Joey, a troubled boy on probation for reckless driving in Melbourne, leaves his cheerless home and is fortunate in hitching a two-thousand-mile ride to a mining community in western Australia [in Iron Mountain]…. Joey's unsuccessful attempt to hide his past, and the problems of the individuals in Leah's family fill an engrossing, well-told story. The exaggerated geographical conditions heighten tensions; and the hot, dust-filled iron-mining country, where workers receive hardship bonuses and air-conditioned company houses, even becomes a protagonist. One can easily envision the mining operations, the dangers of the trackless mountain terrain and the cyclones, and Joey's and Woodie's follies. Joey, who could become excited because of the impressiveness and the beauty of the mountain colors, makes a strong central figure: and his decisions from first to last are convincing. (p. 561)

[Iron Mountain, an Australian novel,] has a sense of purpose, of didacticism even, which belongs to a developing art; this country's freedom from it is perhaps a sign of incipient decadence. Iron Mountain, for all its contemporary technology, is a moral tale and a remarkably good one. The action becomes suspended from time to time while the actors listen to a lecture on geology or metallurgy. None of the information is gratuitous, for everyone in the story is caught up in some way with the adventure of Tom Price Mine and the terrible, beautiful deserts of Western Australia.

The mine and the mountain help Joey to discover himself…. The mountains, too, strengthen his resolve to abandon new-found security and friendship to face his past. The awkward, confused product of the slums has something in common with Leah, eldest and most beautiful of the Rose family, with whom he throws in his lot…. The reader scents romance, but there are no easy solutions to the dilemmas of this tough, honest, rather slow-moving tale. (p. 803)

The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1972; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), July 14, 1972.

[Iron Mountain] is aptly named, for the iron ore mountain in Western Australia plays the leading role; to it come a family from the east, together with a lad from a city slum whom they have picked up on the way. On this new western frontier everything is biggest and best, and [Mavis Thorpe Clark] is full of enthusiasm for the whole set-up notwithstanding dust and flies, and in her eagerness to involve the reader she is far too prone to slip in lumps of undigested information about mines and mining with its brash new towns springing up in what was hitherto desert. The reader from an older civilisation is likely, however, to have doubts for the future of the miners when he reads of company stores, company houses and other symptoms of an out-of-date paternalism. This sort of thing will not worry the young reader as long as the book is readable, which it undoubtedly is, and it seems to give a very fair likeness of life in such a town at the present day. But the older reader may also question the advisability of making the chief human character a boy on the run from the police who seems likely to get away with breaking his parole and even to benefit from it. (p. 241)

The Junior Bookshelf, August, 1972.