At the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne, 100km from Marysville where her husband and 39 others died in the swirling winds of the Black Saturday bushfires, Dr Kathy Rowe is documenting birds.

The holiday house she shared with her husband Ken, and which he had been trying to make bushfire-ready when the front went through the town on 7 February, 2009, had been teeming with birds. Then the fire came, and everything went away.

“Even though it was difficult coming back to the black sticks and red earth, the piles of white ash and the twisted and molten metal,” Dr Rowe said, at a speech representing the bereaved families of the 173 people who died in the 2009 bushfires, “the process for me of hearing the first magpie warbling seven weeks after silence in the normally noisy bush, and then seeing the gradual return of birds over the next six or seven years, helped me realise that we could all recover and it could happen in stages.”

Addressing a crowd of 1,500 people on Monday night at a memorial service marking the 10th anniversary of the fires, Dr Rowe listed the birds that came back.

Dr Kathy Rowe, who lost her husband in the fires. Photograph: David Crosling/AAP

First the parrots, foraging for seeds in trees without leaves. The insect-eaters were back a year later, after a summer where “we could hardly breathe for insects and the ants had taken over”.

Then the honeyeaters, after the wildflowers returned 18 months in, and finally those who fossicked in leaf-litter.

“My lyrebird hasn’t come back yet, but we do have our bower birds,” she says. “About two-thrids of the species that used to visit our place have returned and I look forward to the rest.”

Marysville was one of 78 communities affected by the fires, which were the deadliest in Australian history. Kinglake, 60km east of Marysville, lost 120 people.

More than 400,000 hectares of bush and private land were burned and more than 2,000 homes were destroyed in 400 separate blazes, along with three schools, two police stations, and a fire station. More than 7,000 people were displaced.

The intensity of the fires, which burned to unsurvivable temperatures in Victoria’s mountain ash forests, also forced a drastic change in national firefighting policy. Prior to Black Saturday, the advice to people in the path of a bushfire had been that if your house was well-prepared you were safer staying and defending it than trying to leave. After 2009, that advice changed.

Attendees pay their respects at the service. Photograph: Michael Dodge/Getty Images

“We have a category for fire danger that indicates don’t even think about staying,” Rowe said.

Country Fire Authority chief officer Steve Warrington says emergency services have heeded the lessons. “We will never forget 2009.”

The names of the deceased, scrolled through large screens in the exhibition centre, run in family clusters. Four or five people with the same name dying in the same town – whole families, gone.

Among the attendees were Victorian premier Daniel Andrews and state opposition leader Michael O’Brien, who both read poems, as well as prime minister Scott Morrison and federal opposition leader Bill Shorten.

Jane Hayward is the principal of Strathewen primary school 9km from Kinglake. It burned down in the fires; now its students lead the nation in disaster reliance, a sadly necessary skill for children living in Australia’s changing climate.

Scott Morrison lays a tribute during the service. Photograph: Michael Dodge/Getty Images

“Our students had lived through and experienced a major disaster,” Hayward tells the memorial service. “It just surrounded them. Their little lives were turned upside down. As a result of this experience, they developed a strong sense of empathy and compassion for others.”

The state memorial service, held at the request of the affected communities, is part of a suite of events intended to mark the anniversary.

The exhibition From the Heart: Remembering the 2009 Victorian Bushfires will open at Melbourne Museum on Tuesday.