SOURCE: “Patrick White's ‘The Cockatoos,’” in Southerly, Vol. 35, No. 1, March, 1975, pp. 3-13.

In the following review, Hassall praises White, contending that the author's writing shows he is “clear-eyed,” compassionate, and “can tell a good old-fashioned story extremely well.”

Most of the six shorter novels and stories in Patrick White's second collection begin, like The Eye of the Storm and The Solid Mandala, at the end of life. They are about retired couples, living out their last years together. Though three of the stories have previously been published separately,¹ the collection is a comparatively unified one, held together by the characters' common predicament—loneliness—and by their common, often violent, attempts to break out of it. It is a little surprising to find as the protagonists of these stories some of the ordinary, dun-coloured inhabitants of suburbia, people incapable of the magnificent isolation of an Elizabeth Hunter, but tough...