Indigenous Australians minimised firestorms for 60,000 years by scientifically burning a patchwork of different areas before any major drought developed, resulting in a mosaic of vegetation with many different uses and different fuel loads. (tinyurl.com/tradfire)
Then, in the south-east of Australia 200 years ago, English invaders drove the original settlers off their land and farmed it monoculturally, not realising that its soil and climate were quite different from Europe. Consequently the farmers have suffered endless cycles of flood, drought and firestorm.
The English tried to farm sheep and wheat, just as they did in England, where there was regular rainfall. However, most of the rain in the south-east of Australia comes from evaporation of seawater south of Indonesia. The rain's regularity is affected by the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), similar to our El Nino/La Nina.
In some years the surface water near Indonesia is warmer than near East Africa, causing floods in the south-east of Australia, as happened in 2016. However, over the past three years it has been warmer near East Africa, drawing the Indonesian winds in that direction, and south-east Australia has suffered three years of drought. (tinyurl.com/ozfireflood)
The Northern Territory has no disastrous large-scale firestorms because the indigenous mosaic burnoff system is still used there. In stark contrast, a no-burnoff policy was introduced in the south-east and there have been calamitous large-scale fires there ever since.
Organisations with highly paid executives spending hundred of millions of dollars on high-tech equipment have evolved to unsuccessfully control these megafires. Bush fire researcher Dr Christine Findlay has repeatedly called for these organisations to reintroduce the cheap and effective indigenous burnoff system in the southern states.