Reuters

A fire approaches the Newell Highway near Coonabarabran, Australia, in this handout photo provided by the Rural Fire Service on Monday.

CANBERRA — Raging wildfires destroyed dozens of homes and licked at Australia's leading optical space observatory on Monday, officials said, but spared giant telescopes that have mapped far-away galaxies and discovered new planets.

Less fortunate were a father and son who police arrested after a fire was lit deliberately to destroy illegal drug laboratories they were alleged to be running in dense bushland. Police were closing in on the drug labs when the fire was lit.

More than 140 fires are burning across vast areas in the north and west of New South Wales, Australia's most populated state, and in the island state of Tasmania despite cooler weather giving firefighters some respite.

A searing heat wave had fueled the fires over the past week. Only one person, an elderly firefighter working alone in Tasmania, has died so far in the fires.

The biggest blaze, with a perimeter of 60 miles, destroyed around 100,000 acres of bush-land and 28 homes around the Warrambungle National Park in New South Wales.

That fire also forced the evacuation of the Siding Springs Observatory, which houses 15 major telescopes.

Cameras inside the mountain-top observatory showed large flames and thick smoke sweeping over it. There appeared to be little damage to telescopes and dishes but scientists have been unable to visit the site yet to assess any damage.

"We do not yet know what impact the extreme heat of the ash might have on the telescopes themselves," said Erik Lithander, acting vice chancellor of the Australian National University, which operates the observatory.

The fire damaged five buildings at the observatory, including accommodation for visiting astronomers, but Lithander said scientists were confident the telescopes would still work.

Siding Springs is home to the 13-ft Anglo-Australian Telescope, which has surveyed 200,000 galaxies and was instrumental in confirming the existence of dark energy.

That discovery led to Australian Brian Schmidt sharing the 2011 Nobel Prize for physics.

The observatory has also helped find more than 30 new planets over the past decade and is being used to map the southern sky.

In Sydney, police arrested two men late on Sunday over a fire that broke out in the Blue Mountains National Park west of the city last week. The fire destroyed more than 50 hectares of bushland in the Blue Mountains, a popular tourist destination.

Police said they had been aware of the illegal, outdoor drug labs but were forced to postpone a raid due to the extreme fire danger in the area last week.

"The two sites ... were only accessible by foot and required police to trek through tick, leech and snake-infested scrubland to reach them," New South Wales police said in a statement on Monday.

Police said a father and son had been charged with "the large commercial manufacture of a prohibited drug" and contaminating a water catchment area. The younger man was also charged with lighting the fire.

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Rob Blakers / EPA

Michelle Ardle was among the tourists evacuated Sunday after being trapped by forest fires in south-east Tasmania for two nights.

CANBERRA, Australia — Australia was bracing on Monday for days of "catastrophic" fire and heat-wave conditions, with fires already burning in five states.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard toured fire-ravaged Tasmanian townships and promised emergency aid for survivors, who told of a "fireball" that engulfed communities across the thinly populated state on Friday and Saturday.

"The trees just exploded," local man Ashley Zanol told Australian radio, recounting a wall of flames that surrounded his truck as he carted water to assist fire crews in the hard-hit township of Murdunna, which was largely leveled by the inferno.

Tasmanian police said around 100 people feared missing in bushfires had been accounted for and there had so far been no deaths as authorities combed through still-smouldering ruins of homes and vehicles, while evacuating local people and tourists.

Bushfires were ablaze in five of Australia's six states, with 90 fires in the most populous state New South Wales, and in mountain forests around the national capital Canberra.

On Tuesday morning, authorities were warning people living in Kybeyan valley to leave the area, where they said at least 20 homes were in the path of a blaze.

Record heat wave
Severe fire conditions were forecast for Tuesday, replicating those of 2009, when "Black Saturday" wildfires in Victoria state killed 173 people and caused $4.4 billion worth of damage.

A record heat wave, which began in Western Australia on Dec. 27 and lasted eight days, was the fiercest in more than 80 years in that state.  It has spread east across the nation, making it the widest-ranging heat wave in more than a decade, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

Chris Kidd / Pool via EPA

Homes damaged by fire are seen from a helicopter between Dunalley and Boomer Bay, Tasmania, Australia, on Jan. 5. Hundreds of local residents and tourists took to the sea in boats to escape forest fires that burned to the waterline in Australia's island state of Tasmania.

New South Wales Premier Barry O'Farrell said record-low rains have produced large fuel loads that increase the risk of fire, combined with record temperatures and high winds, Australia's 7 News reported.

"Tomorrow [Tuesday] is not going to be just another ordinary day," he said. "Tomorrow will be perhaps the worst fire danger day this state has ever faced."

More coverage from 7 News

Tuesday would bring the highest "catastrophic" bushfire temperature conditions, fire officials said, warning that many blazes would likely be too fierce for fire crews to easily extinguish.

"Any fire that burns under the predicted conditions — 40-degree (Celsius) temperatures (104 degrees F), below 10 percent humidity, winds gusting over 70 kilometers an hour (43 mph) — those conditions are by any measure horrendous," New South Wales Rural Fire Service Deputy Commissioner Rob Rogers said.

PhotoBlog: Wildfires in Tasmania destroy more than 100 homes

In the Australian capital, Canberra, hit by a firestorm in 2003 that destroyed hundreds of homes, authorities said they were expecting the worst conditions in the decade since, with a fifth day of searing temperatures and strong winds.

"With those winds it boosts up the fire danger significantly," the city's deputy fire chief Michael Joyce told local reporters.

Blazes sparked by weekend lightning storms were already burning in forests surrounding the sprawling lake-and-bushland city, as they did 10 years earlier.

Reuters contributed to this report. 7 News is NBC's Australian partner.

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Leigh Carmichael / MONA via Reuters

The installation "Cloaca Professional, 2010" by Belgium artist Wim Delvoye, which has been dubbed the "poo-machine" is shown on display at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Australia.

SYDNEY -- Smelling excrement may not be everyone's idea of fun, but for those who like to push the boundaries, Australia's most controversial new museum may be just what they are looking for.

Dubbed "the subversive adult Disneyland", the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is located in Tasmania and features around 400 works of art from Egyptian mummies to Young British Artists including Chris Ofili and Jenny Saville.

But the most talked-about piece is the Cloaca Professional, labeled the "poo-machine." It was built by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye to mimic the actions of the human digestive system.

A series of glass receptacles hang in a row with the machine being "fed" twice a day on one end. The food is ground up "naturally," the way it is in the human body, and the device produces feces on the clock at 2 p.m. at the other end.

The smell is so powerful that not many visitors can take it.

"It put me off because of the overwhelming assault on the senses," said Diane Malnic, a Sydney-based accountant.

'Vomit room'
Yet this was her second visit in five months, following a family holiday in Tasmania earlier in the year. This time, she flew without her husband and children just to have another look at the collection, interested in Delvoye's other pieces.

She took great care to avoid the "smelly" parts and still talked vividly about the "vomit room" which was part of an earlier exhibit no longer on display.

"I wouldn't go back to see them," she said, laughing.

The Cloaca is part of a series of at least five similar machines built by the artist, another of which will soon be exhibited at the Louvre. It is the most hated piece in the museum but also the most visited.

The museum, which opened in January 2011, is owned by eccentric and philanthropist David Walsh, who made his fortune as a professional gambler, and features one of the largest private art collections in the world with an estimated value of around $100 million.

Leigh Carmichael / MONA via Reuters

The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Australia, features around 400 works of art from Egyptian mummies to Young British Artists including Chris Ofili and Jenny Saville.

Its motto is to shock, offend, inform and entertain.

"It definitely challenges your interpretation of what art is," said Malnic.

Elephant dung
Pieces include Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary, which features elephant dung and porn-magazine cutouts of genitals. It caused controversy in 1996, with then-New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani reportedly describing Ofili's work as "sick".

Another much-talked-about piece is the Matrix by Jenny Saville, a full-frontal large painting of a naked transgender man with his modified genitals exposed.

"It's confronting," said Margarita Silva, a Melbourne-based dentist making during her third trip to the MONA.

Detractors argue that some of the pieces don't belong to a museum, which is also what Malnic initially thought. But upon reflection, she said the Cloaca machine opened her mind and argued that perhaps it was the future of art.

For Silva, her favorites were a soundproof room of 30 Madonna fans who were individually filmed singing a capella the artist's Immaculate Collection album. The other was a waterfall with droplets spelling out a series of words.

Keeping with the MONA's sensibility, none of its art work is grouped or chronological, leaving viewers to walk at random.

"Overall, it's a fantastic experience," said Silva.

The museum charges A$20 ($20) for entry and has drawn around 389,000 visitors in its first year.

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Police in Tasmania, Australia, are investigating whether personal watercraft riders broke any laws when they raced through a pod of dolphins near Hobart.

Video footage apparently shot by an onlooker shows two personal watercraft, each with a man and a woman on board, coming up behind the pod before racing through them on Saturday in Frederick Henry Bay, The Mercury newspaper of Tasmania reported.

Witnesses said the watercraft managed to separate a pod of about 30 dolphins, according to Australian Broadcasting Corp.

According to Marine and Safety Tasmania, Jet-Skiers and boaters must not exceed 8 knots within 100 meters (330 feet) of dolphins and they must withdraw immediately if the animals show signs of disturbance, The Mercury reported.

Inspector Stuart Scott told the newspaper police would be interviewing the watercraft riders to determine if marine mammal protection laws were broken.

One of the riders, Todd Tatnell, claimed they did nothing wrong and that the dolphins had been following them before and after the video was taken. He denied that the dolphins were distressed.

"It's just been blown right out of proportion over nothing really," he was quoted as saying by the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

"We were only just playing with the dolphins as you do when you go out on the boat and Jet Skis and they'll come and play with you all the time."

Wildlife biologist Kris Carlyon of the Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and the Environment told The Mercury it’s likely the marine mammals were scared away and would not  return.

"The dolphins will have felt harassed and basically will clear out, at least in the short term," said Carlyon.

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