[5] The book is divided into four parts:[3] Steve and Blue leave home in Dandenong and travel to Gippsland, near Bairnsdale, where they work as apple-pickers.

Maxwell writes that the title of this section "is from Steve's idealisation of Macca, her lifelong love, whom she sees sometimes as Charon, the mythical Greek boatman on whom the goddess Venus bestowed youth and beauty.

[3] Steve and Blue travel to the Ovens Valley in Northeastern Victoria and obtain work harvesting hops and maize.

The title, Maxwell writes, "expresses Steve's growing impatience and despair as she waits for sings of affection from Macca, her one true love, who has gone up-country".

It was also done by Joseph Furphy in his Such is Life (1903), Jessie Couvreur, who wrote as Tasma in her short story Monsieur Caloche (1889), Marie Bjelke Petersen in Jewelled Nights (1923) and, after Langley, Kylie Tennant in her The Honey Flow (1956).

[7] There is no real resolution to this dilemma at the end of the novel: Blue returns home to marry, while Steve remains in Gippsland, alone.

Suzanne Falkiner says that "writing with a mixture of passionate exuberance and wry self-deprecation, Langley combines realistic detail with an almost Lawrentian prose style, in which the emerging sensuality of the girls is projected onto the landscape and into an almost excessive nationalism".

[8] Joan Maxwell writes in her Teachers Guide that "Many events reflect Steve and Blue's optimism and sense of fun, but there is often a heavy mood of depression and a fear of the destructiveness of the time, which seems to suggest that a feeling of entrapment might have seeped through from 1940".

She sees Langley attempting to achieve this through a "classical understanding", that is, by using "other languages, other cultures and ultimately other histories to voice her sense of connection to the Australian nation".

She says: "but if Eve Langley knew the benefit of trousers, her critics did not: it is distressing to find that sometimes there is more comment about her eccentricities as a person than about the strengths of her writing".

[12] Ellis, on the other hand, writes that "it is almost impossible to side-step the biographical data that often obscures discussion of her work whether it be the eccentricities of her life -- including her transgender wardrobe and her decision to change her name by deed poll to Oscar Wilde -- or her lonely and somewhat grisly death.

[9] She suggests that the "presumption of entitlement that resonates throughout Steve's quest for and within the Australian nation [and] the preponderance of overtly racist passages that often overwhelm the narrative, will inevitably ring discordantly in the ears of modern readers".

[13] Not quite a critical response, but in his autobiography Flaws in the Glass, Australian Nobel Laureate Patrick White, writing of his experience of the Second World War says "Otherwise I had dried up.