Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are wading
into some truly turbulent waters. We're looking
at a figure who is quite possibly the most contradictory
character we've ever profiled. Oh, absolutely.
Imagine a man who is an absolute national icon,
yet he spent a huge portion of his life, you
know, loathing the very society he lived in.
It's a study in friction, isn't it? We're talking
about someone born into the Australian aristocracy.
A wealthy grazier's son who ends up becoming,
well, a radical left -wing activist. And not
just any activist. This is the only Australian
to ever win the Nobel Prize in literature. Exactly.
And when he wins it, his reaction isn't joy or
pride. He describes the experience as a terrifying
and destructive experience. Who says that? It's
incredible. We are, of course, talking about
Patrick White. And the mission for this deep
dive is to really unpack the life of this man.
We want to understand how he wrote these massive
visionary stories about individuals clashing
with what he called a materialistic conformist
society. And, you know, how his own personal
isolation, his own feeling of being an outsider,
actually fueled a literary revolution in Australia.
To do that, we have a really rich stack of sources.
We're looking at his biography, critical reception
of his work, which, as we'll see, was often just
brutal. Unbelievably so. We've got specific analyses
of his novels like Voss and The Tree of Man,
his personal letters, which are fascinating,
and the detailed records of his political evolution.
So it's a pretty comprehensive picture we're
trying to build. Right. So before we get into
the weeds of his life, let's address the big
so what question. Why does Patrick White matter
to someone listening today who might not be a
huge literature buff? I think it matters because
White fundamentally changed the landscape of
Australian storytelling. Before him, the prevailing
style was this very dry, dun -colored realism,
as it was called. What does that mean, dun -colored?
It means kind of drab, brown, factual. It was
all about the bush, the hardship, the external
reality, you know, describing the flies and the
heat. White came along and brought high modernism
to the outback. He challenged the idea that Australian
stories had to be simple or purely descriptive.
So he was saying there's more going on here than
just sheep and dust. Exactly. He wanted to show
that the Australian landscape, and more importantly,
the Australian soul, was capable of immense,
complex, spiritual drama. He wanted to write
about the inner world. He essentially forced
the culture to grow up whether it wanted to or
not, which it seems it mostly did not want to
do. It kicked and screamed the whole way. Okay.
So to understand the man, we have to start with
the boy. And honestly, his start in life sounds
like something out of a Dickens novel or maybe
a Henry James novel. It really does. So he's
born in 1912, but the first complication is he's
not born in Australia. He's born in Knightsbridge,
London. Right in the heart of the empire. His
parents, Victor and Ruth, were these incredibly
wealthy Australians from a pastoralist dynasty.
They were on what was basically an extended honeymoon
that lasted for years. They only moved back to
Sydney when Patrick was about six months old.
So that initial displacement, that sense of not
quite belonging in either place, it sort of set
the tone for his entire life. And he wasn't exactly
a rough and tumble Bush kid, was he? Oh, God,
no. Far from it. He was an incredibly fragile
child. At four years old, he developed severe
asthma. And this is a really crucial detail.
Why? I mean, lots of kids have asthma. Well,
back then, in the early 20th century, a serially
sick child was often kept apart. There was a
fear of, you know, infection or just the general
fragility. So he lived in a flat with his sister,
a nanny, and a maid, while his parents lived
in an adjoining flat. Wait, in a separate flat?
As a toddler? Yes. A profound level of separation.
He spent a huge amount of time alone, and you
can see how that would foster a rich inner life,
a powerful imagination. He had to create his
own world. He had to. He fell in love with the
theater early on. His mother would take him to
pantomimes. But his real emotional connection,
interestingly, wasn't with his parents. It was
with his nurse, a woman named Lizzie Clark. I
love that detail from the files. that she was
the one who taught him to always tell the truth
and not blow his own trumpet it's wonderfully
ironic isn't it The man who would become this
world famous author, this towering figure being
told not to be boastful. And it seems like a
part of him really took that to heart, that wariness
of fame. It stayed with him his whole life. But
the real trauma, and I don't think that's too
strong a word, came when he was 13. His parents
did what wealthy colonial families did back then.
They shipped him off to an English public school.
Cheltenham College in Gloucestershire. Sounds
very fancy. It sounds fancy, but White had a
different name for it. He called it an expensive
prison. An expensive prison. That says everything.
He absolutely hated it. You have to try and put
yourself in his shoes. He's this colonial boy
in a very rigid, class -obsessed British system.
He's immediately an outsider. He gets mocked
for his Australian accent. On top of that, he's
dealing with his health, the asthma. And crucially,
he was already certain of his own homosexuality.
So imagine it. You're a teenager in the 1920s
in this sadistic, puritanical, hyper -masculine
boarding school environment. And you're hiding
your sexuality. You're being mocked for your
background. And you can't breathe properly. The
sense of alienation must have been absolute.
It was. The sources say he never forgave his
mother for sending him there. That's a heavy,
heavy burden to carry through life. It completely
solidified the sense of being an alien. He wasn't
fully Australian. because he was in england but
he was never going to be english because he was
australian and he wasn't one of the boys because
of his artistic nature and his sexuality so he
just withdrew into himself completely into books
into his own head but he did have an escape plan
right yeah he had this dream of being an actor
he did he pleaded with his parents to let him
leave school early to go on the stage and they
being you know very practical wealthy landowners
were horrified by this an actor In their family.
They wanted him to run a sheep station. So they
struck a compromise. A very Australian compromise.
He could leave school early without his final
exams, but only if he went back to Australia
to try life on the land. The classic go jackarooing
and toughen up strategy. See if they can knock
the artistic nonsense out of him. Precisely.
So in 1929, he returns to New South Wales. He
works as a jackaroo in the Monara district and
then at Walgett out in the middle of nowhere.
And this is where the contradiction just deepens.
How do you mean? Well, physically, he was completely
unsuited for. The experiment failed. The experiment
failed. But, and this is the crucial but, the
landscape itself seared itself into his brain.
He may have hated the work, the sheer physical
labor, but the starkness of the Australian bush
The quality of the light, the silence, the colors,
it all planted the seeds for his future descriptions.
So he was failing as a farmer, but he was gathering
the raw material he would need to write The Tree
of Man and Voss. Exactly. He was absorbing the
very essence of the place, even as he was rejecting
the life that was expected of him there. Okay,
so the sheep station experiment is officially
a bust. What's next? His parents must be at their
wits' end. His mother, Ruth, still had ambitions
for him, if not a grazier than perhaps a diplomat.
Something respectable. So the next step was Cambridge.
He goes to King's College in 1932 to study French
and German literature. That must have been a
monumental shift for him, from the dust and isolation
of Walgett to the ancient halls of Cambridge.
Massive. This is where he finally finds his intellectual
home. He discovers the heavy hitters of modernism.
He's reading Proust, Thomas Mann, James Joyce,
Gertrude Stein. He's traveling to France and
Germany. He's finally realizing that literature
can be more than just a simple story. It can
be an exploration of consciousness itself. Precisely.
That you can map the internal world just as you
can map a continent. He also published a collection
of poetry around this time, didn't he? The Plowman.
He did in 1935. And this is classic Patrick White.
He later grew to hate it so much that he tried
to suppress it. He literally went around buying
up secondhand copies so he could burn them. Wow.
He was always his own harshest critic, wasn't
he? From the very beginning. But Cambridge gave
him the intellectual foundation and the confidence
he needed. It validated his artistic impulses.
Okay, let's move into the 1930s. He's graduated.
Instead of becoming a diplomat, which I'm sure
his mother was still hoping for, he decides to
become a writer in London. And he's not exactly
a starving artist in a garret. Not at all. His
father gave him a very generous allowance, 400
pounds a year, which was a lot of money then,
and later he inherited a legacy of 10 ,000 pounds.
So he had the freedom to write without worrying
about paying the rent. He was living in London's
Pimlico district, mixing with artists and writers.
And this is where he meets a really pivotal figure,
Roy de Maistre. Yes, the Australian painter.
This relationship was absolutely crucial. De
Maistre was a lover for a time, but more importantly,
he became a mentor, an artistic guide. He taught
White to see things differently. He taught him
to write from the inside out. What does that
mean exactly, from the inside out? It sounds
a bit abstract. Well, it means moving away from
pure naturalism. You know, just describing what
a chair looks like or what a house looks like.
It means trying to describe how the chair feels
to the person sitting in it or how the house
feels to the person looking at it. It's about
projecting the internal psychological state of
your characters onto the external world. The
landscape reflects the soul. So the weather isn't
just weather, it's a state of mind. That's it,
exactly. And that becomes the absolute signature
style of Patrick White. But then, as happened
to so many people of his generation, history
intervenes in a big way. World War II breaks
out. Right. The bohemian life in London comes
to an abrupt end. White joins the Royal Air Force
as an intelligence officer. He's posted to North
Africa, the Middle East. And this leads us to
what is arguably the single most important meeting
of his entire life. Without a doubt. Alexandria,
Egypt, 1941. It's the middle of the war. Everything
is uncertain. And White meets a Greek army recruit
named Manoli Lascaris. And this wasn't just a
wartime fling. This was something else entirely.
This was it. This was the defining relationship
of his life. White's own words for it are just
so beautiful and so precise. He described Manoli
as the central mandala in my life's hitherto
messy design. Wow. The central mandala. That's
so much more than just saying my soulmate. It
is. A mandala is a symbol of wholeness, of order,
of a spiritual center. It suggests that before
Manoli, White felt his life was scattered, chaotic,
without a core. Manoli provided that center.
And they remained partners for the rest of their
lives. For nearly 50 years. But here's a twist.
The war ends. White has a choice. He can stay
in London, where the literary culture is, where
his publisher is, or he can go back to Australia.
And you would think, given how much he struggled
with Australia later on, that he would have jumped
at the chance to stay in London. He was tempted,
but he also had this great fear of becoming what
he called that most sterile of beings, a London
intellectual. He was afraid he would dry up,
become too cynical, too detached from real life.
But he was still terrified of going back to Australia.
Absolutely. He associated it with his prison
years, with failure. It was actually Manali,
the Greek, who had never even been there, who
pushed for it. He wanted to start a new life
somewhere new. That is fascinating. The Greek
partner is the one who wants to go to the Australia.
Australian bush. White wrote that he ultimately
relented because it was Manoli's illusion. And
he sensed that Manoli's illusion was a better,
healthier thing than his own jaded reality. So
in 1948, they packed their bags and returned.
And they don't move to a trendy inner city suburb.
They buy a farm. Dogwoods. They bought a small
farm at Castle Hill, which back then was on the
semi -rural fringe of Sydney. I just love the
image of this. You have Patrick White, this.
Cambridge -educated intellectual who reads Proust
and Mann and Manoli Lascaris, this cultured,
cosmopolitan Greek man. And what are they doing?
They're growing vegetables and breeding dogs.
Pedigree schnauzers, to be exact. They also sold
milk and cream and flowers. They were working
the land. Imagine buying a schnauzer puppy in,
say, 1950 and having no idea that the breeder
is in his spare room at night writing the great
Australian novel. It's an incredible juxtaposition.
But for White, it was an immense struggle. He
was working the farm all day and trying to write
at night, exhausted. And initially, the reception
for his work in his home country was, well. It
was cold. His book, The Ant Story, came out around
this time. It did. And this really establishes
the pattern that defines the first half of his
career. The Ant Story was praised in the United
States. The critic James Stern in the New York
Times absolutely loved it, called it a work of
genius. And in Australia. Crickets. It was largely
ignored, or if it was reviewed, it was misunderstood.
Why the disconnect? Why did the Americans and
the British get it when the Australians didn't?
I think the literary cultures in America and
Britain were just more accustomed to modernism
by that point. They were used to Virginia Woolf,
to James Joyce, to Faulkner. Australian critics
at the time were still very much wedded to the
old Bush ballad tradition, you know, realistic,
straightforward storytelling. So white style,
the stream of consciousness, the shifting perspectives,
this intense focus on the interior life of a
lonely spinster. It was just alien to the local
critical establishment. They didn't have vocabulary.
to appreciate what he was doing. He must have
felt incredibly isolated. He's finally come home
and he's still an outsider. He was. He wrote
this heartbreaking line where he described himself
as a despised colonial in England and an artist
in horrified Australia. He felt he didn't fit
in anywhere. And that isolation led to a real
crisis. He seriously questioned whether he should
even keep writing. But then something happened
out there at Dogwoods. A moment in the mud. 1951.
It had been raining for what felt like forever.
A typical Sydney deluge. White was out on the
farm, slipped and fell flat on his back in the
thick squelching mud. And he just lay there and
started cursing. Cursing God. Cursing a God he
was pretty sure didn't exist. He was an atheist
at this point. But in the middle of this rage,
this torrent of curses, he had a kind of epiphany.
What was the realization? He realized that his
own personal scheme of things, his own intellectual
arrogance was just too foolish and small, that
there had to be something more. It wasn't a sudden
conversion to a specific doctrine, not at all,
but it was an awakening to a spiritual dimension
in life. It led him to believe in God in some
form. And that moment of spiritual crisis in
the mud. That moment inspired his next novel,
The Tree of Man. Which is a novel about an ordinary
couple in the land, right? Yeah. Stan and Amy
Parker. Yes. He said he wanted to show every
possible aspect of life. Birth, death, marriage,
work, joy, suffering through the lives of these
very ordinary, uneducated people. He wanted to
show that even in a simple life of milking cows
and clearing scrub, there are these moments of
immense spiritual revelation. But while he was
finding God in the mud, he was also looking at
the broader Australian society around him and
seeing something he hated. This is where we get
his famous concept of the great Australian emptiness.
This is one of the most famous and scathing cultural
critiques in Australian history. White looked
at the booming suburbia of 1950s Australia, the
Menzies era, and he saw a spiritual vacuum. Let's
unpack the quote because it is absolutely brutal.
He described it as a society where the mind is
the least of possessions. And where muscles prevail.
It's so cutting. He talked about the buttocks
of cars growing hourly, glassier. The buttocks
of cars. That is such a specific, miserable,
and kind of disgusting image. It perfectly captures
that obsession with shiny material surfaces.
He said that for Australians, food just means
cake and steak and culture meant nothing. He
was criticizing a culture that he felt valued
materialism and physical prowess above everything
else, above intellect, above art and above the
spirit. It sounds like he was essentially calling
the whole country a bunch of bogans. In a way,
yes. And look, there's definitely a strain of
snobbery in it. We can't deny that. But I think
it was deeper than just snobbery. I think he
was genuinely anguished by it. He felt that the
country had this incredible mystical landscape
and this huge potential, but that the people
were content with mediocrity. They were afraid
of the deep dive, to borrow our phrase. They
were afraid to look at their own souls. So he
writes The Tree of Man in 1955 and then Voss
in 1957 really as a direct challenge to this
emptiness. Exactly. Critical Divide just widens
into a chasm. Overseas, The Tree of Man is hailed
as a masterpiece. It gets compared to Tolstoy.
But in Australia. The poet A .D. Hope, who was
a major gatekeeper of literary taste at the time,
writes a review that has now become infamous.
He called White's prose pretentious and illiterate
verbal sludge. Illiterate verbal sludge. I mean,
you can't get much more insulting than that.
He's not just saying it's bad. He's saying the
man can't even write a proper sentence. No. And
Hope genuinely believed it. He hated the style.
White didn't always use standard grammar. He'd
break sentences into fragments. He'd use adjectives
as nouns. He was pushing language to its absolute
breaking point to try and describe things that
are hard to describe, these mystical interstates.
But to a traditionalist like Hope, it just looked
like a mess, like bad writing. Exactly. It was
a clash of two completely different ideas about
what a novel should be. And what about Voss?
That's the big one, the one about the explorer,
right? Yeah. Loosely based on Ludwig Leichhardt?
Very loosely, yes. It's about a megalomaniacal
German explorer who leads an expedition into
the heart of the Australian desert. But it's
not really an adventure story in the traditional
sense. It's a story about a man trying to conquer
his own pride, his own ego. The desert is a metaphor
for the soul. It's a metaphysical journey. And
eventually, slowly, the tide starts to turn in
Australia, too. It does. It had to. His next
novel, Writers in the Chariot, in 1961, was the
real turning point. It was so powerful, so undeniable,
that it finally won over most of the local critics.
He started winning the Miles Franklin Award,
which is Australia's top literary prize. He won
it twice, actually. And then he famously refused
to be considered for it anymore. That's right.
After his second win, he wrote to the committee
and asked them to remove his books from consideration.
He told them to give the prize to younger, emerging
writers who needed the recognition and the money
more than he did. Which is a nice counterpoint
to his reputation for being an arrogant curmudgeon.
It shows the complexity, doesn't it? He could
be incredibly generous, but he did it on his
own terms. Okay, let's fast forward to 1973.
The big one. The phone call from Stockholm. The
Nobel Prize. The absolute pinnacle of literary
achievement. And the citation from the Swedish
Academy is so important here. They awarded it
to him for his epic and psychological narrative
art, which has introduced a new continent into
literature. Introduced a new continent. Oh. That
is a huge claim. It's immense. It's an acknowledgement
that before Patrick White, Australia wasn't really
on the map of world literature in a serious,
modernist way. He put it there. So pop the champagne,
right? National hero status braids down the street.
Hardly. White's reaction was classic Patrick
White. He was horrified. He didn't want it. He
gave an interview where he said the machinery
behind it seems a bit dirty. He felt that suddenly
becoming this global celebrity this public figure
would completely destroy his privacy and his
ability to work. And this is where we get that
quote from the start. He called it a terrifying
and destructive experience. Terrifying and destructive.
And he meant it. He refused to for the ceremony
in Sweden. Can you imagine? The king of Sweden
is waiting to hand you the medal and you just
send your mate instead. That's exactly what he
did. He sent his friend, the painter Sidney Nolan,
to collect it for him. It was a massive snub
to all the pomp and circumstance that he despised.
But, and this is a really key, but he didn't
just pocket the prize money. No. He used the
entire sum to establish the Patrick White Award.
And the criteria for that award is very specific
and very revealing. It is. It's specifically
for Australian writers who have made a significant
and ongoing contribution to literature, but who
haven't received adequate recognition. In other
words, he wanted to help the outsiders, the ones
who were struggling for recognition, just like
he had struggled for those first 20 years. That
brings us to the next and maybe most surprising
phase of his life. Because after the Nobel, he
doesn't just retire to his garden. He becomes,
well, he becomes loud. He becomes the activist.
And this is a genuine shock to people who only
knew him as the conservative grazier's son who
had voted for the Liberal Party, which is the
conservative party in Australia, for years and
years. What changed? What was the catalyst? I
think the 1960s changed him as it changed so
many people. He saw the world shifting. But for
White, it was a radical shift to the left. He
became a fierce opponent of the Vietnam War.
And not just in a signing petitions kind of way.
No, not at all. He got up on stage at rallies
and illegally incited Young Den not to register
for the draft. That was a serious crime. He was
putting his freedom and his reputation on the
line. He also got heavily involved in environmentalism,
which was quite ahead of its time. He did. He
fought against a proposal to build an Olympic
stadium in Centennial Park in Sydney. He fought
against sand mining on Fraser Island. He saw
the great Australian emptiness as not just spiritual,
but also physical. This willingness to destroy
natural beauty for profit. But the big political
turning point, the moment of no return, seems
to be 1975, the dismissal of the Whitlam government.
This was the moment that turned him into a fervent
Republican. When the Governor General Sir John
Kerr, who is the Queen's representative, dismissed
the democratically elected Prime Minister Gough
Whitlam, White was absolutely apoplectic. He
saw it as a profound betrayal of Australian democracy.
He did. He saw it as a colonial relic, the crown
interfering in a sovereign nation. In protest,
he returned his Order of Australia, the highest
civil honor, and he spent the rest of his life
arguing passionately for an Australian republic.
And then there was the issue of nuclear disarmament.
He called it the most important moral issue in
history. By the 1980s, he was a regular fixture
at protest marches. You have to picture this.
This elderly, frail, Nobel Prize winning intellectual
who was notoriously private, marching in the
streets with the punks and the unionists and
the hippies all chanting against the bomb. It's
an amazing image. But while he was fighting all
these external battles, he was also dealing with
some very intense internal conflicts, which he
then made public. In 1981, he published his memoir,
Flaws in the Glass. This book was a bombshell
for two main reasons. First, he came out publicly
as homosexual. Now, everyone in his artistic
circle knew, of course, but this was a formal
public declaration to the entire nation at a
time when that was still a very brave thing to
do. And the second reason. The burning of the
bridges. The book contained... absolutely scathing
portraits of many of his former friends. He was
vicious about people he felt had let him down.
He insulted Sidney Nolan, the man who collected
his Nobel Prize for him. He insulted the opera
singer Joan Sutherland. Why? I mean, why torch
those lifelong friendships so publicly? White
valued truth above all else. or at least his
version of the truth. He felt Nolan had sold
out, that he'd become too commercial, too cozy
with the establishment. White had this incredibly
puritanical streak, and if he felt you had compromised
your artistic integrity, you were dead to him.
Simple as that. Nolan considered suing him, right?
He did. The friendship ended instantly and irrevocably.
It really shows that White was not an easy man.
He was prickly, unforgiving, and held people
and himself to impossibly high standards. Speaking
of burning things, he also famously burnt his
own work. Yes. This is another key part of his
controlling nature. Before moving houses and
then again later in life, he built a bonfire
and burnt most of his private papers, manuscripts,
letters, journals. He wanted to control his legacy
completely. He didn't want academics and biographers
picking through his unfinished drafts and his
private thoughts. He wanted the finished work
to stand alone. Let's pivot then to the themes
of that work. We've mentioned the great Australian
emptiness, but what is the core philosophy that's
really driving his novels? I'd say at the center
of almost all his books is the search for reality.
But not social reality. Not who is marrying whom
or who's making money he was interested in a
higher reality a spiritual or metaphysical reality
the truth behind the curtain exactly his characters
are almost always trying to grasp a truth that
lies just behind the veil of ordinary everyday
life and crucially the people who are most likely
to see this truth are the outsiders the explorers
the artists like in vos yes but also the simple
-minded as he would have called them in his novel
the solid mandala One of the main characters
is a brother who is intellectually disabled,
yet he is the one who has the true spiritual
connection to the world. White believed that
those on the margins of society, the outcasts,
the failures, the mad, often saw more clearly
than the successful conformist pillars of the
community. And where did his own spirituality
fit into all this? You mentioned he wasn't a
standard Christian. Not at all. He once described
himself brilliantly as a lapsed, Anglican, egotist,
agnostic, pantheist, occultist. That is a mouthful.
Let's break that down. It basically means he
picked and chose what he needed. He believed
in a god, but not the one from the prayer book.
He was deeply influenced by Jungian psychology.
He dabbled in the tarot and other forms of mysticism.
And the pantheist part is key. He believed the
divine was present in everything, in a rock,
in a gob of spit, in a twisted tree. God wasn't
in a church. God was in the mud. In his later
career, he really started to push the boundaries
of identity in ways that feel incredibly modern.
The Twyborn Affair from 1979 is a prime example.
It explores gender fluidity in a way that was
decades ahead of its time. The protagonist lives
as a woman, then as a man in the trenches of
World War I, then as a woman again running a
brothel. White was exploring this radical idea
that the soul has no fixed gender. And his final
novel, Memoirs of Many in One. A bawdy, wild,
hilarious, and terrifying book about senility
and the disintegration of the self. He was writing
about the mind falling apart as he himself was
facing his own physical decline. He really did
not mellow with age, did he? Not one bit. In
1988, for the bicentenary of British settlement
in Australia, the whole country was throwing
this massive year -long party. White refused
to publish anything that year. He issued a statement
saying, circuses don't solve serious problems.
He thought the celebration was a dishonest spectacle
that was ignoring the plight of indigenous Australians
and the country's unresolved bloody history.
Let's talk about the end. He died in 1990. He
did. He died at home in his house in Centennial
Park. He'd been suffering for years from osteoporosis
and glaucoma. He was in a lot of pain. And his
legacy. Is there a Patrick White Museum, a writer's
house you can tour? No. And that's absolutely
by his design. His house is privately owned.
There's no institute, no foundation bearing his
name, apart from the award. In a way, he has
vanished back into the landscape, just like his
character Voss did. But his influence is undeniable.
Every serious Australian novelist writing today,
people like Peter Carey, Tim Winton, Richard
Flanagan, they are all in one way or another
writing in the space that Patrick White cleared
for them. So this is where it gets really interesting
for me. We have this man who spent his whole
life attacking his country. He called his people
materialistic, its culture empty, its suburbs
ugly. He insulted its heroes. And yet he is its
most decorated and revered writer. It raises
the fundamental question, was his difficult nature,
his constant criticism? actually the ultimate
form of patriotism. How so? Explain that. Well,
think about it. If you don't care about a place,
you just ignore it. You leave. You don't spend
50 years of your life screaming at it to be better.
White attacked the great Australian emptiness
because he desperately wanted to fill it. He
wanted Australia to have a soul. He forced a
young, insecure, sunburnt culture to look in
the mirror and see not just the cheerful surface,
but the darkness and the divinity underneath.
So by being un -Australian, in the way that term
is often used, meaning not being a cheerful,
easygoing mate, he was actually doing the most
patriotic thing he could have done. I think so.
I think he loved the country enough to tell it
the hard truths, even if it made everyone, including
himself, miserable. That is a powerful and very
provocative thought to end on. Patrick White.
The man who hated the buttocks of cars, but loved
the mystical light on the gum trees. A complex
man for a complex continent. You couldn't have
one without the other. Thanks for listening to
this deep dive. If you've never picked up a Patrick
White novel, maybe start with Voss or The Tree
of Man. It might be a challenge. It might feel
like verbal sludge at first, but hey, muscles
shouldn't prevail over the mind, right? Absolutely.
Give it a try. See you next time.