Mr Bekker, a former captain of the Glenfyne CFA brigade, said that when he saw the big glow in the sky about 9.30pm on Saturday night from the Terang fire, he was quick to make the decision to leave for a relief centre in Cobden.

He said the winds on Saturday night were “ferocious”, reaching speeds of up to 120 kilometres an hour.

When he stepped out of his house at Glenfyne, they “hit me straight in the face.”

“I made the decision early to leave,” he said.

He, his wife, his daughter and son-in-law and two grandchildren spent the night at a relief centre at the Cobden Civic Centre “but none of us slept,” he said.

He and his son-in-law went back to their farm on Sunday morning and found most of it had escaped unscathed apart from some damaged fencing.

They went to their outpaddock at nearby Elingamite and found that while paddocks all around were burnt, their 32 hectare outpaddock (80 acres) was not.

The cows and two tractors in the paddock also escaped unharmed.

That luck this weekend continued the good fortune the family had in the Ash Wednesday fires when their property was also not burnt.

“I feel like I have won Tattslotto,” Mr Bekker said.

He has been on his dairy farm at Glenfyne for 43 years and said he had never expected to experience the fear of a fire similar to Ash Wednesday again.

“It was a little bit scary,” he said of Saturday night.

More than 100 people spent Saturday night at the Cobden relief centre as fires raged throughout the south-west.