Overland 169 contains essays paying tribute to DOROTHY HEWETT, who was Australia’s most important post-war female writer and a much-loved, larger-than-life presence. The issue also features BOB ELLIS’s Overland lecture, ‘The Age of Spin’, in which Ellis delivers his customary blend of anger and humour in a powerful polemic against Australia’s political rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’ and its obscene justifications of mass murder, xenophobia and cruelty.Overland 169 features a series of previously unpublished letters by XAVIER HERBERT written on the overland trail from Brisbane to Darwin. DAVID CARTER discusses the decline in English cultural influence in Australia and MICHAEL LEACH looks at the remains of Australian socialism’s great heroic failure, the utopian Paraguayan experiment. JOHN KINSELLA writes about the cultural tensions – literary and concrete – between the city and the Bush.NATHAN HOLLIER, DENNIS GLOVER, JOANNE SCANLAN and ALICIA SOMETIMES consider the significance of the Whitlam era and the vestiges of ‘true belief’.This issue presents a laugh-a-minute story by MELISSA LUCASHENKO that affectionately ribs the authentic Indigenous vernacular, and essays by FAY ZWICKY, TONY BIRCH, ENZA GANDOLFO and JEFF SPARROW on the books that changed their lives.