The Fires is about two fires: the burning city of Troy and the almost constantly burning megafire of the present. It's also about the beauty and fragility of the world we live in, human voices and concerns, the passing of time. It's a sequence that becomes a mosaic.

One layer down from the surface landscape, The Fires is also about the landscape of South Australia, the hills and beaches surrounding Adelaide, and its marginal, drought-prone mid-north plains. "Odysseus" is an implicit continuation and argument with writers Flexmore Hudson and Kenneth Slessor.

But after all the tragedy, cruelty, politics, love and arguments with its ancestors, The Fires is about being human in a world in which non-human beings, larger gods and forces, and beauty and utter frailty also live.

Plus: auto-fiction, "Hollywood, Guido Orlando, the Pope and the Mother" - which shows the connections and disjunctions between Old Hollywood (in the person of fixer and PR man Guido Orlando) and a former Pope, and the effects on a mother and daughter on the far side of the world. It is the story of a marriage, disjunction and alliance within a family, of what is nurtured and what is not, and of the power of politics and finance to reach into the lives of everyone.