Patrick White was born on 28 May 1912 in Knightsbridge, London. He was brought back to Australia when he was six months old; his family had been pastoralists in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales since 1829. Thus began a life spent travelling between England and Australia. He spent his childhood in Sydney’s Kings Cross, however was sent to school in England in 1925. He returned again to Australia in 1929 to work as a jackaroo on a family property before beginning his studies in modern languages at Cambridge in 1932.
Described as a late modernist writer, White’s first novel, Happy Valley was published in 1939. He then produced The Aunt’s Story (1948), a novel that revealed White’s own cultural condition of not being at home in Australia or anywhere else. He became so disenchanted with writing, and with the hostile reviews he was receiving, that after the publication of The Aunt’s Story he almost gave up writing. He returned to authorship, however, to produce The Tree of Man (1955) and Voss (1957). Among his extensive list of novels, his most-read works include The Vivisector (1970), The Eye of the Storm (1973) and A Fringe of Leaves (1976). White has also produced plays and short stories, though the majority of critical attention has focused on his fiction. He has also written an autobiography, Flaws in the Glass (1981). He won the Miles Franklin Award twice (1958 and 1961) and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973.
Recurring themes within White’s body of work are his uneasy relationship with his country, and sexual and familial relations. Symbols are also important in his writing. He hated suburbia, contested Americanisation, and loathed the banality of everyday life. His fundamental criticism of modern society, however, is that Australian society especially is too dependent on the nuclear, heterosexual family. White is known as the precursor to postcolonialism in Australian writing, evident through the overall themes of his novels. For example, the will to dominate and its failure in Voss, and the importance of a scapegoat for social cohesion in Riders in the Chariot (1961). Both of these novels depict colonisation as fragile.
White has received and endured much abuse from critics, but time has ultimately proved them wrong, as he is now acclaimed as Australia’s greatest novelist. Most particularly he has been criticised for being difficult, complicated and opaque. There has also been heavy criticism regarding White’s representations of Aboriginal characters and of the consequences of colonialism for Aboriginal society. He has also been labelled as misogynist in his use and depiction of female characters.