Loved and loathed, Patrick White loomed over Australian literature for decades as a distant, grimacing colossus. There was simply no way around him, no way he could not be taken into consideration. Not only did he appropriate the physical and spiritual landscape in his major novels, The Tree of Man, Voss and Riders in the Chariot: in cultural terms he became the landscape. Writers around him and after him were forever in his debt, or at least his shadow. The scope and achievement of his work simply made everything else look ordinary, and Australians - normally prepared to make a virtue of their ordinariness - bridled. In retrospect, and now that 'the monster of all time' is safely dead, it would appear that his countrymen needn't have taken it all so personally, since it's difficult to find peers for White anywhere.

LRB 22 June 1995 | PDF Download