SOURCE: “The 1960s,” in Patrick White, The Macmillan Press, 1980, pp. 83-7.

In the following excerpt, Kiernan observes that The Burnt Ones is marked by abrupt contrasts in setting, mode, and tone among the stories in the collection.

Although it is as a novelist that Patrick White has established his reputation, his shorter fiction and drama have their own intrinsic merits, as well as interest in relation to his novels. The stories and plays written in the period framed by Riders in the Chariot and The Solid Mandala can surprise the reader, by revealing unexpected attitudes and departures from what for many came to be seen as the ‘typical’ characteristics of White's work. The range of modes and moods in the stories and plays suggest an element of self-conscious literary play that needs to be balanced against presumptions of too direct an expression of the writer's attitudes, or his...