Leonard Edward Bishop Stretton

From an early age Leonard was brought up at the then-rural Campbellfield, north of the city, but the family returned to the suburbs when his father won the Tattersall's Sweepstake in 1902.

[2] The Black Friday bushfires on 13 January 1939 where nearly 2 million hectares burnt, 69 sawmills were destroyed, 71 people died and several towns were entirely obliterated became a landmark in the history of the State of Victoria.

[6] The Victorian Premier, Sir Albert Arthur Dunstan appointed Judge Stretton on 25 January 1939[7] to chair a Royal Commission and hearings began within weeks of the fires into the relationship of people to the forest.

[8] Hearings were not only conducted in Melbourne but also where fires had impacted townships like Healesville, Powelltown, Kinglake, Marysville, Colac, Forrest, Lorne as well as far-flung communities such as Omeo.

"[9] Farmers, graziers and bush workers blamed the Forests Commission Victoria as well as the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (MMBW) for an overly zealous fire-suppression policy.

[6] The report stated that "they had not lived long enough" which pointed to the short experiences and lack of accumulated wisdom of European settlers of the natural rhythms of the Australian bush and how they could never have a full understanding of what might, and did, happen.

[9] He reported that hundreds of small fires smouldered unattended in the week leading up to Black Friday, when, fanned by the gale-force winds, they joined to create the inferno.

While there had been other major bushfires during the summer of 1943-44 the Yallourn fire had spread into the nearby opencut coalmine and power station which had threatened Melbourne's electricity supplies.

[16] Prior to the creation of the CFA, the Forests Commission had, to some extent been supporting individual volunteer brigades which had formed across rural Victoria in the preceding decades.

[17] Stretton’s inquiry was at the urging of the Forests Commission which had been expressing strong public concerns, from as early as 1932, about the impacts on upper water catchments of grazing and burning by lease-holder cattlemen.

Maisie Fawcett worked closely with Judge Stretton and became the Soil Conservation Board representative, and sole woman, on the Bogong High Plains Advisory Committee, which from 1946 determined the permissible number of cattle and the length of their stay each summer.

Stretton conducted two more Royal Commissions for the Victorian State Government into electricity supply in 1947 and lastly examining the bread industry 1949.

Judge Stretton served as an acting justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria from 1951, but declined an offer to hold that post on a permanent basis.