The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea

In a review in The Canberra Times in 1972, Maurice Dunlevy called it "not so much a novel as a lyric poem...The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea is a beautiful book, a novel full of controlled evocative prose, a haunting sense of place, and a wonderfully consistent structure of imagery."^[2]

In a survey of the author's work for Australian Book Review in 2009, Tony Hassall has no doubts about the novel's worth: "The book captures the contradictory feelings of its author as he looks back on a golden childhood with fierce nostalgic longing, while at the same time seeing it as transient and irrevocably separate from mature experience... In its sensitive exploration of Rob’s reluctant progression into a world of divided allegiances, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea stands alongside earlier Australian classics like Henry Handel Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony and Martin Boyd’s Lucinda Brayford."^[3]

• 1965 in Australian literature