The severity of these fires have shown us a reality that was previously unimaginable. A fiery twister formed in the fires on Kangaroo Island. A fireman, Samuel McPaul, was killed when his truck flipped over in a fire tornado in Jingellic, New South Wales. Four thousand people huddled on the beach in the coastal town of Mallacoota as a wall of fire approached them; they had to be rescued by the Australian Navy.

Matthew Deeth, the mayor of Wollondilly, New South Wales, summed up the devastation. In some areas there was “literally nothing left,” he said just before Christmas, “apart from a few burnt sticks in the ground.”

We are only beginning to understand the fires’ disastrous consequences. Fragile forest ecosystems were decimated. Over a billion animals, experts estimate, perished. Perhaps thousands of birds, including our iconic yellow-tailed black cockatoos, died of exhaustion when they flew out to sea to escape the fires; their bodies washed up on beaches in East Gippsland. And our southern skies have been a smoky haze for days. More bad news will follow when rains wash vast quantities of ash from the fires into our waterways.

Australia remains caught in the nightmarish spell cast by these fires. Our hearts and minds have been thrown into a furnace; a volcano of anger has spewed from our mouths. Some of that anger is misdirected, aimed at arsonists or the Greens party for supposedly stopping trees from being chopped down as a fire-management technique. But most of the anger has been directed straight at Prime Minister Scott Morrison, whom people condemn for taking a holiday in Hawaii while his country burned.

Many people are starting to ask the right questions about climate change. When will we have leadership that reflects our needs? We urgently need governments that are not afraid to act to defend our planet from further destruction.

Aboriginal people are the caretakers of this ancient land. The nation’s leaders should value our knowledge. I join Craig Lapsley, who led the emergency response after the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria, in calling for the federal government to start a national Indigenous burning program. While the results would not be immediate, listening to Indigenous knowledge would help curb catastrophic fires of the future.

This terrible disaster has forced us to imagine our way in unimaginable times. I am guided by the words of my countryman Murrandoo Yanner, who reminds me of the strength of our ancient country. “The greatest thing we have to offer today is our humanity,” he said, “because this is all we ever had.”