But the usual flurry of post-bushfire inquiries including a Royal Commission ordered by the federal government didn't shed much new light on how to better tackle a very old problem.

Australia has had some whopper bushfires in the past including during the 1974-75 summer when an extraordinary 117,000 million hectares of mainly grassland were burnt across the inland.

Savage bushfires ravaged Victoria in January, 1939, after a long drought and a severely hot summer killing 71 people and destroying vast areas of state forests.

The colourful and scathing report of Judge Leonard Stretton, who headed a subsequent Royal Commission into the fires, could have been describing last summer's fires or Victoria's bushfires of 1851!

The year preceding the 1851 firestorm was exceptionally hot and dry and on February 6 furnace-like winds and temperatures (up to 47C) helped trigger blazes which burnt five million hectares and killed one million sheep.

The weather conditions during last summer's megafires may have not been as "unprecedented" as frequently claimed in news reports.

However, the lead up to them followed the familiar pattern of a long drought and a stinking hot and dry spring and summer.

Among other things Judge Stretton sanctioned and encouraged controlled burning as a means of protection against fires along with the clearing of land around homes and towns.

Fast forward to 2020 and the federal Royal Commission and the NSW (the state which suffered the most bushfire damage) bushfire reports offered the now familiar lukewarm support for hazard-reduction burning.

While hazard-reduction burning was again dismissed as being ineffective against large bushfires (mainly because it's never done on a large enough scale), both reports argued for a big boost to our fleet of water-bombing aircraft.

IN OTHER NEWS:

One thing last summer's bushfires showed was that Australia would need a Luftwaffe-sized water-bombing airforce to make a dent on a megafire.

Debate about bushfires in Australia these days invariably gets side-tracked into a row over our action, or lack of it, to halt climate change.

While the climate change debate is critically important, actions that lower average temperatures by a couple of degrees isn't going to prevent bushfires and the enormous environmental damage they do.

If you let fuel pile up on the floors of our eucalypt forests for long enough they will eventually burn, mainly thanks to Mother Nature's box of matches called lightning strikes.

Aboriginal people managed the Australian landscape for tens of thousands of years using fire.

There is enough historical evidence written by the early settlers and explorers to show their firestick ecology produced a landscape less prone to fire with forests dominated by very large trees and relatively low levels of shrubs and undergrowth.

Wide-scale logging no doubt helped upset the apple cart and encouraged thick regrowth of young trees and under-storey plants.

The bottom line is that our present efforts to mitigate against huge mega blazes aren't working.

It's time for change. But that won't happen without the involvement of many more practical land managers including Aboriginal people expert in cultural burning.

- Comment by Vernon Graham, a veteran rural journalist and long-time resident of one of the NSW Blue Mountains most fire-prone villages which has been protected by a pattern of mosaic hazard-reduction burning for more than 60 years.