"[2] In the story "Enter Mitchell", Lawson describes him as "short and stout and bow-legged, and freckled, and sandy.
He had red hair and small, twinkling grey eyes, and ‒ what often goes with such things ‒ the expression of a born comedian.
He had the sardonic wit; he expected little from life; he expected nothing but brief pleasure and then never-ending pain from a woman; he knew only one real pleasure in life, in which he let them see how the bushman could "one-up" all comers; he let slip hints of his melancholy, and his conviction that things would never be any different.
"[5] Critic John Barnes suggests that Mitchell functions as a persona rather than a fully developed character, replacing the author as narrator and storyteller, an "instrument by which Lawson can create states of feeling and so define his sense of being human.
[2] Lawson's Mitchell stories explore the domestic consequences of the bohemian lifestyle.