In terms of fires, we obviously had that terrible period last December. I was in New Zealand over Christmas & some of the snow on the mountains was pinkish-yellow, due to all the ash that had drifted across the ocean. Then about 2 weeks later is actually hit South America, by all accounts. We have bushfires pretty frequently so December was not particularly exceptional in that sense, although the heat was such that many separate fires pretty much combined into one huge front.

But the difference in Australia is that we are largely empty. Fires need something to burn, and trees (largely) only grow near the coast out here (say within a couple of hundred kms). But that just happens to also be where all the people are: we have roughly 23 million people squeezed - to the surprise of many people, with some of the highest density in the world - largely into a narrow habitable band along the coasts. The interior is largely empty, so the extreme temperatures are pretty much unrecorded, there's nothing to burn in the first place, and nothing to destroy if it did.