Where did the missing districts go?

So I’m sitting in a maths lecture a bit bored as I was finding the topics covered a little too easy and my mind goes back to a page I saw when I was applying to be a volunteer at the Country Fire Authority in Victoria.

While looking at the “Find Your Nearest CFA Brigade” map, the map above it caught my eye.

Map of Victoria showing the current CFA district boundaries and their respective region colours

While having a look at the map(I wanted to see if the few CFA brigades outside victoria were on there) I realised that a few districts just straight up didnt exist, namely District 01. Just quickly, here are the districts that exist in order.

District 02 in the North West region
District 04 in the South West region
District 05 in the South West region
District 06 in the South West region
District 07 in the South West region
District 08 in the South East region
District 09 in the South East region
District 10 in the South East region
District 11 in the South East region
District 12 in the North East region
District 13 in the North East region
District 14 in the North West region
District 15 in the West region
District 16 in the West region
District 17 in the West region
District 18 in the North West region
District 20 in the North West region
District 22 in the North East region
District 23 in the North East region
District 24 in the North East region
District 27 in the South East region

So, upon making this list I realise that there are less missing than I thought, but there are still some missing, namely:

District 01
District 03
District 19
District 21
District 25
District 26

Hypothesis

Before I actually get to looking, if we have a look at the map we can see that most of the Districts numbered 20 and above appear to have been split off from surrounding districts, in my opinion the most obvious example of this is District 27. I have a feeling that this happened with 23, 24 and 25.

And so begins the lookening

I started by looking at older verisons of the cfa website and I found that the oldest version of this page is from 2012, which is far back enough to prove parts of my theory correct. This page also has a map of the districts and here it is:

A different map of Victoria with regions marked with CFA district names

As you can see in this image my theory was correct, it appears that District 27 was split off from District 10, but this doesnt actually explain the weird numbering scheme, so my next idea was to go to the CFA home page and then find an older district map, The Internet Archive has archived versions of the page from 1998 but they are totally broken, odd but yk its fine probably, I mean who would be digging through old versions of their website…

anyway…
\

Look at this amazing webpage, I could show the non broken version but I think this is too funny, anyway pressing on the “Enter” button takes us to the actual page:

Looking through the working links here I found a very interesting PDF that was the 1999-2000 annual report, but unfortunatly it wasnt helpful. Edit from me from like two days later, turns out this PDF is on the cfa website.

Deciding that the old page was a lost cause I turn to Google, I found a few interesting results,

This page is an article written by Christopher Simmins in 2016 about the history of Newstead CFA, and its move from District 15 to District 02, amoung other things. in truth as of writing I’ve only skimmed the article for mentions of District 01.
This Facebook post Written by Peter McHugh says: “The Board then divided Victoria into 24 Regions and appointed 17 Regional Officers, but the organisation had very rocky first beginnings.” Again, as of writing mostly skimmed, but from my understanding it’s explaining alot of stuff I already know with some added new info.

Did District 01 ever exist?\

So far I have only found information that alludes to this mysterious district, but nowhere has explicitly said “District 01 was merged with X district”

Well, that was until I went to the second page of Google…

Once I explicitly searched “What happened to district 1” and was scrolling the second page, I found out about the CFA Roll of Honour.

I need to properly discuss how I should quote this but I work with what I think I should do, so I won’t link directly or discuss the spcific entries I found.
But there were a few entries that included “district 1 (15)” or “district 3 (7)“

So we have proof that they did exist, atleast they did before the 80’s.\

So we have proof they did exist. Where to now?

I’m not too sure where I should go from here. there are numerous paths I could take:

explore the Victorian Public Archives
make a Freedom of Information Request but I think I would need to know more information like when and how it happened to do that.
ask an older member of the CFA that would’ve been around at the time. But this could be harder as I am nowhere near where I think these districts were.
maybe I could make a post on the Victoria’s Forests and Bushfire Heritage
I could also ask the cfa directly without a FoI Request.

As of the 14 of March 2025, that’s where I will end my search. Either I will make a new post when I find more or update this post.