A short-story writer, novelist, and essayist, John Morrison placed his art firmly in the realist tradition. In his autobiographical collection of essays, The Happy Warrior: Literary Essays on the Giants of Australian Literature (1987), Morrison maintains that to write on any subject one must have "experienced it, seen it, been involved, moved by it." Early in his career he wrote under the pseudonym "Gordon" for the Communist Review. He was a founding member of the Realist Writers Group, a Communist literary organization of the Labor movement that included writers Frank Hardy, Bill Wannan, Walter Kaufmann, Stephen Murray-Smith, Ian Turner, Eric Lambert, Robert Close, and Nellie Stewart. His concern for decency and dignity in life and labor is revealed through multicultural working-class characters who experience the double bind of material necessity and industrial struggle, and whose occupations often reflect Morrison's own working history: dockside workers, or "wharfies," socially marooned sailors...