Tirra Lirra by the River received Australia’s prestigious Miles Franklin Award and the Australian Natives’ Literature Award in 1979. Another of his novels, The Impersonators (1980; published in the United States as The Only Daughter, 1985), won the Miles Franklin Award in 1980. Jessica Anderson has written several other novels and a number of plays for the Australian Broadcasting Commission.

Like Patrick White, Randolph Stow, Thomas Keneally, and other contemporary Australian writers, Anderson is more interested in inner cartography than in plot, more interested in psychological exploration and inner sensibility than in social realism, yet her precision of description and honesty in characterization anchor her fiction in the ordinary world. Her range of characters is wide, and her sense of the specifics of place, particularly the variety of life and locale in Sydney, gives her work a solid ground from which his characters can take metaphysical flight.