The unease was deep and familiar. The sun had only just risen and the temperature was galloping past 30 degrees. There was danger in the air.

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Eyes already made dry by the hot nor'westerly breeze were strained further by the smartphone and the compulsion to constantly check the apps which would tell me where the fires were.

I knew they were a long way off and posed no threat but couldn't help myself. This was behaviour ingrained during the Black Summer inferno, six years before large tracts of Victoria went up in flames at the weekend.

Watching the news that night, seeing the heartbreak on the faces of people who had lost their homes, lifetimes of memories now ash and twisted metal, moistened those eyes and brought a lump to the throat. Here we were yet again. Not my community this time - we went through it in January 2020 - but people just like us whose lives had been upended by unstoppable fire.

The echoes of 2020 were loud. Ground parched by heat and drought. Pyrocumulus storms triggered by the fires. Dry lightning. The whiplash effect of cool changes that turned the flanks of fires into new fronts. Relief from the heat came with new perils as blazes changed direction. And there was the same dread for people notified by SMS that it was now too late to leave.

At a media conference yesterday, Victorian Emergency Management Commissioner Tim Wiebusch said the slightest winds were causing the fires to move around. And Country Fire Authority Chief Officer Jason Heffernan warned of another "heating event" predicted to arrive in late January. We were, he said, only in the early part of the high-risk weather season.

I can't help wondering, however, if fire these days even bothers to observe seasons. I've always thought labelling the blazes that tore through eastern Australia the "Black Summer" fires was misleading, given many of the blazes were well under way in winter. The inferno, stretching from Queensland into Victoria, lasted an incredible nine months.

Certainly, California learned the hard way in January last year that winter is not a fire retardant. The Eaton and Pacific Palisades fires, found to have been ignited by faulty high tension transmission wires and fanned by fierce Santa Ana winds, destroyed more than 16,000 structures and........

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