SOURCE: “Other Work,” in Patrick White's Fiction, Rowman and Littlefield, 1977, pp. 67-84.

In the following essay, Walsh discusses the common aspects of White's short stories, plays, and novels.

The scope of the eleven stories in The Burnt Ones (1964) is naturally more confined than in the novels, but the shape and proportions are the same. There is a similar sense of the depth of human nature and the same strikingly individual sensibility, giving off a mixed odour of sweat and spirituality. The people in the Australian group of stories may be ordinary (“Dead Roses”, “Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight”) or drab (“Clay”, “Down at the Dump”), the events few and unspectacular, the context conventional or down at heel, the air wretched or melancholy, and yet from these unpromising constituents Patrick White constructs a celebration of human possibility which is at once lyrical and quite unsentimental. White has an eye which is...