Cirrus@Austlit

Alan Marshall ... wrote for a popular audience, to which he conveyed an image of the ordinary Australian as a decent, egalitarian battler, suspicious of authority but always ready to help his mates ... he also created an image of himself as one of them who had, helped by his rural community, overcome the particular disadvantage of infantile paralysis with courage and good humour ... Toward the end of his life, however, he published a collection of stories that show a dark underside of violence and brutality beneath the surface geniality. Far from destroying the earlier image of the Australian, however, these stories discover a strength by which his people endured their darkness.' (p.85)