KANGAROO ISLAND, Australia — Kangaroo Island is Australia in miniature.

It is a wildlife haven, with its own varieties of kangaroos, echidnas (a spiny anteater) and cockatoos, as well as a koala population seen as insurance should disaster strike the species on the mainland. It is a tourism magnet, with luxury cliff-top lodges and beaches studded with sea lions. It is a farming hub, producing veal, wool, grain and honey for purveyors at home and beyond.

Now, Kangaroo Island is unrecognizable.

Wildfires that burned for weeks consumed half of the island — more than 800 square miles. Two people were killed, dozens of homes were destroyed, and wilderness parks were turned to cinders, littering the landscape with animal corpses. In a bush land once teeming with the activity of insects, birds, reptiles and mammals, there is only silence, and the scent of rot.

“Everything is dead,” said Simon Kelly, a farmer who lost more than half of his 9,000 sheep and was burying them in mass graves.

In this season of unimaginable infernos in Australia, perhaps no place is facing more daunting questions about its future than Kangaroo Island.