I love a sunburnt country
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.*
Drought, then, is not exactly a new phenomenon in Australia. And with drought comes fire. Indeed, the aborigines or First Nations, or whatever the fashionable woke soubriquet is this week, used to conduct frequent controlled burnings of the scrub on the forest floor, precisely to prevent the continent-wide bushfires that they knew from thousands of years’ experience were bound to occur otherwise.
In 1642 Abel Tasman wrote of the smoke in the sky and the scorched trees wherever his expedition landed. Captain James Cook described the same conditions in 1770. This deliberate burning created the grassland landscapes that dominated pre-European Australia.
To get a realistic grasp on what is going on in Australia, read the following post. Most of Australia is a parched desert landscape that has been dealing with bushfires and drought long before carbon dioxide was designated as a toxic substance by the cognitively challenged morons holding the reigns of government.
*Dorothea McKellar, 1904, My Country