One of the few things Bruce Clark salvaged from the ashes when fire ripped through his family's Panmure property was a teapot in the shape of a cottage.

The intensity of the Ash Wednesday blaze melted the glaze off the outside of the teapot and it is still pitted with ashes of what was his former home - and sits as a reminder of what once was.

It belonged to his grandmother and once sat up on a high mantlepiece but somehow survived intact as the blaze razed his chook farm on February 16, 1983.

"It fell down and it must have landed in a bed of ashes or something because it survived," Mr Clark said.

He also managed to salvage an old cast iron doorstop from the ashes. "I sieved most of the ashes to see what I could find." But the fire took almost everything. "The steps out the front of the house are the only part that are still here," Mr Clark said.

And when he put his new house on the same spot he built around them. "I thought that was a nice idea," he said.

Mr Clark, 85, remembers that Wednesday in 1983 well. Just 10 days earlier his father had passed away and they were still grieving when they heard a fire was heading for them.

He had just picked up his nieces from school and when he realised the flames were headed for the property he told his mother to grab a few things and leave.

"You don't think that well in a fire. I had photos and I didn't take them out. I took a case of clothes out and picked some tools up. I could have replaced the tools," Mr Clark said.

"The photos were in the room with the case and I could have thrown them in but I never gave it a thought."

His mother had grabbed some clothes and photos but not ones of her own children.

"We had a water pipe but some of it was above ground. It got burnt through. There was nothing I could do about water so I left. The house was alight," Mr Clark said.

"I left and when I came back it was all gone."

Mr Clark ran a poultry farm on part of the 150-acre property that his grandparents had bought about 100 years ago.

"I lost all my breeding stock in the fire and it was just no good trying to start again," he said.

Another house on the property also burnt down.

"The fire went down through the place across the road and burnt about half of it, it burnt all the neighbour's place as well," Mr Clark said.

"I had ash and dust in my eyes and I had to get some attention from the nurse at Panmure."

Mr Clark still remembers the generosity of those who helped at the hall in the town in the weeks after.

"You could get a meal or a cup of tea at the hall anytime day or night," he said.

"You didn't know what to do for a few days."

He ended up living in a caravan on the property for a while before building "a bit of a shack" out the back until he found a house in Timboon.

Mr Clark was out of town on holiday when the St Patrick's Day fire came through in 2018. "I was very relieved to come home and find my house was still here," he said.

In the years after, Mr Clark publicly called for the state government to renew efforts to pinpoint the cause of the Ballangeich fire that took his home but he said nothing was done.

He spent years investigating why a coronial inquest and supreme court case failed to find the cause of the blaze which he said meant none of those affected by the Ballengeich fire received any compensation.

But Mr Clark said he and others did get help and support from various charities, churches, clubs and funds set up to help fire victims who didn't get compensation or weren't insured.

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