The noise. That's what you don't get in all the footage and photos. The terrible, terrible noise of a big bushfire.
The malignant sound of the wind as the fire sucks in the oxygen it needs to grow.
The hissing and popping of eucalyptus trees, the explosions as they release their gasses.
Fires make their own weather pattern, creating their own wind, lightening, black hail.
"The noise," says Liane Henderson, volunteer firefighter of 20 years standing, "is like jet planes."
If we are lucky, we will never know what it is like inside an uncontained fire.
Liane does, and so do her firefighting colleagues. It is dark, like an eclipse.
"It can get very scary because you can get disoriented. It is another world when you are out there, it really is."
An unpredictable fast-moving force of destruction, engulfing everything in its path.