A Window In Mrs X’ s Place presents nineteen stories by Peter Cowan written over a period of more than thirty-five years and taken from six collections already published: Drift (1944), The Unploughed Land (1958), The Empty Street (1965), The Tins (1973), New Country (1976) and Mobiles (1979). This selection is neatly introduced by another Western Australian writer, Bruce Bennett, who makes some clear and worthwhile points and notices, especially, Cowan’s shift into a more ‘bleak vision of human motives and behaviour’ in his later stories. This later ‘bleak version’ perhaps reflects (the ageing) Cowan’s view of modern Australia: certainly some of the stories manifest a nostalgia for things ‘as they were’, as well as a resistance to change and, more particularly, to the single-minded capitalist notion of ‘progress’.

Two early stories from Drift, ‘Requiem’ and the title story, present the preoccupation with change through the anxieties felt by characters about to leave the country for War service. Here, War provides a point of departure, and in ‘Requiem’ especially Cowan mystifies the connection between the soldier and the (rural) land he is about to leave to such an extent that the departure itself contains the death that is to come: ‘For a time I have been a part of reality, for a time I have been fitted to this scene, have been one with the things which gave me being. Then in the madness which has triumphed over the ages I go and become engulfed and am no more’ (pp. 26–27). The ‘scene’ itself becomes central to these earlier stories: the title of Cowan’s second collection, The Unploughed Land, itself testifies to his preoccupation with a precapitalist (that is, ‘prehistorical’) rural Australian landscape, from which we have all now ‘departed’.