Sydney, Monday.

PATCHY rain, cooler weather, and tactical burning allowed firefighters

to push fires back from populated areas on Sydney's outskirts today but

the respite was likely to be only temporary.

''It is not the end of the fight, it's not even approaching it,'' a

spokesman for the New South Wales bush fire services department said as

insurers began counting the cost of the biggest fire emergency in

Australia in 200 years.

The fires, which have killed four people and forced tens of thousands

to evacuate their homes, have destroyed 190 houses and seriously damaged

more than 100 others, mainly in Sydney's heavily wooded northern and

southern suburbs.

Officials said only the heroic efforts of up to 10,000 firefighters

battling the monster fires have kept the number of destroyed homes from

going into the thousands.

Small factories, petrol stations, shops, schools and churches have

also been destroyed in the fires, which have burned 1.5 million acres in

the past eight days.

Early estimates of the damage to residential properties alone was

Australian $100m (#45m), the Insurance Council of Australia said.

The figure excludes the value of infrastructure, businesses and

government property destroyed in the conflagration.

Fighting the fires has cost about A$15m (#7m) so far, according to the

New South Wales Government.

Firefighters today hoped that cooler weather and more co-operative

winds would allow more controlled burning to deprive the fires of fuel.

The Blue Mountains, 50 miles west of Sydney, and near the city of

Gosford 60 miles to the north, remained the areas of most concern. No

homes were in immediate danger in Sydney.

The fierce blazes have been stoked by the highly volatile oils of

eucalyptus trees which vaporise under intense radiative heat as the fire

approaches and explode with flames in some cases as high as 70 metres

230 feet into the air.

''While the rain is welcome, it won't achieve much,'' one fire

official said. Rain of the kind needed to subdue the larger of the 136

fires still burning was not expected until Thursday.

Prime Minister Paul Keating, who surveyed the damage around Sydney on

Saturday, said the government would treble up to Australian $2000 (#900)

per family previously announced payments to the 1000 or so people made

homeless by the fires.

''It will be graded on the size of families so families with more

children will receive more rather than less,'' Keating said in a radio

interview.

He said Sydney was almost unique in the world in that it had very

large forest reserves around the city.

''The one thing I think does need recording is that for fires of this

scale and dimension, where it could have been almost anywhere else in

the world, we would have probably had thousands of homes lost and a

greater toll of life,'' he said.

The official death toll from the blazes stands at four, including a

woman who was engulfed in a fireball as she sought refuge in the

swimming pool of her home at Jannali yesterday. Her two step-daughters

suffered serious burns.

Hundreds of people have been treated by ambulance crews and more than

100 admitted to hospital.

Many fires have been lit by arsonists and police have charged 13

people with fire-related offences and received 1000 independent calls on

a special hotline.

British families arriving home from Sydney yesterday spoke of thick

smoke billowing in the suburbs.

''We went out to Palm Beach and could not see more than 100 yards,''

said Peter Capp, 39, from Coventry, who was attending a wedding with his

family.

''People were ringing up the house to find out how close it was

getting. Everyone in the community was ringing up each other,'' he

added.

In Sydney's southern suburbs of Jannall and Como, where one woman died

yesterday and about 100 houses were destroyed, fires were suppressed but

not contained.

In the outlying southern suburb of Waterfall, perched on the edge of

the Royal National Park, residents were evacuated as a huge fire raced

towards the small outpost. - Reuter.

New South Wales police have set up a helpline number on which

volunteers are handling inquiries from relatives and friends about which

areas of Sydney have been evacuated and where evacuees have been taken.

The number is 010-612-3329344.