Veteran fire investigator Richard Woods can read a patch of scorched earth like a map.
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The blackened grass and charred tree trunks that remain after a powerful blaze has swept through hold helpful clues for Mr Woods, who is acting deputy chief officer of the ACT Rural Fire Service.
He's often called out once the flames have subsided to observe and document singed leaves and branches and to sift through piles of ash for a match, a piece of carbon from an exhaust system or a piece of molten metal from a lawnmower.
They're all vital signs which help him piece together where a fire began and whether it was started accidentally, or was deliberately lit and needed to be handed to police.
Mr Woods has worked as a fire sleuth since the early 1990s, which he says was around the time Australian firefighters started to use the current, internationally-recognised methodology for interpreting how blazes ignited.
"Before we did these fire scene examinations, it was very much left up to guesswork as to how a fire started.
"Our role is to go to a scene like this and interpret how the bush has burned and to bring it back to the origin.
"Then it's a matter of going to look at the overall burnt area to determine where that fire actually started and we do that through what we call burn pattern indicators."
Mr Woods pointed out several indicators, many of which were detected on plant material, during a visit to the scene of a suspicious fire which ripped through grassland in Kambah last Saturday.
He used coloured flags to distinguish the main head, or hottest part, of the fire, from the coldest part, which helped him determine the direction of the fire and where it started.
"There's an angle of char in that tree that's identifying to me the fire has burnt from down below, to up above, and it's based on the known parameters of fire behaviour," Mr Woods said.
Information from witnesses and firefighters who were on the scene early on was vital in determining the cause of a blaze.
"All the pieces of the jigsaw come together, and we can then determine the cause from there."
Mr Woods is involved in training fire investigators both in Australia and overseas and said the challenge of getting to the bottom of each fire mystery kept him interested.
"It is a challenging area of fire work and integral to that is you really need to have a good understanding of the way in which bushfires burn.
"Because when you get to a black scene, many people will say well what can you find in here, there's nothing left?"
"Well, there is a lot left, but you need to know what you're looking for."
Police said almost half of 180 fires in the ACT last year were deemed suspicious and they believed some of those were deliberately lit.
Mr Woods warned arsonists that deliberately-lit fires put firefighters, and members of the public, at risk, and there were serious consequences for offenders.
"It's not a fun act, it's a very serious game.
"Our overall message is if you're partaking in this sort of activity, we don't want to see that. Don't do it."
