As one of those unmentionables from the Australian capital, perhaps I should hold my tongue. But I can’t help thinking that the absence of Patrick White for a full three decades is something to care about, if only to understand how a writer of his intelligence and standing has become a Great Unread. The situation is hardly new. As far back as 2006, White’s stocks had fallen to the extent that a journalist, writing under the name ‘Wraith Picket’, could type out a chapter from White’s novel The Eye of the Storm (1973) and submit it as an unsolicited manuscript to a dozen agents and publishers in Australia. Despite the anagrammatic hint in the nom de plume, no one recognised the work as White’s and no one considered it worthy of publication.

Things have certainly changed since the 1970s when the buzz around the newly minted Nobel laureate was such that the writer Barbara Blackman could protest that a ‘Patrick White Australia Policy’ gripped the nation.

White’s searing wit, which had a delicious way of pirouetting into high bitchiness, is one reason why he is still worth reading. His comic brilliance is fully evident in his works for theatre, as it is in his letters, which he later urged recipients to destroy. (Of course they didn’t.) Accessing this aspect of the White oeuvre is easy. While researching White in the 1980s, David Marr unearthed more than enough letters to fill a large volume. Published by Jonathan Cape in 1994, it is a fine companion to Marr’s marvellous biography, Patrick White: A life (1991).

Marr is one person for whom the thirtieth anniversary did not slip by unnoticed. He threw a dinner party, bringing together veterans from White’s inner circle, a talented crowd of younger friends who used to gather at the house on Martin Road in Sydney’s Centennial Park where White spent the last third of his life. Marr came to know White well during the years he worked on the biography.

When I spoke to Marr recently for a Menzies Australia Institute podcast interview, he explained that his own trajectory intersected with White’s at an early age. During Marr’s childhood, his family had friends who were close neighbours of White and Lascaris. At that time the couple lived in a house called ‘Dogwoods’ in the township of Castle Hill, then on the outer edge of Sydney. The young Marr never met them, but he remembers the house on Showground Road (a wonderful address for a man rather fond of glitter and greasepaint). Castle Hill was the inspiration for the imaginary locality of Sarsaparilla, a bedraggled backwater of outer suburbia, studded with unpromising place names like Terminus Road and Barranugli. White populated this topography with gossips and busybodies – bastions of the ordinary – who are counterposed by the motley and often taciturn ensemble of misfits and eccentrics living in their midst. Sarsaparilla is the setting for many of White’s stories, including the book that made him, The Tree of Man (1955).

At Castle Hill, White and Lascaris lived quietly, as homosexual couples often did in the 1950s. Lascaris was also a ‘new Australian’, the word ‘immigrant’ requiring a euphemism in those years. The emotional scars of the war, streaked by a strong sense of survivor’s guilt, haunted Lascaris for the remainder of his life. They were personified in the memory of a beautiful German soldier with whom he had an affair in 1934 and who had subsequently begged him for assistance in getting out of Germany. Not realising the horror of the situation there, Lascaris had ignored the request. He never heard from the man again and always regretted his failure to help him.

Years later, Lascaris explained to the academic and translator Vrasidas Karalis that he ‘escaped to Patrick and Australia because there was so much death around me, so much darkness. I wanted a place without my memories.’ Whether Australia – or anywhere else for that matter – could have delivered on that front is doubtful. But the new country did give him plenty that he could never forget. This was the time when Robert Menzies was hunting reds with McCarthyite zeal. The real White Australia policy was in full swing, bringing untold misery to the ‘old Australians’.

While White and Lascaris were putting down roots at Castle Hill, droves of artists and intellectuals were heading in the opposite direction. The exodus from Australia resulted in the departure of artists as diverse as Michael Blakemore, Carmen Callil, Randolph Stow, Clive James, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, John Pilger, and Germaine Greer. White fully understood the persuasiveness of these ‘push factors’, but his response to them was very different. The uncertainty of the European foothold in Australia, and the sense of fragility and spiritual vacuity that resulted, became one of his great themes: to ‘people the Australian emptiness’. The ‘push power’ of a seemingly desolate culture in Australia cannot be separated from the ‘pull’ of Europe, which White himself felt strongly throughout his life, despite his growing reputation as the de facto ‘novelist laureate’ of Australia, a status almost formalised by the award of the Nobel Prize in 1973.

Ever the iconoclast, White told the press when the Nobel Prize was announced that while his blood was Australian, he felt himself a Londoner ‘at heart’. He was serious when he described himself as a Londoner. White was born there in 1912 while his parents were making an extended visit to the imperial capital, as colonials of their wealth and class were inclined to do. After studying at Cambridge, he moved there, living at various addresses in the Bohemian quarter on and around Ebury Street, close to Belgravia but closer still to the less salubrious Victoria Station. Marr laments that for all the blue plaques in London connecting famous people with buildings, White’s years in the city have not been officially recognised. If ever he gets his plaque, it will be at 13 Eccleston Street, the address where he lived longest. There, more than anywhere else, he ingested the modernist influences that shaped his style.

The particular influence of London on White’s artistic formation was the immersion in other art forms it provided him. There was always the theatre (White, in the London years, saw his future as a playwright), but it was music and especially painting that brought rhythm, texture, and tonality to his writing. Painting as a medium suggested models for his own aesthetic, and several of his major texts, including The Aunt’s Story and the play The Ham Funeral (1961), were directly inspired by works he had seen in painters’ studios. The Vivisector (1970) remains White’s consummate statement on painters and painting; its protagonist, Hurtle Duffield, is a composite of various painters he had known over the years (Sidney Nolan is often mentioned, but there were many others).

White’s deep engagement with the medium of painting began during his Ebury Street years. Among his neighbours was a wild and extravagant young man, English by descent although raised in Ireland. When White first knew Francis Bacon, he was designing furniture for a living. White became a client as well as a friend, commissioning various items including a desk he adored. Their friendship blossomed and endured, despite the fact that White thought Bacon overdid the lipstick. The two were introduced by the Australian-born artist Roy de Maistre, their senior by about twenty years. An eccentric whose many affectations included a royal pedigree, de Maistre was, as Marr’s biography points out, far more interesting than his self-mythologisation would suggest. As well as having ‘a knack of making young and talented men take themselves seriously’, he was a formidable painter at his experimental best, although one required by circumstance to produce too many potboilers.

White’s move from Ebury Street around the corner to Eccleston Street was due to de Maistre, who was an in-law of White’s godmother and whose patrons included the Tory politician Richard ‘Rab’ Butler. Butler purchased for de Maistre the lease on number 13, which he used as both studio and residence. White, who sublet the two upper floors, fell heavily in love with de Maistre, and for a time they were romantically involved (Bacon, too, was briefly de Maistre’s lover, though there is no evidence to support speculation that White and Bacon were themselves physically intimate). Yet de Maistre’s enduring influence over both young protégés was as a mentor rather than a lover. The radical synthesis of auditory and visual perception in the abstract paintings de Maistre completed in Australia after World War I is also a trait in White’s writing.

Tellingly, White said of de Maistre that he ‘taught me how to look at paintings, to listen to music … He taught me to walk in the present.’ Through de Maistre’s friendship and tutelage, White developed the confidence to understand the nature of his talent and where it might take him. De Maistre, who had little enthusiasm for the theatre, disapproved of White’s wasting his time on scripts that no theatre would perform. White came to swallow the bitter truth that his infatuation with the stage was unrequited. His future lay in the novel.

 Patrick White and Manoly Lascaris, 1980 (photograph by William Yang, reproduced with permission)

Like William Faulkner, James Joyce, and so many of the major moderns, White brought an international perspective to mining the local. He loved gossip and was an acute observer of humanity. A dedicated user of public transport, he had a finely tuned ear that could distil poetry from the thorns and nettles of the Australian vernacular. In White’s plays as well as his prose, it is often the most inarticulate utterances that yield the most meaning. In The Vivisector, the grocer Cutbush, when pushed on whether he believes in God, gives this response: ‘That’s what we were taught, wasn’t it? I’m not going back on that. That is, I wouldn’t be prepared to say I don’t exactly not believe.’ With an all-too-finite vocab in their existential toolkit, his characters grapple, Beckett-like, with the enormity around them.

White’s capacity for bathos was formidable – and seldom more punishing than in his attitude to nationhood and the sacred cows that graze around its base. Speaking in 1984, he argued that ‘those with genuine love of their heritage have begun to wonder whether nationalism, in its overheated fuzz of artificially inseminated patriotism, is all that desirable’. His aversion to Australian jingoism deepened in tandem with his growing concern for the land’s First Nations peoples, about whom he gradually became better informed.

I suspect that White’s supranational outlook and his caution in even classifying himself as ‘an Australian’ are among the reasons why he has receded from view, at least in his own country. He was near the end of his life in 1988 when Australia threw its birthday party to commemorate the 200 years since British arrival. Appalled that a date so unholy for Indigenous Australians could be officially celebrated, White prohibited the publication or performance of his work for the entire bicentennial year. ‘More than anything, it was the need for justice for the Aborigines which put me against the Bi,’ he explained. ‘Aborigines may not be shot and poisoned as they were in the early days of colonisation, but there are subtler ways of disposing of them.’

In the decades since ‘the Bi’, Australia Day has not diminished as many of us who protested against it had hoped. Instead, it has boomed like a mushroom cloud, morphing into an increasingly grotesque display of national chauvinism and white pride. White’s assessment that, at a spiritual and psychological level, the possessors of the nation are themselves deeply dispossessed remains as pertinent as it is unwelcome in the prevailing political discourse.

The Australian emptiness that White hoped to populate is of course an inner state, a self stripped bare. And while it required a specific geography to give it symbolic form, it is ultimately a human – not a national – condition that he was trying to articulate and understand. That idea of peopling the void through language is there in all the major novels: The Tree of Man, Riders in the Chariot (1961), The Solid Mandala (1966), The Vivisector, to name a few. For White the relationship between the inner self and the body’s shell is as abrasive as it is sublime. Perhaps that’s why it required the liminal geography of a place like Castle Hill, landed somewhere between the bush and the outer suburbs, to get the corpus rolling.

I was introduced to White’s writing at Sydney University in the mid-1980s, sampling a few of the short stories in my first year. My strongest, if undergraduate, impression was of the earthiness of the writing: the vulgar ratbaggery of Sarsaparilla, with its crazed loners, mongrel dogs, and scarcely less feral children. There is a gentle humour and a deep compassion to White’s portrayal of ‘the underprivileged’, and while he created some truly great upper-crust characters, he could be especially savage towards his own class. This must have irritated Leonie Kramer, the professor of Australian literature at Sydney. A Dame of the British Empire, she ruled the department in imperial style. ‘Killer Kramer’, as he dubbed her, was famously no friend of White, whose increasingly leftist politics were diametrically opposed to her own. She favoured the poetry of James McAuley and A.D. Hope, both professors of English (the latter from Canberra!). In a judgement that White never forgave, Hope had pilloried The Tree of Man as ‘pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge’. Fortunately for us, there was a young lecturer, recently recruited, who managed to smuggle Voss onto the second-year syllabus.

Voss (1957) is striking for the density of its observational detail and its rhythmic texture. There is an operatic extravagance to the character of both Voss and his romantic interest, Laura Trevelyan, with whom he enjoys something resembling telepathic communication as he strides boldly into the wilderness. You can smell and taste the country traversed by Voss’s expedition, yet there are only faint nods to the naturalism that in White’s day was the default mode of nearly all Australian fiction. The portrayal of Voss’s quest to discover inland Australia is sweetly ironic and adroitly calibrated to a world that in the 1950s was nominally struggling to decolonise. Voss’s one-way journey into the desert leads him not to the anticipated enlightenment of discovery but to the excesses of his own hubris, which ultimately destroy him. Through allegory, White could cross the threshold that Walt Whitman described as the point ‘beyond which philosophy cannot go and does not wish to go’.

In his evocation of Voss’s monomania and narcissism, White examines how exploration is not so much a process of observation as an act of projection on the part of the expedition leader. To interrogate the ‘heroics’ of exploring may not seem especially original today, when statues of imperial figures are being ripped down with such vehemence. But White was well ahead of the game. He made the point in 1957, nearly forty years before postcolonial critics ‘discovered’ similar fault lines in the exploration project. Needless to say, they did not describe them with anything approximating White’s complexity or poetic force.

For those devotees of White’s writing, he remains as relevant as ever thirty years on. David Marr has no doubt that White will resurface as an essential author, but he suggests that a period in the shade is almost to be expected for novelists who have died in recent decades, even for the greats. It takes time to read the big books; and time for so many of us is in short supply, even when we are locked down in a pandemic. Understandably, living writers get press and critical attention. The novel as an art form is in rude health, with more good books being published than anyone can read.

Another reason why White is less read than he should be has to do with political changes. The identity-based politics that presently absorb so much oxygen would have bored White rigid. His own political awakening was, as he confessed, heavily retarded. He began as a political agnostic and evolved into an interventionist. Like Lascaris, he regretted that he took so long to recognise the obscenity of fascism, despite having visited Germany under Hitler. On returning to Australia in 1948, he voted unthinkingly for conservative candidates, as Whites had done for generations. The 1960s changed everything. With actual experience of war under his belt, he had good reason to revile it, whether hot or cold. When Gough Whitlam became leader of the Labor Party in 1967, promising an end to imperial kowtowing and the withdrawal of Australian troops from Vietnam, White supported him. In 1975, he protested vociferously against the sacking of Whitlam’s government by the queen’s representative.

White’s speeches and other public interventions on subjects ranging from nuclear disarmament to urban conservation are sufficiently numerous to fill a volume titled Patrick White Speaks (1990). A noticeable absence in its pages is gay rights. Despite his being one of the most prominent gay men in the country, this was one cause that White eschewed. Viewing sexuality as an essentially private matter, he chided fans of Mardi Gras for ‘walking up Oxford Street with your handbags’. Perhaps White had thought too much about the depths of human identity to be much interested in political labelling: ‘I see myself not so much a homosexual as a mind possessed by the spirit of man or woman according to actual situations or the characters I become in my writing.’

Perhaps for White the assertion of an identity-based politics ran the risk of reproducing tribalism in another form. Much more so than has been acknowledged, his own politics were grounded in concern about economic injustice. He enjoyed a materially privileged existence as he knew well enough. It is said that by the end of his life the lion’s share of his income was going to philanthropic causes. Unlike many who are born into money, White thought long and hard about his family’s fortune and the land that yielded such prosperity, but at such a cost. The cult of wealth he so despised was alive and well in Sydney, which has always exhibited an unwholesome blend of glitz, sparkle, sleaze, and opportunism; it is a city where the homeless rummage ‘in garbage bins among the lobster and oyster shells’, as White himself inimitably put it.

I have one last thought about why White has become a Great Unread. Australia, as is often remarked, is a practical country, guaranteed to deliver if you want to build a fence, swimming pool, coal mine, or public lavatory. So it is especially noticeable that in a practical, nuts-and-bolts way, Australia has neglected to acknowledge the presence of White in the landscape he frequented. He’s out there, but he is not part of the material fabric of our lives.

I feel this personally, having grown up in north-west Sydney in a house that was only seven kilometres from Showground Road. We lived not in Castle Hill but in the adjoining suburb of West Pennant Hills. White and Lascaris moved from Dogwoods the year I was born, so I did not unknowingly pass them at the shopping centre. But the fact remains that I was brought up in Sarsaparilla, or near enough to it. The striking thing is that no one told me at the time and I never worked it out for myself until long after the happy day when I made my exit.

Compare Australia and White with the relationship between localities and their writers that is common in Britain. Whether it’s Austen and Bath or Dickens and London or Hardy and Wessex, places and authors are connected. They speak to each other. Guidebooks, plaques, and rituals of visitation connect literary works with their geographical origins. At their worst, these practices can encourage thoughtless genuflection to the cult of the author. At their best, they provide a way of rendering in gestural form the benefits that creative works bring to our lives. A cottage industry of guided tours and history walks supports these enthusiasms. That’s very different to growing up in Sarsaparilla and not knowing it.

Eccleston Street in London is not the only location that would benefit from a blue plaque acknowledging White. ‘Dogwoods’ on Showground Road is now home to a legal firm. You can look at the house from the footpath, but if you seek some residue of its famous occupant, turn to the street-map, not the streetscape. As was predicted in the concluding pages of The Tree of Man, the tide of suburbia flooded Sarsaparilla and eventually drowned it. In the subdivided land that White and Lascaris tilled, there is a trilogy of street names that may or may not mean something to those who live there: Patrick Avenue, White Place, and Nobel Place.

The house on Martin Road at Centennial Park has received greater recognition. The New South Wales government has nominated it as a site of heritage significance, perhaps in hope of quietening a chorus of White admirers who, after Lascaris’s death, argued that the state should acquire it as a writers’ centre or museum. This was deemed unaffordable and the house was sold at auction, where someone in the finance industry bought it as a private residence.

The house of White’s childhood, Lulworth, is now a nursing home, and in that guise it still has tales to tell. How poignant it is that Lascaris, who outlived White by thirteen years, spent the last three months of his life in that institution. (Another late-life resident was White’s old foe, Leonie Kramer.)

That there are no plaques on these buildings is typical of Sydney, the Emerald City as they call her. Sydney doesn’t really do plaques. During the real-estate bubble, the notion that a building has heritage is as heretical as any other encumbrance to an owner’s right to knock it down. Blue plaques in themselves won’t get people reading The Eye of the Storm or The Tree of Man. They are demanding books. But they could play some small role in encouraging a culture that is genuinely curious about the places we inhabit and the ideas they spawn. White was fully cognisant of the danger and irresponsibility of failing to plumb the depths of the world we occupy. ‘A pragmatic nation, we tend to confuse reality with surfaces. Perhaps this dedication to surface is why we are constantly fooled by the crooks who mostly govern us.’

White could never get used to Australia as a national or political system – too many rogues, too much bad blood and unsettled business – but as a place it breathed inside him. In the Western Desert of Egypt during the war, he was overwhelmed by memories of ‘frosty mornings on the Monaro, with sulphur-crested cockatoos toppling the stooked oats; floodwaters of the Barwon and Namoi through which I swam my horse to fetch the mail; the peppertrees and cracked asphalt of steamy Sydney streets’. Summoned to Australia by these impressions, he brought with him the carapaces of memory borne by all true travellers. As memories from afar continued to resonate, Castle Hill become somewhere for him and Lascaris. There is a trace of London in the Castle Hill they knew. There is Roy de Maistre and the lipstick smile of Francis Bacon. There are bombs falling on London and the caress of the beautiful soldier, lost to history. Without those ties to elsewhere, the Castle Hill in which White lived could only be Castle Hill. It could never have become Sarsaparilla.

Patrick White populated the local with a world of connections. This, too, says something about why he is being ignored and why, more importantly, we need him now. The pandemic has atomised us; made us cellular to an extent we would never have envisaged. No man is an island, but insularity is the very thing demanded of us. We are seeing it not only at the personal level, but in the borders that pin us in place. Trumpism and Brexit are all about walls and lines and checkpoints: the infrastructure of the xenophobe. The very union of the United Kingdom is now uncertain. In Australia, borders between states can suddenly become uncrossable. How unnatural this is. At a certain basic level, it makes no sense. Hence the need to understand the ways in which nations do not define us. In so doing, we might draw inspiration and a little solace from a brilliant, reluctant, and sometimes cantankerous Australian who happened to be a Londoner at heart.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.