Michael McGirr has an eye for coincidence. ‘The first bypass,’ he notes, ‘was performed on the Hume [Highway] in 1967, the year the world’s first coronary bypass was successfully performed in Cleveland. Though he does not press the point, the comparison is more than a mere curiosity. The conversion of highway to freeway - the steady accumulation of bypasses over the last forty years that has produced by accretion what is now a straight and soulless run between capitals - has also had the effect of preserving and even revitalising the towns along the way. These towns, no longer on the main drag, have to varying degrees weathered the impact of the surgery, recovering iden­tities that had once been obscured by the clogged-up road that ran right through the middle.