'Depending on your vintage, Robert Drewe is best known for his memoir The Shark Net, his debut novel, The Savage Crows, his widely studied short stories, or because his Our Sunshine became the Heath Ledger vehicle Ned Kelly. It seems fitting that Ernest Hemingway is name-checked twice in Drewe’s latest novel, Whipbird. “As a writer you should not judge. You should understand,” Hemingway once wrote in Esquire, and throughout his career, Drewe has unfailingly taken this on.' (Introduction)