Allansford's Kelvin Boyle gets emotional recalling the day flames destroyed more than 100 cattle before his very eyes as he was out in the paddock trying to save them.

Mr Boyle was taking loads of livestock to the Wednesday market at the Warrnambool saleyards when he heard about the fire at Cudgee.

He headed home to his Naringal property when he got a call from his cousin who needed help moving his cows to the dairy.

"He was basically in the path of the fire," he said.

"The fire was coming towards him. So I went around, we went up the paddock in my ute and the cattle saw us coming and they were coming towards us but the fire went between us, straight through.

"We didn't get them. When the fire went between us they turned and went with the fire, went to the boundary fence, piled up and seven survived out of 107."

Just talking about February 16, 1983, still brings up the emotions 40 years later.

They managed to round up other breeding cattle from another paddock and take them to a safer place.

Mr Boyle said the original fire front went right through Naringal but his placed escaped the blaze, coming within 150 metres of the back fence.

He said there were people gathered at the corner of Membreys and Moreys roads "not knowing what to do" that day.

"I was there when the wind went round - three minutes past five - and blow. It blew hard for most of the day but when the wind went round it was blowing harder."

Mr Boyle and an off-duty policeman went to move a truck for one of the farmers they knew was out of town.

"We went and got it and when we got back down to the corner, the wooden tray just inside the back was burning," he said.

"We had no water and we were chucking dirt on it. Then a fire truck came along ... and they put it out.

"When we salvaged this truck, the bush was blazing right up to the edge of the road. We virtually drove through the fire but got it out.

"The fire just took off once the wind went round. There was no stopping it."

The Ballangeich fire, which started about 2.27pm, met up with the earlier Cudgee fire which was sparked by powerlines at 1.10pm.

The fires claimed nine lives, destroyed 157 houses and burnt about 50,000 hectares.

In all the blazes destroyed 872 buildings, 11,500 sheep, 7800 cattle, 7000km of fencing and a million hay bales.

At night, the volunteer firefighter went to the fire headquarters set up at Panmure where he was asked to take a strike team out.

"There were fire trucks there. From the hall back up to the school," Mr Boyle said.

"Ash Wednesday was a massive fire. Since then we've had St Patricks Day night fires and that was a pretty hectic night," he said.

A volunteer firefighter since he was 16, Mr Boyle still does radio work at the CFA headquarters. His brother Hilton, who was captain of the Mepunga brigade during the Ash Wednesday fires, also still helps out the brigade.

Mr Boyle said the fire just missed his property "by a whisker" that day. After taking his pre-school children into town away from danger, he went back out to do what he could.

"It was just like an inferno," Mr Boyle said. "To see people get burnt out was just unbelievable.

"I was up all night."

About 6.30am the next day he went back to his property to milk his cows before going back onto the fireground.

"What sticks out in my mind was the loss of people's assets - milking cows that got burnt, machinery sheds on fire and houses on fire," Mr Boyle said.

Volunteer firefighter John Mahony describes Ash Wednesday as "a very nasty day". "It was very hot and it was very, very dusty," he said.

"We just knew if something went wrong we were in trouble. The bristles were up on the back of your neck."

Mr Mahony was at his Cudgee farm when he got word over the radio there was a fire, and as an incident controller for the CFA, he went out in his ute with Mick Finnigan to direct fire trucks to where they were needed.

But it wasn't easy. At times the smoke was "jet black" and you couldn't see out the windscreen it was that thick.

"If you put your finger out in front of you you couldn't see past it," Mr Mahony said.

The heat was so intense that when he went to open a gate for a fire tanker to go into a paddock it took three goes.

The fire claimed both the church and school at Naringal.

"Parents got to the school and they loaded the children in their cars and some were in the back of the ute and they took them straight to Allansford," Mr Mahony said.

"They knew that they had to get moving."

Mr Mahony said he remembered well when the wind changed.

"It brought the tank completely off the stand," he said. "That was the force when the wind changed.

"The sad thing was we lost a number of lives. A lot of us knew those people. That was pretty tough too.

"It often goes through your mind that day."

Mr Mahony recalls visiting properties in the days after and finding people just shell-shocked.

"Sad times, but it brought a lot of people together," he said.

"You really made great friends when you went back and helped them put fences back up."

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