A framed photograph of her was one of many objects put into an experimental blaze conducted for the National Archives by ACT Emergency Services Agency at the latter's training facility in a bleak paddock at Hume.

What the archives was up to, senior conservator Ian Batterham explained yesterday - as purposeful, manly firemen in yellow uniforms and sensible boots organised the inferno to come - was the testing of all sorts of materials and a range of containers and shelvings to see how they would react to fire. The archives has a sacred obligation to protect its holdings, lots of them made from paper and highly flammable, from what fire might try to do to them.

The fire was to be held in a big metal chamber very like an enlarged shipping container. Nearby as we spoke firefighters used a circular saw to create some kindling. Just behind us stood a noble, lemon-yellow fire engine, unit B5, the bright sun reflected glaringly from its polished flanks.

''We're trying to see if we're using the right [fire-resistant] things,'' Batterham explained.

He said that the archives had never done anything like this before but had been a bit fire-alarmed in recent times by some significant fires including the big chemical fire at Mitchell (''Our most valuable stuff is stored at Mitchell'') and the awful heritage-ruining Diamant Hotel fire at Acton. Then of course, Batterham added, there had been the great bushfires of 2003 during which the fires sizzled right up to the nervous walls of an archives facility at Tuggeranong.

''So we thought are we doing the right thing? Can we do better? Are we using the right boxes, the right shelving? So today we've got a whole range of containers and shelves and objects to be tested. It's all about just giving information so that when we make decisions it will be more knowledge-based. I've photographed every single thing beforehand and what we'll do is we'll examine it all afterwards. And there's an interest from all the other institutions, so we've got stuff from them too, from the Australian War Memorial and the National Film and Sound Archive.''

Making one last visit to the giant container I wished Her Majesty the best of luck, comforting her with the thought that as Defender of the Faith she, her portrait, was certain to receive from Almighty God the same miraculous protection that He gave Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego (Daniel, Chapters 1-3) when Nebuchadnezzar threw them into the Fiery Furnace.

Senior Firefighter Andrew Walker gave the waiting media a cheerful lecture about how, with the fire he was about to light going to generate temperatures of up to 900 degrees and create some nasty smoke we all had to stay behind the designated safety tape. Choosing not to overestimate the intelligence of the press he lectured us that while we should be far enough away, if we found the radiant heat too hot we should use ''common sense'' and move further away. ''Ninety-nine point nine per cent of the time everything [with these controlled fires] works as planned but there's the 1 per cent when someone gets cooked.''

''No one gets cooked on my shift'' advised 'Rusty' the firefighter who was appointed to be our safety officer.

The fire was short and intense. Bright tangerine flames licked up the walls and across the the ceiling in the darkness of the far end of the container. Attractive beige smoke billowed forth, turned a menacing walnut for a minute, then went prettily beige again. After a very few minutes water from B5 was employed to put the fire out.

One's hopes of checking how Her Majesty had gone were dashed by Senior Firefighter Walker who reported that because of the ''off-gassing'' given off by some of the chemical-packed things in the fire it would be ages before anyone could go into the blackened site. We journalists had to dash off to other stories. But this columnist appointed the waiting Batterham as this column's Hume correspondent and Gang-gang looks forward to his report on the fate of our Queen and on everything learned from yesterday's forensic bonfire.

Late breaking news: The archives reports: ''Good news - the Queen survived unscathed. Her frame was charred but the photograph is undamaged.''