Q. PATRICK WHITE, WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE IN 1973, IS ARGUABLY THE MOST EMINENT OF AUSTRALIAN WRITERS – WHAT SHOULD HIS WORK MEAN TO US NOW?

In a sense our view of a writer’s work will change as cultures shift and transform in history. If I had been asked this question when I was a young student at Melbourne Uni, doing Arts, I might have responded lazily that he was irrelevant, one of the “dead white males”.

Why that would be have been lazy is that it would have come from ignorance.

In reading him over the last few years I realise he is one of the great prose writers in English of the 20th Century. That doesn’t mean we can’t approach him critically but we should also do so, if we are critics, diligently and I think sympathetically; as he was one of our first writers to come to grips with what this continent is. As readers and writers what we find in reading him is inspiration.

Q. IN WRITERS ON WRITERS YOU DESCRIBE PATRICK WHITE AS “BOTH A GREAT AUSTRALIAN NOVELIST AND A GREAT NOVELIST PERIOD”, SAYING HIS WORK DOESN’T REQUIRE THE “LOUSY ADJECTIVE “AUSTRALIA” AS A QUALIFIER?

That’s a bit polemical, isn’t it?

I guess I get frustrated that there is sometimes a self-consciousness to Australian criticism that is always looking over its shoulder to see what the fashion is in London or New York. Once that was called the “cultural cringe”.

Hopefully that is being muted now that so many of us who are Australians come from so many places in the world. I have had conversations in Mumbai, Greece, Germany and Mexico about White’s writing, with Indians, Greeks, Germans and Mexicans who adore his work. They understand he is Australian but they are responding to his words and his art first. That is the most important thing about him.

The adjective “Australian” is only useful when we want to dig deeper into how he emerged and developed as a writer.

Q. YOU IDENTIFY PATRICK WHITE’S BOOKS AS THREE OF THE GREATEST NOVELS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: THE TREE OF MAN, THE SOLID MANDALA AND THE EYE OF THE STORM – WHAT IS IT ABOUT THOSE BOOKS IN PARTICULAR?

All of us as readers will have our own individual responses to a writer’s work. I’m aware that there will be critics and readers who will argue that other works of his are “finer” or more “perfect” novels. But for myself it is these three works of his that astonished me and made me fall in love with Patrick White’s writing.

I suspect that there is a spiritual grace to these three novels that I responded to, that they are works of art infused with awe and compassion even when – as in The Eye of the Storm – he is at his most biting and satirical. I think all three are deeply humanist novels.

Q. PATRICK WHITE’S WORKS OFTEN INCLUDE A FOCUS ON FEELINGS OF BEING AN OUTSIDER OR IN EXILE – IS THAT SOMETHING YOU SHARE?

My own sense of exclusion growing up in this country came from both being a child of immigrants and also from my coming to terms with my homosexuality as an adolescent and as a young adult. So, of course, I am drawn to works that speak from the outsider position. But that attentiveness to being an “outsider” is something that so many novelists share.

White was writing in the 20th Century and it seems to me that existentialism was a pivotal influence in his development as an artist. The outsider figures in all his work. What he achieved, I think, is creating a language that was secular and realist but also sensitive and responsive to the emotions and wonderment that come from religious and spiritual understandings of the world.

His greatest characters are always outsiders and they, each and every one of them, undergo moments of transcendence that bring to greater understanding of compassion, of love, of suffering and of joy.

Q. YOU DESCRIBE HOW THE “THE SCENTS AND SOUNDS, THE SPEECH AND SYNTAX, THE BRUTALITY AND BEAUTY OF MY CONTINENT PERMEATES THE WRITING” SAYING “THIS COUNTRY, IN ALL ITS BEAUTY AND UGLINESS, IN ALL ITS MEANNESS AND POTENTIAL, IS A PERPETUAL CHARACTER IN HIS NOVELS”?

The landscapes that we live in seep into our bones.

Speak to any Australian who has returned after spending time away in Asia, say, or in Europe, and they always speak in wonderment about the Australian light, about Australian space. I think White was one of our first writers to make that wonderment part of his language. This centrality of landscape to imagination is, of course, not particularly Australian: all great artists respond to the sensual world around them.

White was aware too of the brutality that was in the Australian landscape. A brutality that comes from our violent and ugly colonial history, but also a brutality that is there in the harshness of the desert landscape, in the violence of the ocean.

He is a beautiful writer, a precise and eloquent writer, but there is also coarseness and savagery in his work. One of the great joys of reading him has been responding to the eroticism in his work. And as in all eroticism there is an element of the dangerous there. That too is connected to our landscape and to our history.