SOURCE: “Notes on Frank Moorhouse,” in Overland, Spring, 1973, pp. 9-11.

In the following essay, Kiernan provides a brief overview of Moorhouse's short fiction.

With his The Americans, Baby (Angus & Robertson), Frank Moorhouse seems to have won some long deserved general recognition. The book has been received enthusiastically, though more interest has been shown in the trendy nature of his material—the Sydney push, the drug scene, student radicalism, sexual permissiveness, women's liberation et al.—than with his handling of it. Partly, one suspects, this enthusiasm is a matter of general consciousness catching up with the individual talent. Although Moorhouse, at thirty-four, is still regarded as a “young writer,” he has been writing about his urban tribe and their now suddenly ‘relevant’ preoccupations for most of the past decade, slowly winning an audience who could appreciate his sort of story and the sometimes uncomfortable integrity that was behind it...