale were the first of 71 people to perish in the 1939 Toolangi fires.
Charles’ son Alex was with the group of 10 commission men who, with fires fast approaching Toolangi on Sunday 8 January 1939, went out to investigate.
Alex says that as a 16-year-old, he doesn’t remember being horrified by the holocaust exploding around him.
“But I should have been,” he says, reflecting on a day which robbed he and his sister Alice of their father, and his mother Mona of her husband.
When Barling went ahead of the group and didn’t return quickly, Alex said his father went to look for him.
A sudden wind change proved perilous.
Under the guidance of Alex Blackmore, an experienced forestry man, the remainder of the group, R. Taubet, G. Mitchell, Syd Biggs, C. Ship, George Biggs, J. Monk and young Alex, walked and ran ahead of the advancing fire, north towards Glenburn.
They came out at a farm property owned by a Mr Penrose.
Seventy years on Alex remembers the day vividly.
“The fire was coming up the hill against the wind when it changed from a strong northerly to a howling southerly which blew sparks and lit fires all around us.
“I can remember it racing through the tops of the trees, dropping hot embers on us,” he said.
Earlier on a huge limb had fallen, landing just feet away from him.
“I didn’t hear it; that was my first survival that day. Walking out of the bush alive was his second. He adds, fatalistically, “I wasn’t meant to be killed that day.”
Though exhausted by their ordeal, the men were faced with another challenge.
A separate fire was bearing down on the farmhouse.
“It was right on the edge of the forest. The gases from the eucalypts exploded and killed all the sheep and I remember two little girls there howling their eyes out,” Alex said. “They were petrified.”
“A fireball came through and burned about 20 acres in about two or three minutes – it just exploded.
“They never had any proper fire-fighting gear; they just had buckets, but we saved the house.”
Alex says his father was strong and fit, a member of the 4th Light Horse who had survived Beersheba.
“He was such a good bushman, I thought he would be all right,” he said. “When I got home mum was upset; she knew he wouldn’t be back.”
Reflecting on the tragedy, and growing into manhood without his father, he said “I later felt proud of what he did. I was fully occupied at that time with all sorts of thoughts, but they found he had been carrying Mr Barling … .”
Alex was a member of the Toolangi Fire Brigade for many years before moving to Queensland.
