Then footage started emerging this week of the scale of destruction on the nation's fire grounds.

Victoria is reeling after out-of-control fires erupted in east Gippsland this week, leaving a trail of death and devastation in their wake.

"I don't have a lot of answers for you but this is causing me to rethink a lot of what we believed was possible," Dr Radford, a La Trobe University Bendigo expert on landscapes and climate change, said.

He is not the only person saying these fires are different. Firefighters returning to Bendigo have spoken of conditions like nothing they have seen before.

"I was with a crew on Black Saturday," Lockwood brigade member of 20 years David Hutchings told the Bendigo Advertiser on Thursday.

"What we've just done is nothing like Black Saturday. It was incredible. We saw the dawn. We saw the world go black, the world go red, and then the next thing I know we're about 15 hours later and still fighting fires.

"So no, I've never seen anything like it."

The good news for central Victoria is that the region lacks the vast, dense forests found in the state's east, Dr Radford said.

Its highly fragmented bushland is also easier for firefighters to access thanks to the many tracks that run through it.

But if a major bushfire had taken hold in those forests during the kind of fire conditions seen last weekend - or even on the "catastrophic" rated code red day last November - the consequences could have been disastrous, Dr Radford says.

As it was, firefighters took several hours to bring the blaze in East Bendigo under control last Saturday amid gusty conditions and high temperatures.

Victorians face a new paradigm in which extreme fire days in already dry conditions can occur almost every week, Dr Radford said.

"In the past you might have had an extreme fire event, and that had a devastating impact, but at least you'd generally have enough time to allow an agency to get on top of things. Or you'd see Mother Nature intervene and we'd get some rain to mitigate that threat," he said.

"Now, we just get a brief respite that does not put anything out and it flares up again later."

What's more, climate change is altering the way fires burn through bushland by drying out the low lying gullies that once would have held moisture well into summer, Dr Radford said.

That phenomenon is not only adding more fuel when fires rip through bushland at the height of summer, he said.

It is also leaving less room for the animals lucky enough to survive and repopulate after the flames have gone.

"The forests can come back after one fire. What will be in them, in terms of the fauna that survives the fire, and whether there will be enough refuges to support them to rebuild will depend on the extent and severity of burns," Dr Radford said.

"Even in NSW and Gippsland right now, it's too early to tell how 'patchy' it is within burn areas.

"Without doubt, though, the impact on fauna has been massive."

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Not enough is being done to protect humans from fire, University of Melbourne fire ecology expert Kevin Tolhurst has warned.

There are simply not enough planned burns happening, he said.

"That's partly because the public won't accept it (enough planned burns). They see it as a damaging and risky business that puts too much smoke in the air," he said.

"We need to get a little more realistic. We live in a fire-prone environment and that means periodic smoke and fires in the landscape."

Many planned burns ignore the Indigenous-inspired fires that should be spread "like mosaics" across the landscape, targeting the right native plants and geographic features, Professor Tolhurst said.

Authorities are increasing the number of traditional burns they do, the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning's Paul Bates said.

"There are now over 30 of these burns on the current (plan). We work closely with Traditional Owners and will see more traditional burning in the coming years," he said.

Despite his criticisms, Professor Tolhurst said the number of planned burns taking place in Victoria have risen since 2009, when Black Saturday blazes triggered changes to how authorities prepared forests and thought about property development in high risk areas.

"The problem is that the preparation takes decades. We can't just do it in a month or two," he said.

"The amount of prescribed burning that we do in the landscape - and land-use planning for where we build our houses - needs to be built up over decades. You don't see all the benefits and risks until you add it all up over a 20 year period.

"So in terms of what we can do this summer - that will really be about short term reactions."

That means CFA crews hitting any fires that break out "hard and fast" with as many resources as they can muster - a strategy they used successfully last weekend and during the code red day to get the upper hand before lives were lost.

Despite the danger, many members of the public are simply unprepared for bushfires and often fail to put a plan in place ahead of time, especially in high risk areas.

It is precisely this problem that researchers at the the national Bushfire and National Hazard Cooperative Research Centre uncover in study after study, CEO Richard Thornton said.

"They understand that when the conditions are right, hot and windy days, with dry vegetation, fires will occur. But they just don't think it will happen to them," he said.

"Talk about it with your family and ensure you have multiple back up plans.

"Our research shows it is important to include your children in planning to help them prepare, and don't forgot about your pets and animals too."

People should also appreciate just how dangerous fires can be even if a day has not been categorised code red - the highest of all fire designations - Dr Thornton said.

That is especially important this summer because huge tracts of central Victoria are facing "above normal" fire potential, his researchers have found.

A long, dry spring across vast areas of inland Victoria has stressed plants and left more dead fuel for fires, they warned in a hazard report published in mid-December.

Cold fronts may have brought rain last spring but temperatures then stayed above average, drying soils and vegetation.

Central Victoria has been kept warm by El Nino weather patterns over tropical waters thousands of kilometres away in the Indian Ocean.

Those patterns usually break when monsoonal rains hit the southern hemisphere.

"However, this year the monsoon has been slow to move south - in fact it was the latest retreat on record from India," the Bushfire CRC experts said.

Australia's weather systems were already further north anyway, with more dry westerly winds hitting central Victoria after gathering heat in the centre of the continent.

Both weather systems should decay by mid-January, though likely not in time to ease the severity of the summer fire season, the Bushfire CRC experts said.

Central Victoria has, at least, not been as dry for as long as Gippsland, where the last 36 months have seen the lowest rainfall on record, Bureau of Meteorology data shows. And average rainfall could return as early as this month.

Yet BOM meteorologists are warning that it will take months of above-average rain for the landscape to recover.

Then there are future summers to worry about, the Climate Council foreshadowed in a recent report.

"Against a long term heating trend from the burning of coal, oil and gas and rising greenhouse gas emissions, many extreme weather events are worsening, putting Australian lives at risk and threatening livelihoods and well-being," the group warned.