[H. F. Brinsmead's] interest and sympathy embrace the whole spectrum of Australia, urban and rural. Her first book, Pastures of the Blue Crane …, is mostly a country book, however, and one which shows the formative influence of landscape and a free life in the open upon an unhappy, neglected girl. (p. 159)

Mrs Brinsmead shows with exquisite sensibility how a girl who has had everything in life except affection grows in contact with real problems….

No writer today knows more than Mrs Brinsmead about the workings of an adolescent girl's mind; certainly no one expounds her theme with greater affection, but it is an affection free of illusions. (p. 160)

[Race] is an important element in Listen to the Wind…. However deeply Mrs Brinsmead may feel about race she keeps her touch light, and Listen to the Wind, which has serious, indeed tragic, implications, is essentially a gay story. Bella Greenrush, who claims to be of royal blood—and who could doubt it?—is a person of heroic stature…. One of her tribe is Tam who works for, and loves, Loveday Smith…. Loveday is the meeting-point of black and white, and the working out of her relationship with Tam, inconclusive but quite satisfactory, makes the core of a rich and varied story….

There is drama and exciting action in this story, more than is common in Mrs Brinsmead's books, but it is the tenderness and the gaiety which remains longest in the mind. Best of all is the joint action of God and Uncle Zac in providing a church for Bella's tribe. (p. 217)

There is bitterness alongside the fun in the story. Bella may be essentially a comic character, but she is serious about the integrity of her race. She does not want to be like the 'white-fellers' who took her people's land and now give them 'money and free food and send us the odd social worker.' The bitterness comes from the memories of the old. (p. 218)

Almost alone among creative writers H. F. Brinsmead is concerned to adjust the balance [between adults who never listen and adolescents with problems]. Although Mrs Brinsmead lets the reader know where her sympathies lie, she is normally a detached narrator. In Beat of the City … she abandons the role of observer. Her angry interpolations spoil the symmetry of the book, which by strict standards is her least satisfactory work. Mrs Brinsmead, however, has something to say about the beat generation, and she is worth hearing. (p. 226)

Mary is the touchstone of this story, a girl who walks in both worlds…. Mary would be too good to be true, but for her habit of collecting stray dogs, cats and delinquents.

It is Mary, with help from her uncle, policemen, probation officers and boredom, who lights candles in the eyes of these lost children. It is a long job and there is no final and complete success. What has been proved is that there is something after all behind the emptiness in the eyes of Syd, Sabie and Raylene. Not Blade. Blade O'Reilly, who rides down old women with his stolen bike, is beyond Mrs Brinsmead's compassion. The best she can do is to deflate Blade. (p. 228)

Beat of the City is no more tidy than back-street Melbourne. It is a messy hotch-potch of anger, violence, prejudice, love, confusion; in fact a picture of life. It breaks most of the traditional and formal rules of the novel, but it rises above them…. The flaws in Beat of the City are formal, however; in its passionate concern for human beings, its criticism of society, the serious and humorous truth of its characterization, its strong angry style, this is clearly an important novel of our time. In it the traditions of the children's novel, their roots reaching back strongly to their origins in E. Nesbit at the dawn of the century, are preserved and renewed. (pp. 228-29)