"New Tracks to Travel: The Stories of White, Porter, and Cowan" in Meanjin Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 1, Autumn, 1966, pp. 154-70.

In the following excerpt, Barnes admires the stories collected in The Empty Street for their honest rendering of the human experience.

Cowan strips his description, seeming to aim at plain statement of fact and nothing more. His language is factual, unemotional, and lacking in sensuous reference. The scene, as always in Cowan's stories, lacks colour and vividness: he refuses the temptation to be picturesque or to create a surface excitement, and allows his sense of beauty to emerge only in the exactness of his details. With a countryman's eye, he notices the sky, the changes of weather, the variation of light. . . .

His characters exist in an immediate, specified physical setting, which is devoid of local and historical colour. They respond to the immediate environment, they feel and see the...