"What happened to my parents, happened to me," said boilermaker Mal Murdock, as he stood amid the ruins of his dreams.

Here was the 1974 Harley- Davidson Sport, reduced to a cindered wreck. Over there under buckled corrugated iron in one shed sat the remains of a vintage speedboat. Next to it in another shed squatted a melted Mark Skaife signature Monaro.

All gone, when the bushfire howled out of the forest to the north of the once-pretty seaside town in catastrophic weather on Friday. It reduced a third of the town's houses to smoking heaps in proof that Australia once more is in a bushfire summer.

More than 100 properties went up at Dunalley and nearby communities. Far around the hills were black.

For survivors at Dunalley yesterday, the blaze's scale drew an instinctive comparison to Tasmania's most damaging 1967 bushfires, which cost 62 lives and left thousands homeless.

"I was six years old," Mr Murdock said. "My parents lost a house too."

This time he stayed, wet the ground and watched the flames roll north along the hilltops, then turn and bear down at him. He realised it was all too great to fight.

"Then I ran over the bridge."

Dunalley, the entry point to the Tasman Peninsula, has a sea canal running through it, and Mr Murdock could sit on the bank and watch his house from the other side.

"I could see it all go. The Harley, the boat, the car. Then I saw it licking around the porch on my house after the front had gone. I said to one of the firies could they please just send someone over with a hose. They did, and it was saved."

Not so for the family of four down the street, who, red- eyed and downcast, declined to speak as they poked around the remains of their home while their 1970s Corolla stood, indestructibly, still for sale on the verge.

Or the couple in their 70s whose home was flattened, leaving a satellite dish behind and a collection of charred garden statues.

Here was the cute little concrete girl, pulling at her dress but blown on to her back, the rabbits and fairies on toadstools, and a little boy with a dog, his ashen face looking up to the hills from where the fire came.

Their daughter, who declined to identify the couple, said they were too upset to talk. "They're holding up," she said. "They remember 1967. But how do you start again at 78?"

Further on, past the twisted wreck of the bakery and the burnt-out primary school, Holly Kelly, 19, walked the street looking for a black shar pei. "It's a little dog, it's not mine, but I'm looking for it for a friend."

When the fire came, she was at home with her 11 horses. She shifted them from a grassy paddock and the animals crowded behind a caravan together.

"I stayed as long as I could, but the sky was all full of black smoke," she said. "Colin and Todd, my brothers, stayed and saved our place. Next door it just went down."

In the paddock behind her, one of the horses nipped another over rights to the hay.

Dunalley survived.

Mal Murdock shrugged his shoulders. "It's just one of those things," he said.