AustLit

Walker responds to critics who have questioned the value of the structure and melodrama of Human Toll, arguing that the novel is a deliberate experiment that anticipates narrative techniques used by modernist writers. Walker argues that the melodrama of Human Toll acts as hyperbole to the realism of the text, reflecting Baynton's "outrage at the moral blindness, grotesquerie and evil to be found in the society of the bush". This effect makes way for the psychological realism of the last chapters of the book, producing a mixture of modes and techniques that identify a "proto-modernist text which is well before its time".