{"id":695041,"date":"2026-05-26T05:49:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T05:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/695041\/"},"modified":"2026-05-26T05:49:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T05:49:15","slug":"brinkworth-family-loses-appeal-over-judgement-that-father-was-responsible-for-blackford-bushfire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/695041\/","title":{"rendered":"Brinkworth family loses appeal over judgement that father was responsible for Blackford bushfire"},"content":{"rendered":"

South Australia’s Court of Appeal has upheld a judgement that found a late pastoralist was responsible for a bushfire in the state’s South East months after his death.<\/p>\n

The Court of Appeal has agreed with a judgement handed down in the Supreme Court last year<\/a> that the Blackford bushfire that threatened the town of Lucindale<\/a> started from a rubbish heap that Tom Brinkworth set fire to a month before he died in August 2020<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The fire burnt about 14,000 hectares of land, destroyed three houses and killed thousands of sheep.<\/p>\n

The judgement found the executors of his estate \u2014 his widow Patricia, his sons Ben and Angas and their accountant John Finnis \u2014 were not responsible for the fire, however, the estate is expected to pay substantial damages to insurers and 132 affected property owners.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Tom Brinkworth died aged 83. (Landline: Tim Lee)<\/p>\n

The Brinkworth family’s defence claimed the fire was sparked by lightning that smouldered in a tree for six weeks before the bushfire started to spread on January 11, 2021, when the temperature hit 38 degrees Celsius.<\/p>\n

In the appeal, the family said Supreme Court Justice Laura Stein \u2014 since promoted to Chief Justice<\/a> \u2014 had incorrectly jumped to the conclusion the fire had been caused by the rubbish heap, after dismissing the possibility of a lightning strike starting the fire.<\/p>\n

She found the lightning strike theory “was not a plausible or probable cause of the bushfire” but instead just a theoretical possibility.<\/p>\n

She instead found the fire started from rubbish heaps lit on July 2020 that then smouldered for months until the bushfire started in January 2021.<\/p>\n

\"Cattle<\/p>\n

Cattle under threat from the bushfire in January 2021. (Supplied: Tegan Elliott)<\/p>\n

Justices reject appeal<\/p>\n

In their judgement handed down on May 14, but yet to be published online, Court of Appeal President Mark Livesey, Justice Chris Bleby and Justice Ben Doyle found lawyers representing Tom Brinkworth’s estate failed to demonstrated the fire was caused by something other than the active heat of the rubbish pile.<\/p>\n

“The ultimate findings about the origin of the fire have not been shown to be contrary to compelling inferences or inconsistent with incontrovertible facts,” they wrote.<\/p>\n

“It has not been demonstrated that the findings were wrong.”\"A<\/p>\n

The active heap at 1:18pm on January 11, 2020, showing smoke around it. (Supplied: Supreme Court of South Australia)<\/p>\n

Justice Stein found that if Tom Brinkworth had constructed the rubbish heap following the Country Fire Service Vegetation Pile Burning Code of Practice, the risk of smouldering combustion would have been significantly reduced if not eliminated.<\/p>\n

Mr Brinkworth was one of Australia’s largest landholders before he died.<\/p>\n

In 2018, he stepped in to save Kingston South East’s giant 17-metre-tall crayfish, Larry the Lobster<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He also famously droved 18,000 cattle from Queensland to New South Wales in 2013<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Injured<\/p>\n

A koala injured during the Blackford fire. (Supplied)<\/p>\n

The class action was launched in August 2021.<\/p>\n

Lawyer Liam Campion said the judgement would result in significant compensation for his clients, who had “fought long and hard” to achieve the outcome.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“The litigation, through a lengthy trial and an appeal, has been wholly funded by the property insurers of the bushfire victims, which allowed the victims to also pursue compensation for their substantial uninsured losses, without being hamstrung by financial resources,” he said.<\/p>\n

“So it’s a really tremendous outcome for all of our clients.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"South Australia’s Court of Appeal has upheld a judgement that found a late pastoralist was responsible for a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":695042,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3443,339018,64,63,339014,15909,339015,99,154440,7770,339016,339013,339017,2185,339012,339019],"class_list":["post-695041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-adelaide","tag-angas","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-avenue-range","tag-ben","tag-blackford","tag-business","tag-danger","tag-fire","tag-hall-wilcox","tag-lucindale","tag-maddens-lawyers","tag-rural","tag-tom-brinkworth","tag-willalooka"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=695041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/695042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=695041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=695041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=695041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}