E. Morris Miller's Australian Literature from its Beginnings to 1935 (1940): 729 comments: 'Watson harks back to Western Australia in The Partners, 1933, published under the pseudonym of 'John Lovegood'. In it he records, with bitter irony, the relations of two men who are partners in gold prospecting. The one in the city finances the other who works on the field. The financier marries and goes to Geraldton with his wife. The coming of the woman complicates the mental environment of the prospector, and a 'triangle' develops, bringing tragedy into the desert. The psychological realism of the story is almost forbidding.'
