A Country Fire Authority firefighter takes a break while fighting a bushfire at Bunyip state forest near Tonimbuk, Australia Photograph: Andrew Brownbill/EPA

In view of the scale of this fire's consumption of humans, animals, houses and large and small treasures, it can seem almost obscene to mention history. But in April 1770, Captain Cook, passing a northern New South Wales headland in his barque, Endeavour, saw the voluminous smoke of a bushfire, lit by Aborigines for the purpose of flushing out animals. He called the place Smoky Cape.

Such artfully lit fires as Cook saw along the coastline have been deliberately started for millennia, and they had other purposes than mere mayhem. They were designed to startle animals out of the bush, to burn dead trees and open up savannah for marsupial proteins - kangaroo, wallaby, etc. And they were intended as well to germinate plants that only fire can germinate. An anthropologist, Rhys Jones, named this practice "firestick-farming". It is sometimes blamed for the disappearance of what are known as megafauna - the giant marsupial tiger, the prodigiously girthed mega-wombat, the giant kangaroo that is more dwarfing than Magic Johnson - models of which I entertained my granddaughter with at the Australian Museum in Sydney earlier this week.

A fire truck moves away from the flames of a bushfire in the Bunyip Sate Forest near the township of Tonimbuk, west of Melbourne, Australia. Photograph: AP

But these deliberate, millennial, Aboriginal burn-offs are not irrelevant to the Victorian fires. They lie at the basis of the most publicly and passionately debated question that arose from these terrible fires outside Melbourne: whether to burn off, as the indigenous Australians did - what one expert calls "mosaic burning", the burning of discrete patches, one at a time - does any good at all, or can be safely or effectively conducted.

This was the bewildered argument that was held in many a household as we looked and then flinched from photographs of those consumed in Marysville and Kinglake and elsewhere last week.

Behind all our pity is the self-interested knowledge that one year soon something similar is coming our way. I live only half an hour's drive from the middle of Sydney, but my home is separated by a fire track and a stone wall from a relatively new national park on the North Head of Sydney Harbour. Earlier, in colonial history, observers denounced the non-European bush for its perverse refusal to satisfy northern hemisphere sensibility. Now that's exactly what we love about it. I walked through the next-door bush in the rain yesterday and saw the black cones of the banksia tree that generate ferocious heat when burned. I saw resin-filled eucalyptus trees that not only burn with a passion but can virtually explode and spew fire. I saw paperbarks covered with hanging shreds of bark-like dried, multi-layered papyrus, their bases littered with the stuff. I saw the native tea tree plump with flammable resin. But they were all neutralised by rain when I strolled there. Indeed it was raining and flooding along the New South Wales coast at the same time that the Victorians were consumed by fire. It all seemed to validate the Australian poet Les Murray's argument that there are only two Australian seasons - drought and flood.

Julie Whiteley lost her entire house though managed to take her kids to safety before the fires hit. Photograph: Alex Coppel/Rex/Newspix

In Victoria alone, the state of which Melbourne is the capital, there have been, over time, lethal fires with names such as Red Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, Black Thursday, Black Friday, Black Saturday. On Black Friday in 1939, the temperature in Melbourne reached 45.6C and 71 people lost their lives. On Ash Wednesday in 1983 the temperature was 43C and 75 people were killed. But this fire was accompanied by a Melbourne temperature of 46.4C and killed more than 200. No conclusive proof of climate change. But, as it happens, a record temperature more appropriate to equatorial Africa than to the town which, for its dreary winter, the rest of us call Bleak City.

And one day in the not remote future, while it's raining in Victoria, our bushland will go up in a Black Monday to Sunday. So there's a certain voyeuristic, thank-God-it-wasn't-me aspect to all this. "More bushfire disaster," says one lead on the Sydney Morning Herald website. But perforce it's not like watching an episode of Air Crash Investigation. The question of to burn or not to burn is more than academic for all Australians. Though the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and most universities have scientists working on bushfires, even they are divided. And the scary question arises: are these periodic immolations inevitable?

The other kitchen-table argument is whether to flee or stay. Until this fire the idea was that you attend country fire service briefings and do your best to fireproof your house by removing potential fuel from around it, closing its eaves and removing flammable material from the roof. Then you leave when it's suggested you should, or else you stay and fight it and, one hopes, let it jump over you in a few frightening seconds. I can imagine all too painfully the bind the Victorian dead, recently living, were in. To abandon a house, which is an extension of your soul, is a terrible choice. To abandon horses, thought one teenage victim, could not be contemplated. And what if you abandon your property and the fire doesn't affect it anyhow? And what if you go next time, and ditto? So the third time you say: "To hell with it, I'm staying!"

This voracious fire changed things though, and not least the flee/stay propositions. Working for a Sydney newspaper, my daughter covered a dreadful 1994 fire where, on one of the suburban streets of Sydney's North Shore, the fire jumped the road and, for some terrifying seconds, took all the oxygen with it. In that same street a couple sheltered in their swimming pool but were still somehow killed in a manner best not inquired into. Now my daughter lives not far from bushland and has understandably always been a go-and-take-the-kids woman, her husband a stay-and-train-the-hose man. But after this fire, he says he's going too. Because this fire proved that you could take every precaution, attend every class, and still lose your house and your life. It proved that in the face of the devouring tsunami of fire, a hose is useless.

So who is to blame, and what could have been done?

My eminent fellow Australian, Germaine Greer, belongs to the mosaic-burning school. According to this school of thought, a greater frequency of burn-offs would have meant that there was less fuel in the forests for the fires when they came. In a reception for the UK Friends of the Flying Doctor Service in London last week, she said: "Aboriginal people burned for a reason ... every season sclerophyll [Australian eucalypts, etc] build up and great amounts of detritus drop and collect and this must burn off if there is to be new growth." It is absolutely true that eucalyptus forests shed bark and leaves in profuse showers of tinder all year round. They are perpetually making fuel. And Greer is willing to put her own Australian bushland property up for the process. "If it is burned every five years, you'll have six months when it looks a bit rubbish. But you will also get all the orchids and all the rare wildflowers popping up out of the ground." Indeed, a government fire manual advises farmers: "Most bush would degrade in the long-term absence of fire."

Our cousins in moist New Zealand, who generously sent their volunteer firefighters to help, also belong to the firestick-farming school. One leading paper said that Australians are pointing the finger at the green movement for regulations designed to protect biodiversity of the bush by restricting burn-offs. And some of us are. But for probably fatuous reasons, I can't be as decisive as that on the issue. My own beliefs are skewed by the fact that in Sydney a few years back, in a national park only half an hour's drive from where I lived, a party of seven firefighting volunteers recruited from our area were overwhelmed by a burn-off - a mosaic burning - which turned back on them with a change in the wind, consumed their truck and killed the two youngest volunteers, a man and a woman in their 20s. Since we knew the woman's family, perhaps I am emotionally ill-equipped. This isn't the first time that what the rural fire service calls "a controlled burn" has got out of hand. But my shilly-shallying, as Greer would no doubt tell me, will be small protection when the fire comes.

There are nonetheless political issues we are entitled to complain about. A national early-warning system for natural disasters has never been put in place - it has been "languishing around for several years", said the deputy prime minister, Julia Gillard. Indeed, federal and state governments have argued about who would pay for it, and it went unattended to throughout John Howard's long prime ministership. Now the relatively new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, has promised to introduce the legislation, and one hopes the parliamentary heat will cool along with the ashes of Victoria.

Action is also promised on permitting Telstra, Australia's chief telcommunications provider, to send messages to all phones of all servers warning of danger, a restriction that up to now was based more on fear of monopoly than any desire to prevent fair warning. And in the spirit of Australian contradictoriness, while the local federal member has expressed gratitude that the worst fire, which destroyed many schools, occurred on a Saturday when they were empty, and has proposed that fireproof shelters be placed under all such schools, others have said that given the capacity of fires to draw oxygen, they would be death-traps. You see, even after 221 years we're not sure what to do.

Another thing that is eternal to fire, but about which politicians always make amazed, sombre speeches promising severer penalties, is arson. As incomprehensible, lethal and punishable as it seems to us, it will always be with us. It's something the best of psychiatry and the most severe jail sentences will never protect us from. It should be included along with other forces of nature in any modelling. To talk of it as an exception to the rule, as politicians like to do, is unrealistic.

For Australia, not to put too delicate a point on it, is an arsonist's wet dream. The bush cries out for fire as lover cries to lover. I hate, after all our boasts about having the most venomous spiders, snakes and medusae in the world, to say we've got the most deadly fire conditions. California's conflagrations are not negligible. Mind you, their need, for earthquake reasons, to put wooden shingles on their roofs makes them more vulnerable, whereas we have the non-flammable luxury of metal or terracotta tiles - indeed, charred metal lies all around the ruins. But whether our fires are the worst or not, we're up there.

Perhaps impressionistically, it seems to me that this calamity has shaken climate change sceptics. It seems that as well as El Niño, which suddenly (about Christmas, hence the name) exchanges our warm water for cold Peruvian waters and creates drought in inland Australia, the summers are getting more cyclonic, dumping water to encourage growth and then drying it brittle with heatwaves.

I always throw Nome, Alaska, at anyone who expresses doubt about climate change around our place. Admittedly, Nome is a long way from Australia, but last summer my wife and I saw there a number of moored, well-rigged but unexceptional yachts that had come through the Northwest Passage. That is, they had made without drama a journey that defeated Cook in the 18th century and killed Sir John Franklin and all his expedition in the 19th century. Only Arctic melt made this possible.

Then, a month ago, my grandson and I went with others for a flight over the coast of Antarctica and the South Magnetic Pole. A scientist on board pointed out clearly discernible blue melt-pools on the surface of the tongue of an ice shelf, an utterly new and unprecedented symptom of increasing temperatures. And in between, Australia with its long-term droughts and violent storms and awful catastrophes, its wonderful ancient bush inhabited by spirits utterly different from those of Europe, atmospheric as anyone could hope for; surpassing strange. And with fire on its breath.

· This article was amended on Friday February 20 2009. We mentioned Maryvale but we should have said Marysville. This has been corrected.