SOURCE: “The Cockatoos,” in The Peacocks and the Bourgeoisie, Adelaide University Union Press, 1978, pp. 131-37.

In the following excerpt, Myers examines the title story of The Cockatoos, asserting that it “is not a short story but a remarkably compressed novella” that integrates complex narrative methods and variations in mood.

This is a story about very ordinary people's suffering from lovelessness and crippling inhibitions, and about their tormented yearning for the release of passion. It is also a story about both the brutal cruelty and the kindness of which humans are capable; about the perversion of sexual love into smothering possessiveness or into neurotic fear of intimacy and the reaction to such perversion in the quest for freedom and the courage to bear this freedom. The story vibrates with intensity of vision into the paradoxes of human misery and successfully probes the inner truths of four major characters, Mick...