The novels and short stories by Patrick White, included in the collection "Cockatoo", first published in 1973 and which managed to enter the classical fund of not only Australian but also world literature of the twentieth century, are a kind of "world of loneliness" inhabited by people deprived of the ability to "talk". Whoever they are and wherever they live - in the quiet bourgeois towns and cozy suburbs of prosperous post-war Australia or hungry, riddled with the utter horror of the German occupation of Greece - each of them carries his own hell and fights his demons alone. Any attempt to break through the wall of total loneliness only leads to even greater misunderstanding and distance from each other, even the closest and most loving. There is a sense of imminent tragedy in the air, which only a miracle can help to avoid... and sometimes it happens - and not in a metaphorical way, but in the most direct and literal sense of the word...