Parts of Victoria and South Australia are still cleaning up, almost 24 hours after being smashed by gale force winds.

Tens of thousands of homes remain without power.

The powerful winds are now lashing New South Wales, where a total fire ban has been ordered.

Dom Beattie reports.

TRANSCRIPT

Wind gusts in Melbourne tore roofs off houses and uprooted trees.

A man was seriously injured this morning after a tree fell on his car.

Emergency services spent an hour freeing him from the wreckage before he was airlifted to hospital.

Between midnight and one-thirty this morning, winds of up to one-hundred and fourty-two kilometres per hour struck the Victorian capital.

SES crews attended to more than 1500 calls with fallen trees causing most of the damage.

One-hundred-and-fifty-thousand homes experienced blackouts overnight and at midday 35,000 Victorians still remained without power.

Residents couldn’t believe it.

Fotios Giannakis, resident: “As soon as I heard it I went outside and I didn’t expect to see this sort of damage.”

Chris MacLeod, resident: “I was asleep and there was one unearthly crash and initially I didn’t have a clue what it was.”

South Australia didn’t escape where gusts reached 100 kilometres per hour in some areas.

Power was cut to hundreds of properties across the state and emergency crews responded to countless reports of fallen trees.

In NSW the winds are making it difficult for firefighters to keep a blazes under control.

A key concern for them is a bushfire in Sydney’s northwest which at one stage threatened houses.

At last reports the crews believed they had the situation under control.

Dom Beattie, QUT News.