[One of the principal figures of postmodern Australian literature, Wilding is best known as the author of experimental short stories and as a founding editor of Tabloid Story, one of the most influential Australian literary magazines of the 1970s. Rejecting traditional realistic narrative, he strove in his early work toward a fusion of fantastic, surreal, pastoral, ironic, and self-reflexive elements. In the following review, Wilding praises The Supermale and judges it an "affront to the bourgeoisie. "]

The Supermale, an exhilarating and inventive piece of erotica, begins a little slowly, the weak, feeble-looking André Marcueil telling his guests that 'The art of love is of no importance, since it can be performed indefinitely.' The guests' discussion of the records of life and literature to discover the record performance has a nice antiquarian pedanticism. But with the 10,000-mile race between an express train and a four-man (plus counterweight dwarf) bicycle, the story surges. The race is a Jules Verne extravagance—technological prediction from a nineteenth-century engraving, and it is told in the American journalese of cyclist Ted Oxborrow writing for the New York Herald afterwards—a style whose practicality well copes with the death, rigor mortis, re-educating and putrefaction of one of the cycle team en route. The race is won, of course, by a secret competitor (who else but André), driven neither by steam nor Perpetual Motion Food, but the energy of a supermale. His strength proved for us, we next see him disguised as the Indian who according to Theophrastus 'did it in one Day threescore Times and ten, and More'. The erotic set piece is classic. Our voyeurism is part of the structure, for Dr Bathybius is to watch the demonstration as scientific observer; excitation arises with the prostitutes, gathered to partner the Indian, who, locked in a stuffy room, from neglect, heat and frustration begin to strip and—the masturbatory prologue—fondle each other. And then we are ready for the fulfilment of idyllic fantasy—the beautiful Ellen (whom on the racing train an invisible André mysteriously showered with continual roses) appears before André, naked. But our admiring involvement with the ecstatic record setting is shattered to a shocked withdrawal by Ellen's exhausted death, and André's fulfilment in necrophilia. Jarry's affront to the bourgeoisie has suddenly become something more, the idyll has become evil. But having followed through this sexual extreme, we are reassured: Ellen revives from an hypnotic trance. (Yet darker notes are not expunged: the raped corpse of a schoolgirl in André's grounds is passed over; but not forgotten.) The record set, the bourgeoisie exercise their horrible accidental revenge: all will be well if André loves Ellen, and a machine is devised to persuade him electronically to love. A brief ecstatic hope, when the machine begins to love André, is destroyed by the machine's faulty construction that leads to André's death. Ellen marries. Society wins. It would make a delightful film.