In 1935 the English critic V. S. Pritchett wrote two reviews of an Australian novel recently released in London and New York. The novel was titled Landtakers: The Story of an Epoch (1934); its author, Brian Penton, was a feature writer for The Daily Telegraph (Sydney). Pritchett wrote in The Spectator (London) for 8 March 1935:

Why is it that this novel stands head and shoulders above any others of its type? The answer lies, of course, primarily in the soundness of its writing, its richness in incident, character and emotional material, its power to present the historical scene with biting vividness. The real merit of Mr Penton is that he subordinates the nevertheless important element of the building of a nation to the building of a man who may epitomise the essence of the nation's spiritual struggle, but whose spiritual sources are in the country he has left. . . .

Landtakers was the...