![]() ![]() It is a fictionalised account of the life of the explorer Ludwig Leichardt, and it is salutary to remember that despite the fuss sometimes made about it today, fictionalising actual events is nothing new. ![]() Yet it’s included in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and the summary of Voss suggests an enticing story. He is doomed to be increasingly neglected, or, at any rate, celebrated only in lip-service.( Simon During) ![]() White’s critique of Australian ordinariness is no longer especially vital or useful, and that his reputation is as Australia’s genius loci means it is more important to criticise than to join him. There is a curious ambivalence about this site, presumably set up to explain White and his works yet careful to add demurrers – as if to commit the un-egalitarian sin of praising White is to risk the charge of being ‘un-Australian’. To read through the Opinion pages is to feel an increasing sense of dismay when there are comments like this: You’ll have to take my word for it about what follows. Update 2/12/22: I see that the site has been removed, and good riddance. Where else but Australia could there be a website so offensively titled as the ABC’s Why Bother with Patrick White? Prior to that the writer who would become Australia’s only Nobel Prize Laureate had been dismissed in Australia, as indeed he so often is today. Vosswas Patrick White’s fifth novel and is the book that won the inaugural Miles Franklin Award in 1957. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |