AustLit logo

AustLit

Flaws in the Glass extract   autobiography  
Issue Details: First known date: 2011... 2011 Flaws in the Glass
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Notes

  • Editor's note: The great Australian novelist Patrick White (1912-90) became an officer in RAF Intelligence in London in 1940, 'most likely', he recalled, on the advice of his friend, the painter Roy de Maistre. It seems probable the war would have gone just as well without him.
  • pp. 85-98

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Penguin Book of Australian War Writing Mark Dapin (editor), Camberwell : Viking , 2011 Z1828081 2011 anthology extract autobiography correspondence diary war literature

    'From the cliffs of Gallipoli, through the jungles of Vietnam, to the deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq, Australia's short history is a story of war.

    'The battlefield has shaped the way we define ourselves - the Australian values of mateship, courage under fire, larrikinism - but few of us have witnessed these scenes firsthand. Soldiers writing from the front and journalists on the ground have formed the way we think about war and so formed the way we think about ourselves.

    'In The Penguin Book of Australian War Writing, author and journalist Mark Dapin has gathered together the finest of these accounts. Starting with Watkin Tench's observations of an Aboriginal war party, we see the terror, confusion and occasional heroics of the front line through the eyes of some of our best writers, including AB Paterson, Martin Boyd, Patrick White, Alan Moorehead, Kenneth Slessor, Peter Cundall and Barry Heard.

    'These remarkable letters, diaries, memoirs and reports remind us of our history, and of our responsibility in recording and remembering what happens in the wars we send our soldiers to fight. (From the publisher's website.)

         Camberwell : Viking , 2011     pg. 195-209
VIEW PUBLICATION DETAILS FOR ALL VERSIONS ()

Related Works

y separately published work icon Flaws in the Glass : A Self-Portrait Patrick White , London : Jonathan Cape , 1981 Z443896 1981 single work autobiography (taught in 2 units)

'A self-portrait that is as brilliant original as White's fiction and drama.

'In this remarkable self-portrait Patrick White explains how on the very rare occasions when he re-reads a passage from one of his books, he recognises very little of the self he knows. This 'unknown' is the man interviewers and visiting students expect to find, but 'unable to produce him', he prefers to remain private, or as private as anyone who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature can ever be. In this book is the self Patrick White does recognise, the one he sees reflected in the glass.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Vintage ed.).
VIEW ALL RELATED WORKS (1)
Last amended 22 Mar 2012 14:34:15
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X