Fire has long been a feature of the Australian bush, with the plants and animals adapted to regular, natural infernos. For thousands of years, Aborigines lived with the flames too, using them to improve forest access and increase the size of hunting grounds.

But as more people have moved to live in the bush and the urban fringes, the risk to them and their property has grown.

The weekend's terrible death toll has already prompted questions about the country's "stay-and-defend" policy, which encourages homeowners to stay and fight the flames. Many victims are believed to have perished in their cars as they realised too late that they would not be safe if they had stayed.

There are also questions about the consequences of fire risk reduction measures practised over the last few decades: preventing regular fires means the amount of burnable wood grows year-by-year, risking even greater firestorms.

"The mismanagement of the south-eastern forests of Australia over the last 30 or 40 years by excluding prescribed burning and fuel management has lead to the highest fuel concentrations we have ever had in human occupation," said David Packham, a bush fire researcher at Monash University, Australia. "The state has never been as dangerous as what it is now and this has been quite obvious for some time."

He said Australia's modern inhabitants needed to learn from the way the Aborigines had deliberately allowed some areas to burn in order to protect others. "There has been a total lack of willingness to instigate a proper fuel reduction management programme based on the skills and understanding of indigenous people who, after all for tens of thousands of years, were the stewards of our environment. We have thumbed our noses at what these people did and knew and we just can't keep on doing it."

But Stefan Doerr, a wild fire expert at the University of Swansea, and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Wildland Fire, said the case for such "prescribed burning" was not clear cut. "They have to be very carefully managed because every single one may escape control and cause a real bush fire." They must be carried out in ideal weather conditions and require detailed planning. Steep hillsides, common in Victoria, can make controlled burns difficult, while large portions of eastern Australian forests are often too wet to burn in winter.

The best way to reduce fire risk is to allow regular, smaller fires that break out naturally to run their course and use up available fuel, he said. "Though clearly that's easier said than done when people are around," said Doerr. A zero-tolerance approach to fire, as practiced through much of the US, can simply store up the problem, he said. "The bottom line is that as long as we are willing to live in areas that are very flammable then we are going to have to live with the risk of fire."

Fire breaks bulldozed into forests to prevent flames from spreading would have done nothing against the fires, he added. Intense fires in tinder-dry eucalyptus forest spread through flying embers, which can be carried by the winds to trigger new blazes several kilometres away. "Once you have a fire burning in the crowns [tree tops] there is relatively little anyone can do." A special factor in Australian bushfires, said Dr Clifford Jones, at the University of Aberdeen, is that eucalypts, which dominate the Australian landscape, release very flammable oil. "This is stored in 'glands' in the leaves and is released when the leaves start to heat up ... and undoubtedly adds to the vigour – and therefore the hazards."

"With climate change models predicting an even drier and hotter Australia in coming decades, the scene could well be set for even worse to come," said Professor Bill McGuire, at University College London.