IS climate change a factor in this month's bushfires and in the undoubted increase of bushfires across the northern hemisphere?
To appropriate Julia Gillard's memorable phrase when handing the keys back to Kevin Rudd in 2013, it "does not explain everything" about the fires, "nor does it explain nothing".
But I think there are other factors at play that are much more important.
First off, there's the widely accepted role that fire has played in shaping Australia both through nature and Aboriginal practice. Then there's the modern trend toward locking vast tracts of bushland away as national park, building massive loads of fuel. And finally, for those who say "but it's happening around the world": yes it is, but in those parts of Europe and the United States that have been taken over by one of Australia's greatest but increasingly unpopular exports, the gum tree.
Despite its comedic value, I'm ignoring Israel Folau's theory from the Old Testament Book of Isiah that "the bushfires and the droughts" are punishment for having "violated the statutes and broken the everlasting covenant" by supporting same-sex marriage and abortion reform.
Now, back to the real world. I was already planning this column when an email titled "we have very short memories" arrived from a reader describing this month's fires as far from "catastrophic" when compared with, say, the February 1983 Ash Wednesday fires in South Australia and Victoria, the January 2003 Canberra fires or the Black Saturday fires in Victoria in February 2009, which between them killed almost 260 people and damaged or destroyed more than 4000 homes.
Even so, it's been argued that this year's season has started very early, presaging a terrible summer to come. But there were enough old newspaper mentions of bushfires in November to show they are nothing new. The Picton Post on July 6, 1932, reports on the funeral of an early settler who arrived in the Camden district as a baby in the early 1850s. An inscription in the family Bible - often used back then to record major events - mentioned "the terrible drought of 1888, followed by the fearful bushfires in November the same year".
The Nepean Times of July 15, 1937, notes the Springwood branch of the Red Cross having to move an event because of "the bushfires in November last", while the Daily Telegraph of January 6, 1949, reports on a returned soldier who said his "home in Springwood was burned in bushfires in November 1945, while I was away in the forces".
But we don't need newspaper accounts to tell us that Australia has long been prone to bushfires.
There's a growing understanding that Indigenous Australians had much more control over their landscape than most early observers had imagined. The Western Australian Parks and Wildlife Service, for example, notes how early settlers commented on Aboriginal familiarity with fire, and the presence of usually "relatively low intensity" burning of small areas throughout the year.
"This constant use of fire by Aboriginal people as they went about their daily lives most likely resulted in a fine grained mosaic of different vegetation and fuel ages across the landscape," WA parks and wildlife says.
"As a result, large intense bushfires were uncommon."
The Aboriginal Heritage Office in Sydney quotes an estimated Indigenous population of 750,000 when the first fleet arrived. Those numbers were quickly decimated by disease and the mass murders of Aboriginals that critics decry as a "black armband view of history". By 1850, Australia's colonial population was still only about 400,000. And while many early settlers found the landscape unfamiliar and unsettling, there are also accounts of the land looking in places like an English park, with grasslands and forests where the trees were large and evenly spaced, easy to ride through and with little in the way of undergrowth: a result, it seems, of regular deliberate burning.
Early colonial artists have often been criticised for not coming to grips with the Australian landscape. Arguably the greatest of them all, Joseph Lycett, who travelled widely in NSW and Van Dieman's Land between 1814 and 1822, has been criticised for work that looks "more like English parkland than antipodean bush scenes".
Is it not possible that he painted what he saw - a well-tended countryside that quickly deteriorated once the Indigenous population succumbed to the colonial onslaught, and was long gone and forgotten by the time that modern art critics compared it to "their" bush? It seems even some rainforests were permanently navigable. Another great painter, Conrad Martens, showed a wide Aboriginal pathway through giant trees in a painting of Brisbane Water, just north of Sydney, in 1848.
But even if Aboriginal Australians used fire in the landscape for much of their 60,000 years on the continent, there is fossil and DNA evidence to show that the eucalyptus family split off into its own evolutionary branch about 50 million to 60 million years ago, and that fire resistance evolved soon after. This indicates that Australia - alone of the continents - developed a massive family of trees that dominated the landscape and were not only fire resistant, many of them needed fire to germinate.
And now that eucalypts are well established around the world - partly for ornamental reasons, but mostly as a plantation tree grown for timber and paper - other countries are experiencing the same sort of fires that we do, when a eucalyptus forest with an undergrowth full of fuel is hit by flame in hot weather.
Greece, Spain and Portugal in Europe, and California in the US, have all been hit with raging forest fires, and almost always, it seems, in stands of eucalypts. The Portuguese call eucalypts the "tree of fire" and they are estimated to have spread to cover a quarter of that country's forests. On two visits to Greece I've been struck by the intense smell of the Australian bush that hangs in the air. Rod Doherty of Kurri Kurri, who wrote the bushfire email, said the same thing about California in 1992, when he says he saw gum forests planted "right up to housing estates" and worried at the time that "if these people don't clear their properties, the whole place will go up".
"And it has," he says. I could go on, but I'm out of space and I trust you get the picture. And speaking of pictures, the one on this page is a eucalypt fire near Madeira in Portugal on July 3, 2011. Australia's "tree of fire', doing its thing around the world.
