[1] In the 1950s in Queensland's Stone Country the orphaned Robert Blewitt (nicknamed "Bobby Blue") works as a deputy for the local constable, Daniel Collins.

Writing in The Monthly Geordie Williamson noted: "To follow Alex Miller once again into the stone country of Central Queensland, a landscape sacred in the author’s memory and an essential site for his fiction, is to watch a self return to its wellsprings, and not only in terms of place...Miller's voice is never more pure or lovely than when he channels it through an instrument as artless as Bobby.

The intelligence of the author haunts the novel, like an atmosphere: a “colouring of the air”, writes Proust, like 'the bloom on a grape'.

"[2] In the Australian Book Review Brian Matthews wrote: "Coal Creek is a beautifully managed novel.

The almost unbearably harrowing climactic sequence – laden with the inevitability Bobby has long feared for himself, Ben Tobin, and the Collins family – is followed by a tender 'dying fall' in which, however, there is no mitigation of grim reality or wrenching loss.