The Andersonian audience wants plenty of action, and “Thunderbolt” supplies that... You get an evening of Thunderbolt with an interesting and reasonably sober plot thrown in, and a menagerie of wallabies, kookaburras, mail coaches, and cockatoos to add more local color to Reg Robins’ New England (N.S.W.)
"[6] The Evening News said "Thunderbolt was imaginatively drawn, his opinions and his method of moralising being struck in too intellectual a key.
"[7] The Sydney Morning Herald said "In the plot, Thunderbolt...is depicted as an outlaw who robs the rich but spares the poor, and who, indeed, generously assists the latter from funds nefariously acquired from other people.
He has a high opinion of his own virtue, and mentions the fact in verbose language, couched in terms refined enough to make the wallabies in his vicinity sit up with admiration, and subdue the desire of the kookaburras to laugh as they listen to his glowing rhetoric.
"[8] The Age called it "a good, honest and thoroughly workmanlike melodrama on more or less conventional lines, in which a sentimental interest is handled judiciously and the sensational element plays a smaller part than in many of Mr. Anderson's imported pieces.