SOURCE: “The 1970s,” in Patrick White, The Macmillan Press, 1980, pp. 123-24.

In the following excerpt, Kiernan shows that the short stories in The Cockatoos mimic the “satiric charicature” and the “poetic intensity” of White's novel Riders in the Chariot as well as the author's work during the 1960s.

A second collection of stories, The Cockatoos, appeared in 1974. Some of the six ‘Short Novels and Stories’ it contained had appeared in periodicals and anthologies as far back as 1966 and, overall, the tone of the collection harmonises more closely with White's work of the sixties than with that of the previous decade. All but one of the stories have Australian settings, or characters, and the shifts in them from satiric caricature to poetic intensity recall something of the strained combination of modes in Riders in the Chariot. As in The Burnt Ones there is a pervasive theme of the frustration...