RED DAWN

Outside the small town of Cobargo in southern New South Wales, Bruce Leaver has semi-retired to a leafy, rambling home on the edge of fire country. The historic town 16km west is a ruin, twisted and blackened by the towering flames that raced up the main street on New Year’s Eve.

Although homes and land close to Leaver’s house burnt, his didn’t. That was partly good luck and partly design. Leaver, a former forester and one of Australia’s top conservation administrators – last year made a member of the Order of Australia for his life’s work – dreaded this summer because he knew what was coming.

“The big disaster this time was the drought,” he tells the Listener, gazing through the smoke haze from his dining table across a vast, bone-dry eucalypt forest that didn’t burn in the New Year’s inferno that hit Australia’s south-east but still might.

“So, you had these forests drying out for the past two or three years … that’s what’s happened,” says Leaver. “I was looking at the extended drought and it was just clear to me with my forestry background that it was going to be very severe because all the fuels were dried out.”

The bushfires have pumped about 400 million cubic tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere, more than the combined annual emissions of 116 countries.

After warning his closest neighbours in the rural hamlet of Coolagolite, Leaver spent months doing all he could to fireproof his own home. It has roof and perimeter sprinkler systems rigged up to a full 44,000-litre water tank. All around his property’s edges, Leaver cleared away dried timber and leaves – anything flammable. He moved his woodpile further off. And just in case all else failed, he stacked containers of firefighting gel at his front door, ready to ward off fire from whatever might be his last line of defence.

Leaver’s fears, we now know, were entirely justified. An area of Australia larger than Scotland has burnt, more than two dozen people have died – including at least five firefighters – and more than 2000 homes have burnt