A haunted Australia stares down bushfire disaster again

As Australia edged into spring in 2019, former fire brigade chief Greg Mullins warned the country was disastrously primed to burn.

Over and over, he begged to be heard. In letters, phone calls, press conferences and countless interviews, he painted an apocalyptic picture of the summer ahead.

But his pleas fell on deaf ears, and his premonitions would come true.

Over the coming months, Mr Mullins watched on as 24 million hectares was torched - an area the size of the UK. Almost 2,500 homes burned down, and 480 people died in the flames and smoke.

Now a worrying combination of conditions has Mr Mullins sounding the alarm again.

Authorities have stressed this summer will not reach the same scale. But years of rain have caused an explosion in plant growth, which is drying out after Australia's warmest winter on record, and an El Nino-affected summer promises more oppressively hot and dry conditions.

Just days into spring, parts of the country are experiencing catastrophic-level weather warnings.

"Bushfires will be back in the headlines," Mr Mullins tells the BBC.

"I'm nervous."

Out in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales (NSW), it's not hard to see why.

Walking through the thick scrub of Nattai National Park, the occasional blackened tree trunk peeks out from behind a wall of leaves. Only by craning your neck can you see that the canopy is still threadbare. The area was incinerated four years ago.

"If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, there's no way I would believe that had burned as hard as it did," local firefighter Andrew Hain says.

In 2019 it resembled "the surface of the Moon with sticks coming out of it", he adds.

"You think nothing will ever grow in there again... [but] I could now go in there 30 metres and you won't see me any more."

In November 2019, a lightning strike had sparked an inferno of a scale and ferocity unlike anything Mr Hain had seen in his decade in the state's Rural Fire Service. It was relentless.

Usually, darkness brings a reprieve for exhausted firefighters - but this fire kept "burning at night like it was at midday".

"We were working on trying to get a ring around this thing, put it in a box, but it would just keep popping out and keep going," he tells the BBC.

By the time heavy rain extinguished it after 75 days, the Green Wattle Creek fire had burned through 278,000 hectares, killed countless animals and destroyed 37 homes. It left the communities of Balmoral, Buxton and Bargo traumatised.

Surveying the national park that borders those towns, Mr Hain points to dense undergrowth which is already turning brown, and then to the ground. It is a carpet of parched leaf litter.

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