Historical information
A colour photograph of the entrance to a fire dugout on Mount Margaret near Marysville in Victoria.
Significance
A colour photograph of the entrance to a fire dugout on Mount Margaret near Marysville in Victoria. The fire refuge dugout, which developed in the era of bush sawmilling in the early twentieth century, was a distinctive cultural response to the history of fire in the tall Victorian forests. Few dugouts were built in other forest regions of Australia, but those that did exist in these Victorian ranges saved dozens of lives in the fires of Black Friday 1939.
