AustLit

'Australian critics have lamented Patrick White’s disappearance from our literary culture in recent years. While the legend of the man remains – the man who refused a knighthood, the man who used his Australian of the Year speech to declare that Australia Day is for ‘self- searching rather than trumpet-blowing’, the man whose prose, a chapter from The Eye of the Storm (1973), submitted under the anagrammatic name ‘Wraith Picket’, was rejected by agents and publishers in a 2006 literary hoax by The Australian – so does the question of his legacy: does anybody still read White? Christos Tsiolkas (2018) admits feeling ‘ashamed’ for not engaging with ‘arguably the most eminent of Australian writers’ earlier in his life. Describing how his ornate style bewildered our nation of ‘plain-speaking larrikins,’ Madeleine Watts (2019) concludes ‘it would seem, in the end, that nobody could be bothered with Patrick White.’ Cultural cringe, identity politics, impenetrable style – many ponder why White, who felt Australia ‘in my blood’ but also acknowledged ‘at heart I am a Londoner’, has struggled for survival among our nation’s readership (Marr, 1994, p. 419). Despite offering different reasons, critics appear to have reached at least one in Martin Thomas’s (2021) words, ‘a Great Unread’. And this is to say nothing of his drama.' (Introduction)