[aerial view of Mafeking campsite in Caveat, Victoria]
Jon McGregor, CEO Scouts Victoria: We're at the Mafeking campsite in Caveat in Northern Victoria which is a campsite of Scouts Victoria which has been run by our Rover section which is our 18 to 26 year olds. Mafeking campsite is primarily a motorsport park.
[image of mud bash vehicles racing around the track in the Rover park]
And this is a park where young people can come together and they can race vehicles. This is a Motorsport Australia accredited park and we have Rover units that maintain a vehicle called a mud bash vehicle and they come together several times of the year to compete against each other here.
[January 2026 Victorian bushfires image of blackened trees and fire damaged area with flattened and destroyed structures]
We always knew that Mafeking was in a bushfire prone area and when we saw the wind report and bushfire report in early January of 2026 we knew the campsite was in trouble. It was a very fast moving, very hot fire and pretty much every building on the site was razed completely to the ground. Trees were black and dangerous and it just looked like a lunar moonscape. When a fire moves through somewhere like Mafeking there is an enormous job in the clean up and we really didn't know how to go about it and I was made aware of the Emergency Management Victoria's clean-up program and I jumped on the phone and they were very quick to phone me back and a couple of weeks later we arranged a meeting out on site.
[3 members of the clean-up program team assessing the damage at the site in June 2026 including a melted shed containing a tractor]
We had to remove slabs and toilet blocks and old sheds, including one shed that had melted around a tractor. So it was an enormous job to clean up and I don't know how we would have gone about it ourselves.
[demolition heavy machinery swinging around to clean up the site debris]
Dean Purkis, Director Recovery Programs, Emergency Management Victoria: About 80% of the park was actually damaged or destroyed by bushfires. So it's a very big job to clean up such a large site. So we're pretty proud of the work that we've done here. It’s a community asset that means a lot to people in regional areas and that's why we focus on these places a lot in terms of the clean up that we do.
Jon McGregor: Hi Dean. John McGregor. Nice to meet you. Welcome to Mafeking. Thank you.
[Dean and Jon greeting each other on site and signing document inside the work cabin]
It's an amazing privilege to be part of the clean-up program. Just to be here and get a real feel for the place and what it means to local people here and to the people who visit. So the chance to be able to help people recover and rebuild after the fires and bring all of that back for the community is pretty special.
Jon McGregor: We're really excited to see activity start again at this campsite. It's too important to see it disappear just because of a bushfire. So Scouts are pretty resilient people and we will recover here and we will get the campsite up and running again.
[Emergency Management Victoria logo]
[End transcript]
Updated