SOURCE: “The Short Stories of Patrick White,” in Southerly, Vol. 24, No. 2, 1964, pp. 116-25.

In the following essay, Burrows illustrates how White uses observations and anecdotes about Australian society in his fiction as a form of social satire.

At her first appearance in Happy Valley (1939), the loneliness and discontent of poor Vic Moriarty are epitomised in her absurd day-dream of being mentioned in the social pages of the Herald as having played bridge at David Jones. She pictures herself wearing a powder-blue dress (p. 37). At her final appearance in Riders in the Chariot (1961), Mrs. Chalmers-Robinson, socially rehabilitated at last, actually does lunch at a smart Sydney restaurant. She is wearing a powder-blue dress (p. 544).

Out of innumerable trifles like this, many of them similarly recurrent, there is made up one of the most striking, even obtrusive, characteristics of the work of Patrick White. It ranges from this flicker of...