Bernice:  Great, you ask me a question and now I have to answer so now I'm up to 20 posts for today and that means I'm still over 50 percent!  Oh well, now that I'm here, I have an answer.

You see, the Australian government set those fires.  The current theory is that the fires were set deliberately but the "who" isn't known.  Likely it was secret government operatives with orders coming from the highest branch of the military.  The reason?  Unknown at this point.  But like all good conspiracies, we'll just keep digging until we get to the bottom and find the "truth" (or find some reasonable explanation that we can adopt--which ever comes first).  And like all those committed conspiracy theorists, we will explain away any and all official explanations and only accept those explanations that support our conspiratorial views.

Or something like that.  ;)