AustLit

Epigraph: If I go down to Hell Thou art there also.

Dedication: To Edward Thomas

Watson sent the manuscript to Joseph Conrad (q.v.) who read it seven times and made thirty-one pages of notes. On the 2 September 1913 Conrad wrote: 'It had seven readings - not all by me alone, however. I perceived at once (and with great sympathy) that your work was concerned with the right things, but that you did not always express them in the right way.' Watson records that 'They wanted me to rewrite the whole thing, as a long short story of about forty thousand words. This they said would make it a real artisitic success, but my thought was swift and obstinate:- would I ever get it published at that length? ... I compromised with the determination that I could accept a good eighty per cent of their emendations, but that probably I would have to keep it as a novel' (Grant-Watson, But to What Purpose (q.v.), pp. 149-150).

In Australian Literature from its Beginnings to 1935 (q.v. p.728), E. Morris Miller's writes: 'Where Bonds are Loosed, 1914, is a psychological narrative of the reactions of a group of men and women isolated from contact with civilization. The loosening of the restraints of religion and morality leaves "only that stripped and raw nucleus of life which lies so close to the brute from which it was evolved." Watson works out this thesis in the lives of nurses and doctors in a hospital among diseased aboriginals, segregated on two small islands off the Queensland coast. He continues his studies of this problem in a collection of short stories, Innocent Desires 1924' (q.v.).