Spotter › Bendigo

Safety alerts for Bendigo and the Goldfields

Live incidents from the state’s official emergency data across Greater Bendigo, Mount Alexander, Loddon and Campaspe, a warning before you enter a repeat-incident area, and your family’s position against whatever is happening.

What Spotter covers in Bendigo and the Goldfields

Bendigo is about 150 km north west of Melbourne, with roughly 100,000 people in the urban area and a wider Loddon–Campaspe catchment taking in Castlemaine, Heathcote, Elmore and Marong. The city grew through the goldfields, which is why its suburbs run into box-ironbark bush rather than stopping at a clean edge.

Spotter reads the state’s official incident data — the same source behind its public warnings — and shows what is live near you across Greater Bendigo, Mount Alexander, Loddon and Campaspe, including Bendigo, Kangaroo Flat, Eaglehawk, Golden Square, Strathdale, Strathfieldsaye, Maiden Gully, California Gully, Epsom, Junortoun, Castlemaine, Heathcote, Elmore, Marong and Axedale.

The incidents that actually recur here

That bush edge is the point. Box-ironbark forest comes right up to and between the suburbs — Maiden Gully, California Gully, Eaglehawk and Strathfieldsaye all sit against it — so Bendigo has a bushfire interface running through the city rather than around it. On Black Saturday, 7 February 2009, a fire that started at Maiden Gully ran through West Bendigo, California Gully and Long Gully, destroyed homes and killed a resident, within a few kilometres of the city centre. Outside summer, structure fires and rescues make up most of the feed.

Spotter orders all of it by distance rather than by when it was filed, and hides the operational-status and “0 ha” noise that makes the raw feed hard to read. When nothing is live nearby it says “Nothing reported near you” — never that you are safe.

Getting around Bendigo

The Bendigo line and the Calder Freeway run to Melbourne, and the surrounding goldfields towns commute into Bendigo. Saved places give you an arrival notice at Home, School or Work, and the family page says plainly how recent each person’s position is rather than implying it knows more than it does.

A fire edge that runs through the suburbs

Most people picture the bushfire interface as a line at the edge of town. In Bendigo it is not a line, it is a weave — forest between suburbs, reserves inside them, and a street in Maiden Gully that can have bush on three sides.

That is the case Risk Radar is useful for. An area becomes a hotspot when three or more reports land inside roughly a one-kilometre cell within 180 days, and the warning fires as you enter it with the app closed. A suburb-level score would average all of that into one meaningless number; Spotter deliberately publishes no such score.

Risk Radar

An area becomes a hotspot when three or more reports land inside roughly a one-kilometre cell within 180 days, and the warning circle is 1.2 km across. Spotter watches the 20 nearest of those using the phone’s own region monitoring, so warnings arrive with the app closed. There is no suburb score anywhere in Spotter: a single number across a whole postcode tells you nothing useful about the street you are on.