SYDNEY -- At times like these, Australians are wondering whether they really do live upside down. While the Northern Hemisphere, shivering in the cold, was welcoming in 2002 with hot drinks, Australia has been battling bush fires.

Thousands of hectares of this country's forests have burned down to charred stumps, species of fauna found only here are threatened with extinction, and hundreds of families are homeless.

Japan has its earthquakes, North America has its blizzards. This self-styled "lucky country" has no such natural disasters. But once or twice in a decade a summer can turn our complacency into red-alert mobilization as we again face oncoming walls of fire that sweep toward the state capital cities, at times engulfing suburbs. So far this summer it's Sydney's turn to sizzle.

Radio warnings started sounding on Christmas Day. As families sat down to sweat through the traditional (British) dinner of baked turkey and boiled pudding -- or the more sensible Aussie-style meal of cold prawns and salad -- radio stations swung into alert mode. People in bushland suburbs were told where fires had broken out. The usual crowds motoring to holidays were warned to stay away from highways out of the city.

The radio shock-jocks soon did not need to fever-pitch their warnings. Nor did TV news broadcasts need to flash scenes of houses engulfed in flames. Everyone could see and smell approaching danger as the whole of Sydney became shrouded in smoke. The famed arch of Sydney Harbor Bridge disappeared from sight. A week later the acrid blue haze still hung low as a warning of an arc burning toward the city. The pollution index hit 237, 10 times normal.

Never a good place for asthmatics, Sydney is now a no-go zone for people suffering from respiratory complaints. People are being warned to stay indoors. Hospitals are treating asthma cases at unprecedented rates.

Major Australian cities are particularly at risk from summer fires that periodically ignite, sometimes by lightning, at times from carelessly tossed cigarettes, and, as police are finding this week, a few lit by crazed pyromaniacs.

Australia's unique eucalypt scrublands are highly vulnerable to fire. The eucalyptus oil in leaves explodes, bursting alight the tall trees in successive waves. Hot winds, as came this week, shoot the flames across treetops at speeds impossible to control.

Fire-fighting methods used in North America do not work so well here. Lacking lakes, there is less scope to dump water from helicopters as works with Canadian brush fires. American flora and landscape allow different containment techniques. Even so, Australian brigades are grateful for word from American volunteers that they are ready to come immediately with men and equipment.

Local voluntary rural fire brigades are saving the day. These men and women drop everything to rally to their local units where their training allows them to halt the walls of flames.

Dangerous? Yes, even the best trained and equipped volunteers sometimes are burned to death. In "perfect" weather recently near Sydney, four of them died while "backburning," an exercise in clearing bush-free spaces.

Still the volunteers come. From thousands of kilometers away in Queensland and South Australia, convoys of fire trucks loaded with young men in their heavy uniforms lumbered into the worst-hit state, New South Wales. In the mountainous, near-impenetrable bush west of Sydney, they relieved locals who had been on duty day and night for a week.

Bush fires do not penetrate into cities, but they can devastate suburbs. Australians insist on owning spacious yards around their houses. Hence the awkward outward sprawl of suburbs. Sydney, with over 4 million people, can only sprawl westward into mountains, many of these protected by law as national parks. Against common sense, houses get built on the fringes of parks covered with thousands of hectares of protected, thick forest.

The first houses to burn this week -- you guessed it -- were beside bushland. The volunteers saved what they could, as they have for decades past. After insurance companies recover from claims sure to total billions of dollars, the houses will be rebuilt. On the same spot, of course.

After the shock wears off the public will be asking questions, however. Not only about the folly of rebuilding and again risking human life, but about the handling of these recurring disasters.

Oddly enough, sympathy has gone first to the lost wildlife. Animals with burned paws draw tears to the eyes of TV viewers. Animal welfare groups trying to rescue dead birds and pets talk of "a catastrophe" and are appealing for donations. The vast Royal National Park has lost, perhaps forever, native flora and fauna.

Public anger is rising against the arsonists who, amid the carnage, delight in lighting some of these fires. "Acts of sheer bastardry" is how Sydney's Acting Police Commissioner Ken Moroney describes the dozens of suspected cases. Phil Koperberg, Rural Fire Services chief, says 40 of 100 blazes investigated "cannot be adequately explained."

NSW Premier Bob Carr, who cut short his holiday to tour the devastation, says the pyromaniacs are "mad, bad, or some combination of the two." But what will he do about them? State opposition leader Kerry Chikarovski claims only seven of 110 people convicted since 1995 of lighting bush fires have served time in jail.

Still, most victims are not casting blame. Stoically, they are sifting through the ashes they once called home.

Out at Warrimoo, in the Blue Mountains, the folk in Cross Street are trying to figure out why the flames destroyed seven of their houses but merely left eight random neighbors singed. The Russian roulette inferno claimed and bypassed indiscriminately.

One father who lost his home of 16 years, Lance Jackson, managed to get his wife and son out of No. 50 Cross Street as flames burst through shattered windows. Johnson still has faith: "Praise the Lord. We're alive."

Fire chief Koperberg, a veteran of many such perplexing conflagrations, is philosophical: "It's a weird country."

Only a resident of this neck of the Southern Hemisphere woods could say that with a smile.