Welcome to our March issue – a packed one with contributions from about 50 Australian writers, several of them new to the magazine. These include distinguished journalist-editor Luke Slattery, who writes about Volume 3 of Thomas Keneally’s ‘Australians’ and finds it somewhat wanting. David McCooey offers a spirited defence of John Kinsella. Novelist Andrea Goldsmith writes about two new books on Susan Sontag – and likes one of them. We publish the first in a new series of Reading Australia essays on key Australian texts: Kerryn Goldsworthy revisits Jessica Anderson’s much-loved novel ‘Tirra Lirra by the River’. Then we have reviews by people like Glyn Davis, Joan Beaumont, Nigel Biggar, Jane Sullivan – and much more!