The past week has been marked by the refusal of public officials, including PM Scott Morrison, to recognise the scale of the crisis

The sky over Cobargo in New South Wales was still tainted yellow on Thursday afternoon when Australia’s prime minister arrived. For the past month, the country had been ablaze, and the village 240 miles south of Sydney and home to 776 people, had been hit hard.

Standing in the crowd, Zoey Salucci McDermott, 20, eyed Scott Morrison coolly. She and her young daughter had lost her home in the fires, so when he extended his hand in greeting, she did not reciprocate. “I’ll only shake your hand if you give more funding to the RFS [Rural Fire Service],” McDermott said, holding back tears. “So many people here have lost their homes. We need more help.” The prime minister turned away.

Days before, two separate firefronts had swept across much of southern NSW and eastern Victoria with unprecedented ferocity, wiping entire towns from the map. When the flames arrived in Cobargo, they tore through the main street, roaring like the ocean, incinerating lives and livelihoods.

Robert Salway, 63, and his son Patrick, 29, died when they stayed behind to defend their property. Patrick’s wife, Renee, who is pregnant with the couple’s second child, found their bodies.

As the flames retreated, a white hot anger smouldered. “You’re not welcome, you fuckwit,” a man yelled after Morrison as he retreated under a barrage of insults. Referring to the affluent Sydney suburb where the prime minister has an official residence, he said: “I don’t see Kirribilli burning after the fireworks.”

The scene, caught on video, has become symbolic of a nation at odds with its leadership as it has endured a week of horror in a rolling, months-long national emergency that has yet to reach its climax.

The scale of the destruction is hard to overstate. When the Amazon rainforest caught fire last January, 906,000 hectares burned. And last July, 2.6 million hectares were turned to ash across the Siberian steppe.

Since the first fires began in Australia in August, more than 5 million hectares have been set aflame, fanned by unusual weather patterns and lower-than-usual humidity that has allowed firefronts to spread rapidly across a bone-dry landscape. The country’s volunteer firefighting forces are exhausted, outgunned and overwhelmed.

The fires are behaving in unpredictable ways, spreading at night and even returning to areas that have already burned. Conditions on the ground have seen walls of flame, spot fires coalescing into fire tornados and some firefronts burning so hot they have formed their own weather systems. The ensuing lightning strikes have gone on to ignite yet more fires.

The direct death toll stands at 23, with more expected. Some species have been pushed to extinction, and more than half a billion animals are estimated to have been killed. Farmers have reported running out of bullets as they work to end the suffering of half-dead livestock.

Of all the states, New South Wales has been hardest-hit, with 3.41 million hectares scorched over the past few months and Sydney, at one point, finding itself encircled by active firezones. Around the same time, fire ripped through the Adelaide Hills and Kangaroo Island in the central state of South Australia. In the Adelaide Hills in South Australia, flames swallowed 25,000 hectares of prime agricultural land, leaving a third of the wine industry in the area “smashed”.

The state of Victoria in the southeast, meanwhile, greeted the first week of the new decade in horror as it watched new firefronts bloom in East Gippsland before quickly building into an inferno which blackened 700,000 hectares in days.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Scott Morrison, the prime minister, turns away from Zoey Salucci McDermott on his Cobargo visit. Photograph: ABC News

Wherever the fires rise, their approach has been foreshadowed by falling ash and the dimming of light as blue skies turn either nicotine yellow, glowing orange or, in some cases, blood red. That was the scene in Mallacoota, a tourist town 260 miles east of Melbourne in the middle of a Unesco biosphere. As the rest of the world readied to bid goodbye to 2019, locals spent their New Year’s Eve watching the flames approach.

Residents woke to find skies blackened by ash and temperatures rising to 49C at 8am. As daybreak turned to night, the sky grew red as the flames drew near.

With the only road out of town soon cut off by fire, 4,000 people were forced to flee towards the beach. When traffic backed up, people abandoned their cars. Soon after, the emergency services ordered people to wade into the sea to escape the blaze.

Over the next two days, as images of the destruction began to emerge on social media, an evacuation order was given for some 14,000 sq kms between Nowra in New South Wales and the border of Victoria.

Across the state lines, Victorian state premier Daniel Andrews declared an official state of disaster in Gippsland on Thursday night, enacting sweeping powers that have never been used.

Weeks after an advertising campaign began in the UK to attract tourists to Australia, tens of thousands of holidaymakers were evacuated from coastal NSW and Victoria, the largest peacetime evacuation in the country’s history, with the navy deploying to rescue those trapped in Mallacoota.

Authorities in those states which have so far escaped the devastation have been left to watch on nervously. Peak fire season typically hits with the height of summer, leaving those states so far unaffected to wait their turn – with far fewer resources.

With bushfires flaring so early in the year, volunteers have been sequestered from across the country to assist on the east coast. Their absence means states like Western Australia are reliant on ex-volunteers in the event of emergency.Even regions relatively unaffected by the fires have been unable to escape the consequences. Smoke drift has stained glaciers as far away as New Zealand. In Canberra, the nation’s capital, air quality has been so bad that the postal service has stopped delivering mail.

Liz Bashford from Doctors for the Environment Australia said the smoke has probably already caused deaths. Preliminary statistics show mortality rates, ambulance callouts and hospital admissions all increasing since the smoke settled over Sydney, but the precise impact won’t be known ubntil at least the end of this month.

“Bushfire smoke will increase the incidence of death, but to say it was responsible for a particular death is much harder,” Bashford said. “It’s a bit like smoking cigarettes. If someone dies of respiratory problems and they’re a smoker we can clearly say it contributed to their death, but it’s very hard to put the finger on the only thing that caused their death.”

“All this has been predicted for decades by scientists but it’s happening in a far quicker and in more dramatic way this fire season than we expected.”

Morrison has shrugged off criticism of his government’s climate change policies. Speaking at the UN in New York last September he insisted Australia would meet its emissions reductions targets “in a canter”. That same month, his government was being warned about the catastrophic fire risk presented by climate change.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People fleeing the fires at Mallaccota board an Australian navy landing craft to be evacuated. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Former New South Wales fire chief Greg Mullins and 22 other former emergency services chiefs wrote to Morrison outlining the potential crisis and asking for more specialised equipment to deal with hotter and longer bushfire periods.

They were ignored. Emergency services have been asking for resources since 2016, when the National Aerial Firefighting Centre asked for a “national large air-tanker fleet” to support firefighting operations but were rebuffed.

The consistent refusal to stump up the cash or even engage with a chorus of experts warning about a crisis has defined the conservative government’s policy since it took power under Tony Abbott in 2013.

Now, as the country faces one of the worst natural disasters in its history, a short-term, transactional austerity politics has collided with the long arc of climate change in a way that is clearly visible on the ground.

Firefighters in some areas have been forced to crowdfund for basic equipment while until recently the federal government remained steadfast in its refusal to back-pay volunteers for their time, even as the prime minister praised their “spirit”. It took sustained public pressure to drag the government to compensate volunteers, with Morrison announcing last Saturday that they would receive up to $6,000.

The denial of reality was seemingly reinforced on New Year’s Day, when Morrison held a reception for a professional cricket team at Kirribilli House, the official residence.In a throwback to an earlier scandal when Morrison was photographed on holiday in Hawaii as the first homes were lost in New South Wales,

As the country burned, the prime minister was pictured playing backyard cricket.“Whether they’re started by lightning storms or whatever the cause may be, our firefighters and all of those have come behind them to support them, whether they’re volunteering on the front line or behind the scenes in a great volunteer effort, it is something that will happen against the backdrop of this test match,” Morrison said.

These words might have been of little comfort to locals huddled together on a beach in Mallacoota against the approaching inferno on Tuesday morning and who were, on Saturday afternoon, again bracing for “another round”.

Brendan, a Mallacoota local who asked that his last name not be printed, told the Observer how three branches of his extended family were now living under one roof as the fires had destroyed the homes of friends and family.

“We chose to live here. We love this part of the world, and we’re really quite devastated at the destruction that’s taken place,” Brendan said. “We had a fire plan, we went over it at Christmas, all together. We still didn’t know how big the burn would be.”

While they weren’t in any imminent danger, Brendan said the firefront had remained active around the town as of noon and an expected change in weather conditions threatened to make the situation unpredictable.

A few hours later Brendan posted to social media another image showing the eerie sky over Mallacoota. It carried the ominous caption: “I don’t think we’re getting light back today. We’re relaxed enough that we’re going to make some dinner. I believe the risk that today’s weather posed has passed, for us at least.”