Thoughtful and positive fiction reviews (from American critics) of novels by Thomas Keneally, A. Frances Johnson and Matthew Condon devote much space to intricacies of plot, while critiques of Tim Winton’s Breath (Nathanael O’Reilly) and Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap (Rebecca Starford) make interesting cases for these novels being slightly less than each author’s best. In fiction, Simon Barker’s ‘The Crocodile Hunter’s Wife’ offers a contemporary take on Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’. Graeme Kinross-Smith’s memoir ‘Three Fires’ is elegiac: ‘The house is set against the bush below the level of the road and it is dying … I can see its bones being eaten as I watch.’ The poetry often draws on rural settings, Jeff Guess’s ‘Abandoned Car’ finding its ‘last garage’ in mallee scrub. B.N. Oakman surveys a more colourful landscape in ‘In Defense of Hawaiian Shirts’, while Cameron Lowe maps a suburban backyard and night sky in ‘The Rule’.