Charlotte O'Dwyer, the daughter of NSW Rural Fire Service volunteer Andrew O'Dwyer, stands in front of her father's casket during the funeral. Photo: Dean Lewins/AAP

On 7 January Charlotte O’Dwyer, the 19-month-old daughter of volunteer firefighter Andrew O’Dwyer, held her father’s helmet over her head as the New South Wales Rural Fire Service commissioner, Shane Fitzsimmons, pinned a posthumous service medal to her dress.

One week earlier, at another funeral, Fitzsimmons knelt before 19-month-old Harvey Keaton, who was standing solemnly with his dummy in a small firefighter’s shirt, and presented the same medal in honour of Harvey’s father, Geoffrey Keaton.

O’Dwyer, 36, and Keaton, 32, died when a falling tree caused their firetruck to roll on 19 December during a shift battling blazes south of Sydney.

Crew members from Horsley Park RFS carry the casket of volunteer Andrew O'Dwyer during his funeral service. Photo: NSW RFS

Thirty-three people have died in or while working to fight bushfires in Australia between 1 October and 31 January. It is the highest death toll for a fire season since the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria on 7 February 2009, in which 173 people died.

But the deaths, like the fires themselves, have been spaced out. Black Saturday was one terrible day. This season there has been a succession of terrible days, with little reprieve.

Johanna Selth, daughter of Ron Selth, who died in the Adelaide Hills the week before Christmas, told Guardian Australia: “When my sister called me to say that they'd found a body I just couldn't believe it”. The 69-year-old was found dead near his burnt-out farmhouse. His last communication with his partner was to say that the fire appeared to have passed him by.

“It just didn't seem real,” Johanna says. “I was here in the US in Washington DC and was just like, ‘It can't be him, there must have been someone else up there, because he knows what he's doing and he wouldn't have got caught like that.’”

Ron Selth’s identity was reported in the media before police confirmed it. Johanna sat down to tell her children after booking flights back to Australia.

Ron Selth died defending his farmhouse in the Adelaide Hills. Photo: supplied

“It's hard being away from home when these sorts of things happen,” she says. Now, back in the US, people stop her in the supermarket when they hear her accent and ask if she knows anyone affected by the fires.

“I just have to say, 'Yeah, we know some people,' and then just leave it at that and try to change it to a different subject … because I really don't want to talk about my dad to strangers,” she says.

Johanna and her siblings Luke Selth and Jasmine Berry visited the farm a week later, to find trees still burning and their childhood home reduced to rubble. Even the rose bushes planted by their late mother, who died 18 years ago of leukaemia, had burned.

“The whole thing was gone, even all the brick walls had come down so the fire was obviously extremely intense,” she says. “There was just nothing left.”

Calla Wahlquist