On the subject of bushfires, these are a few pictures from the fires that hit here back in january. They took out something like ~300 houses within about a 3KM radius of where I live. Left me without power for ~4 days.
The second one gives you an idea as to just how much smoke was around at the time.
More images avaliable at:
http://canberrafires.xsnet.org/galleries.html
Edit: gah, fixed the "more images" url.