Black Saturday at Steels Creek
Tuesday 16 July 2013
Peter Stanley, Scribe Publications, May 2013.
The Black Saturday bushfires killed 173 people — wreaking a greater human toll than any other fire in Australia’s history. Ten of those victims died in Steels Creek, a small community on Melbourne’s outskirts. It was a beautiful place, which its residents had long treasured and loved. By the evening of 7 February 2009, it felt like a battlefield.
Prize-winning historian Peter Stanley tells the dramatic stories of this small piece of country on that one terrifying evening — of epic fights to save houses, of escapes, and of deaths. He also tells the tale of a community — of people’s attachments to the valley and to each other — and how, over the weeks and years that followed, they lived with the aftermath of the fire.
The most detailed account of any one community to emerge from the fire, Black Saturday at Steels Creek shows what Black Saturday means not only for Steels Creek, but also for Australia as a whole.
More information at Scribe's website.
This book was Peter Stanley's major contribution to the The Victorian Bushfire Research Project, a collaboration between historians Tom Griffiths, Christine Hansen, and Peter Stanley, filmmaker Moira Fahy, and the residents of Steels Creek.
