There were no quick answers, but officials said panic and the freight-train speed of the fire front driven by winds of more than 90 kilometres per hour and temperatures as high as 47 C  probably accounted for the unusually high toll.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, visibly upset during a television interview, reflected the countrys disgust at the idea that arsonists may have set some of the 400 fires that devastated Victoria state, or helped them jump containment lines.

What do you say about anyone like that? Rudd said. Theres no words to describe it, other than its mass murder.

More than one dozen fires still burned uncontrollably across the state, though conditions were much cooler than on Saturday.

Evidence of heart-wrenching loss abounded. From the air, the landscape was blackened as far as the eye could see. In at least one town, bodies still lay in the streets. Entire forests were reduced to leafless, charred trunks, farmland to ashes. The Victoria Country Fire Service said some 2,200 square kilometres were burned out.

At Kinglake, a body covered by a white sheet lay in a yard where every tree, blade of gra** and the ground was blackened. Elsewhere in the town, the burned out hulks of four cars were clustered haphazardly together after an apparent collision. Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio reported a car in a small reservoir, the driver apparently steering there in desperation.

What weve seen, I think, is that people didnt have enough time, in some cases Victoria Police Commissioner Christine Nixon told a news conference. Were finding (bodies) on the side of roads, in cars that crashed.

But there were also extraordinary tales of survival.

On man leapt into his pool to escape the flames as they roared over his house, leaving it unscarred but razing the neighbours. Another woman sheltered with her children in a w****at burrow as the worst of the fire passed.

Mark Strubing sheltered in a drainage pipe as his property, outside Kinglake, burned.

We jumped in the car and we were only literally just able to outrun this fire. It was travelling as fast as the wind, Strubing told Nine Network television news.

He said he and a companion rolled around in the water at the bottom to wet their clothing as the flames started licking the pipe: How we didnt burn I dont know.

Elsewhere in Kinglake, Jack Barber fled just ahead of the flames with his wife, his neighbour, driving in two cars packed with birth certificates, insurance documents, two cats, four kittens and a dog.

We had a fire plan, he said Monday. The plan was to get the hell out of there before the flames came.

Their escape route blocked by downed power lines and a tree, they took shelter first at a school, then when that burned in an exposed cricket ground ringed by trees, where they found five others.

All around us was 30 metres flames ringing the oval, and we ran where the wind wasnt. It was swirling all over the place, Barber said. For three hours, we dodged the wind.

The wind surged and changed direction quickly time and again on Saturday, fanning the blazes and making their direction utterly unpredictable from minute to minute. Local media had been issuing warnings in the days leading up to the weekend, but many people guarding their homes with backyard hoses would have been outside when the wind changed, and thus could have missed the fresh warnings.

At least 750 homes were destroyed on Saturday, the Victoria Country Fire Service said.

Officials said both the tolls of human life and property would almost certainly rise as they reached deeper into the disaster zone, and forecasters said temperatures would rise again later in the week, posing a risk of further flare-ups.

Nixon said investigators had strong suspicions that at least one of the deadly blazes known as the Churchill fire after a ruined town was deliberately set. And it could not be ruled out for other fires. She cautioned against jumping to conclusions.

The countrys top law officer, Attorney General Robert McClelland, said that people found to have deliberately set fires could face murder charges. Murder can carry a life sentence.

Police sealed off Maryville, a town destroyed by another fire, with checkpoints, telling residents who fled and news crews they could not enter because there were still bodies in the streets. Armed officers moved through the shattered landscape taking notes, pool news photographs showed.

John Handmer, a wildfire safety expert at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, said research has shown that people in the path of a blaze must get out early or stay inside until the worst has past.

Fleeing at the last moment is the worst possible option, he said. Sadly, this message does not seem to have been sufficiently heeded this weekend with truly awful consequences in Victoria.

Even if a house is set ablaze, it will burn more slowly and with less intensity that a wildfire and residents have a better chance of escape, he said.

Victoria state Premier John Brumby on Monday announced a commission would be held to examine all aspects of the fires, including warning policies.

I think our policy has served us well in what I call normal conditions. These were unbelievable circumstances, Brumby said on Australian Broadcasting Corp. television.

Blazes have been burning for weeks across several states in southern Australia. A long-running drought in the south the worst in a century had left forests extra dry and Saturdays fire conditions in Victoria were said to be the worst ever in Australia.

In New South Wales state on Monday, a 31-year-old man appeared in court charged with arson in connection to a wildfire that burned north of Sydney at the weekend. No loss of life was reported there. He faces up to 10 years in prison.

The countrys deadliest fires before the current spate killed 75 people in 1983. In 2006, nine people died on South Australias Eyre Peninsula.