Writing to Geoffrey Dutton in 1969, Patrick White confesses: ‘All my life I have been rather bored, and I suppose in desperation I have been inclined to weave these fantasies in which I become more “involved”. Ignoble, au fond, but there have been a few results.’

He is speaking, in that typically wry last phrase, of the books. My guess is that one of the great frustrations of the last six years of his life was that for the first time in three decades he had no great book of his own to look forward to. A Life was meant to fill the gap. What he wanted it to be was not an apologia, or a cover-up, but what his books had always been, a revelation – anything else was too boring to contemplate. Having used his life, its landscapes and houses, his parents, his friends, all the fractured bits of his own psyche, to make the fiction, he wanted to turn the material over now to someone else and see it through their eyes. It wasn’t simply the events of a seventy-five-year existence that he was trusting to his biographer but the life material that had already gone into one lot of books and was now to make another. He set David Marr on the track of the documents, gave him access to all the names he would need, including those of people who would have some harsh truths to tell, then withdrew and waited. It was, among other things, a kind of test. 

That Marr, in his role of investigator, should have come up with so much that White had forgotten, or obscured, or believed was lost, is one vindication of the old man’s choice. The other is an integrity, a passion for the truth, that White must have known would stand up to any attempt he might make to exert his authority – reclaim authorship, that is – by intimidation or bullying. The tact with which Marr keeps White at a distance while entering fully into the spirit of the man, the skill with which he covers so much time and space to compose a narrative that is shapely, detailed, and has pace, drama, and real complexity, is something of a miracle. White’s was a great life and David Marr has made a great book of it.

The difficulties, in fact, were huge. There was, for example, the special sympathy he had to discover for places that were, in their way, White’s sacred sites: the landscape round Belltrees that appears in so many forms in the fiction (as Rhine Towers, as Kudjeri), the southern high­lands round Moss Vale, the streets around the river at Chelsea, later the Castle Hill of Sarsaparilla and, later again, Centennial Park. He had also to get to know the various houses, and to make himself, and us, at home with the Byzantine intricacies of the White/Withycombe inheritance, the town and country rituals of a privileged class that knew what it was to work and get its hands dirty, as well as to travel, collect, and play at ‘culture’ – he had to recreate, that is, a life of a quite peculiarly Australian kind that has largely vanished. 

Later, there was the real Byzantine world that came to White through Manoly Lascaris and gave him access, beyond the sufferings and triumphs of Australian experience, to the darker history of contemporary Europe; then the war in the desert – Alexandria, the Sudan, Palestine; with always, behind and beneath, the Proustian litany of White’s illnesses, the asthma bouts and other crises. And all this had to be shown to have one life in real events and another in the books.

Marr is especially adroit at making the transition, through details and characters whose only relevance to his own narrative is the part they play in another. ‘At the front,’ he writes of Thirteen Eccleston Street, ‘was an antique shop run by a crazed and boring White Russian who was once an admiral in the Czarist navy. He was now, unknown to himself, waiting for his greatest engagement, as General Sokolnikov in the jardin exotique of the Hotel du Midi.’ 

What is chiefly impressive is the wholeness of White’s life as he himself experienced it, and the wholeness with which Marr recreates it. On almost the last page of his book, he writes of the room at Martin Road where White is dying: ‘On a calm morning he pointed out his favourite picture in the room: Max Watter’s grey painting of a country church: “It’s from the country round Belltrees.”’ White himself offers another insight into the way his affections continually led him back into the depths of his life. On a late trip to New Zealand to support a nuclear ban, he recalls after more than seventy years the South Sea Island gardener at Lulworth who came each day to collect him from kindergarten: ‘my small white hand in his large black spongy one as he helped me board the tram’. When his old nurse, Lizzie Kirk, died, aged ninety-six, he was asked if there was anything of Lizzie’s that he wanted. ‘He named,’ Marr writes, ‘the little worm-eaten trunk Lizzie had brought with her from Scotland. For years he had wanted it, but did not know how to ask.’ (It is typical that when Sid Kirk turned up with it, some weeks later, White should complain at the door: ‘You could have given me a ring.’) Affections of this sort, for houses and landscapes, for people, for many generations of dogs and all kinds of objects, was what held his life together. 

He was fiercely loyal to those, such as Roy de Maistre and his American publisher, Ben Huebsch, who had helped discipline his art, but was most loyal of all to his own feelings. Marr makes a point about his difficult relationship with Australia that explains both White’s passionate attachment to the idea of the place, to his own edenic landscapes, and his bitter disappointment at the daily reality. The time is the 1950s: 

Some part of him painfully grasped that he was not in the Australia of his childhood, the country which remained so vividly in his mind as a paradise of order and comfort, of freedom, primitive sensuality, well-run houses and beautiful gardens. Had he grown up in Australia, these early memories might have been overlaid by a truer picture of the country. Exile, instead, had preserved the country in all the colours of early memory. All his life Patrick White was to draw on those memories while raging at the reality around him. 

His worst anger was always reserved for what he had loved and what had, he felt, let him down – and especially for those artists among his friends who, in his eyes, had compromised the great hopes he had for them by chasing after money or public affection or fame. 

Marr writes of his affection, late in his life, for Kerry Walker: ‘a daughter to worry over, help out, quarrel with and take pride in as her career grew. She broke many of his rules but was admired.’ There were other daughters – Zoe Caldwell, whom he misses at the end, Luciana Arrighi, Kate Fitzpatrick – and a good many sons as well. Not all of them broke the rules and got away with it, and many were kept on the straight and narrow by the knowledge of his eagle eye upon them. Harshness, in his case, is always an indication of dangerous involvement. This is also true of his harshness towards himself. He was afraid all his life of going soft, of being sentimental, because the possibility of it was so strong in him. (It was de Maistre who put the iron in his soul in this regard – to the great benefit of the work.) He had always to be wary of the ‘easily seductive’ (he was especially hard on male beauty) because he was so susceptible, and of the dangers of courting public ap­proval because he was by nature vain. 

‘God and love are the two great mysteries of White’s world’, Marr tells us when he approaches this difficult territory of the affections: 

The place of love in his novels is peculiar, for White is not much interested in falling in love, which is the central drama of most Western fiction. Few lives are shaped by the search for pleasure in Patrick White; his men and women sacrifice very little for passion; and more often than not the people who matter most are haunted by their inability to love enough ... Sex is necessary in White’s world. Sex offers relief from lust. It is a service offered and taken. The many whores of White’s fiction are saints who pursue in bed and on street corners their vocation: they are the nuns of relief ... The great hazard is self-disgust ... Love makes sex bearable. ‘Personally I find sex without love so boring.’ And what was this love? Nothing White experienced as a man displaced Lizzie Clark’s example from his heart. Her love was the selfless devotion of a servant for her charge ... Love is Service ...

This is an important passage that goes a long way towards explaining the complexities of the man and the moral and spiritual hierarchies, the judgements and dismissals, of the fiction. That it is fairly conventional in no way diminishes the power with which he uses it. 

The real monsters of his world are those, such as Waldo Brown, who are incapable of love; they are worse than any of the physical tormentors. Waldo represents what he himself might have become, without a certain grace, some luck, a good deal of discipline and the daring to break free of his own ‘nature’. He was aware always of that mixture of lust and self-disgust, of pride and contempt for others, that marks the Waldos of this world – most of all, the sterility that comes from cutting off the sources of feeling. His heroines are those who triumph over their own pride and isolation, his saints those who offer loving service, especially those who tend the sick. Everything that has to do with the humble domestic world of washing and cleaning and the preparation of food is sacred to him. 

Writing to his Spanish lover, Mamblas, soon after he set up in Eccleston Street in 1938, White muses: ‘There always seems to be plenty of domestic detail to attend to ... I suppose really I have the soul of a Hausfrau.’ That was one of its incarnations. Writing sharply to his old enemy, Time, which had spoken of his living with a ‘male housekeeper’, he insisted, ‘I am the housekeeper’. Riding down to Kent with the sister of his agent, who feared ‘a heavy literary discussion, White raised the question of Hoovering rooms: how often did it have to be done? His own position was, once a week, but thoroughly.’ 

Hausfrau, but also – especially in his Ebury and Eccleston Street days – dandy; later, as Marr lists it, ‘patron, benefactor, gardener, gossip and authority on questions of marriage, children, education, manners and good form’. Also, one might add, monk. There was something very austere and cell-like about the upstairs rooms at Martin Road, and increasingly, in later years, about the man. The search, like Eudoxia/Eddie/Mrs Trist’s, was for purity. ‘Since there was an income of any size,’ he writes to Dutton in a late letter, ‘I have been giving it away. By now I give most of it – not a noble gesture when one no longer has much desire for anything beyond a roof, a bed, a table and a few pots and pans.’ He was hugely generous and quiet about it. He could also be a skinflint, especially about postage, and tormented his publishers to the end with single-spaced manuscripts of the novels, offering only the most disingenuous explanations of excuse: ‘My hand must have slipped and the spacing gadget shot up to single spacing. I did not notice until I had typed about twenty-five pages. As it did not seem to me to look too bad, and because it would cost less to send, I continued typing that way.’ This in 1975, two years after the Prize!

The tightness was a family trait. So was the generosity, part of what Marr points to as a strong sense of ‘civic duty’, though it also sprang from a natural charity. He was himself, in his later years, a great visitor of the sick. 

Marriage? From the beginning what he was set on was a permanent relationship. After a few false moves, which we read about in detail here for the first time, he found his life partner, and for the next forty-six years, despite the usual difficulties and the unusual ones posed by his own abrasive and sometimes cruel nature, they stuck to it. He was fiercely intolerant of those who gave up. ‘The passion,’ Marr writes, ‘seemed to grow from his fears, for if men and women with children should break up, how much more vulnerable must the union of homosexuals be.’ White left many moving testimonials to the splendours and miseries of a lifelong marriage, in Signal Driver, in the ‘Journeys’ section of Flaws in the Glass. His life as he saw it, his work too, would have been impossible without Manoly. 

As for ‘homosexuality’, Marr treats that with the coolness one might expect of a man who refers to it as ‘a commonplace of human nature’. There is no psychology, no special pleading, no prurience, no gossip, no camp. 

The most painful part of the book has to do with the way White, at various times in his life, got rid of those who no longer interested him; had nothing more to offer in the way of insights for what he was writing, no new ideas or pleasures. It was that tendency to boredom again, a restlessness in him that kept him boiling but was necessary as well for the renewal of his work. Once he had decided to get rid of someone he was brutal. ‘You’ll get it in the neck yet,’ Lascaris warns Gretel Feher. 

The most general of these blood­lettings involved the Central Europeans, Jews mostly, who had been the support of his early years at Dogwoods, sharing his sense of iso­lation, introducing him to music, providing some of the impetus for Riders in the Chariot. His break with them coincided with the move to Martin Road, when he had also to slaughter the last of their chooks. ‘I must commit murder twice a week before we go,’ he writes to Dutton’, and they come racing towards me, wings out­stretched, asking for it.’ 

There are many things here that surprise and illuminate. How close White came, just before the war, for example, to choosing America rather than ‘home’; that he went to Cornwall, and later all the way to New Mexico, on the track of Lawrence; what it was exactly that the experience of the war gave him (‘The rich,’ Marr writes, ‘are able to choose the company they keep, but White had spent the war years thrown in with the crowd and discovered to his surprise that he could deal with mankind at random. The fear of being cut off from the human race no longer afflicted him ...’); that when he first came back to Australia after the war it was in a hundred-man dormitory along with other migrants; that he had no response at the time to the political events of Europe in the thirties, to Nazism, to the fate of the Jews; that he voted Liberal until 1969, was drawn into public life by the Vietnam War, and became an activist by risking jail in Chifley Square on 9 December 1969; that he sat down and talked with an Aboriginal Australian for the first time in 1965. 

Marr gives an excellent account of White’s relationship with de Maistre, to whom he owed, at least in part, the extraordinary development of his ideas between The Ploughman (which seems barely aware even of Eliot) and the fully fledged modernism of Happy Valley. He also reveals the process by which Nobel laureates are made. There are tantalising snippets from many letters, including the ones White wrote in the 1980s to world leaders: to Reagan, ‘Come on, cowboy!’; to Thatcher, ‘I urge you to search your heart, Mrs Thatcher, if one exists behind the pearls.’ (They were sent for publication to the New York Times, The Times and Le Monde. As Marr puts it, ‘None appeared’.) Marr has a nice line in irony. ‘To mark each medal,’ he writes of the Nobel Ceremony, ‘the Stockholm Philharmonic in the gallery above the stage played an interlude of appropriate music. To honour Patrick White for introducing “a new continent to literature” the band played Percy Grainger’s “In an English Country Garden”.’

When White was reading a new book he looked first at the opening paragraph then at the last, and hoped, somewhere between the two, for a good cry. A Life cannot have disappointed him, though he did not, of course, in the draft he read just before his death, see the end as it now stands – Marr’s description of the scattering of his ashes in Centennial Park: 

White had chosen a scruffy stretch of water where he used to rest on a bench in a clump of melaleucas. Could it not be one of the beautiful lakes, Lascaris had asked? It had to be this: heavy with lilies, with a scurf of plastic and broken glass along the bank. The sun was not yet up and a mist was on the water. Barbara Mobbs kicked aside a few empty cans and prayed. As Manoly poured out the ashes a pair of ducks swam over to investigate, hoping for bread.

Every detail of that leads us back into the pattern of the book and into the life. 

Although Sumner Locke Elliott spent more than half his life as an American, his native country Australia was, for him, his land of imagination where memory could be both crystallised and transformed and temporal and spatial boundaries ceased to exist. Of his ten published novels, six (or five and a half, as he liked to say) were set in Australia. Not coincidentally, I think, these were his most successful. His death in June, at the age of seventy-three, marked the passing of not only an incandescent literary talent but also a generous spirit, a superior and entertaining wit and, that rarest of all species, a successful yet humble man.

The way that books are presented has changed from the time when Patrick White’s Happy Valley first appeared in 1939. Humphrey McQueen charts the progress.

If before the 1890s, books had been judged by their dust jackets, most would have been considered uniformly dull, or indecently attired.

Dust jackets appeared first in 1833 to protect the recently introduced cloth casings as they made their progress from printery to publisher’s warehouse, on to booksellers and then to library shelves, at which stage the wrappings were usually thrown away. Those earliest dust jackets could be blank or printed with the title as well as the names of the author and publisher on the front, or notices about other volumes on the back panel.

Many jackets continued to be blank scraps, or transparent glassine, until the start of this century when the wrappers became another part of the expanded sales effort transforming the marketing of all commodities. Blurbs appeared shortly before the Great European War.

According to Charles Rosner’s 1949 catalogue for a Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition on ‘The Art of the Book’, the next step came during the 1920s with the elevation of the dust jacket into a work of art for which illustration and typography had to be matched.

The illustrators’ attention moved from the text to the covers. Just as reputable engravers such as Dore had illustrated books, so, in the 1920s, an artist as established as Sir William Orpen designed the jacket of H.G. Wells’s latest novel for a fee of two hundred guineas. When the publishers lost the original, Orpen got a second fee for the replacement, thereby earning more than many novelists can still expect from their labours.

Patrick White began to publish during what has been called the golden age of dust-jacket design and the changes apparent on his covers, as well as the differences between British and US American presentations, offer one path through the publishing world since the 1930s. They also allow us to compare the ways in which Australia’s two great and powerful friends have visualised a writer whose settings have been mostly as foreign to them as his style and concerns were to his fellow Australians.

In 1935, when Patrick White privately published a limited edition of his book of verse, The Ploughman, the jacket’s rear panel and spine were left blank. Above conventional lettering for the title and author, the cover carried an enlarged version of one of the images in which L. Roy Davies had depicted the settings if not the mood of White’s poems. Any cover illustration was still a daring touch.

Four years later Harrap published Happy Valley using sensible black and white lettering on a blue jacket, with notices for other writers on the back. Reprinting in the same month brought forth brown letters on fawn paper. Front and back panels now carried quotations extolling White’s achievement from a distinguished list of writers including Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, Stephen Spender, Howard Spring, Herbert Read and V.S. Prichett. The first printing had summarised the plot on the front flap above a brief biographical note in minute type. The reprint expanded the author’s career onto the back flap, stressing that he had attended a good school, Cheltenham, before going up to Cambridge.

The US American first edition of Happy Valley came from Viking in 1940 with white and black letters on a brick-coloured panel set into a green landscape for the front and spine. The rear panel paraphrased the plot and cited critical enthusiasms, as did the front flap. Viking’s potted biography omitted the name of White’s school and university, but explained that he had worked on a ‘sheep ranch’ and had twice visited the USA.

The Living and the Dead appeared first in the USA in a jacket executed by E. McKnight Kauffer, one of the most esteemed designers of our century. The colour range was limited to purple, grey and sky blue with white relief. At first glance, the front looks as if it has no illustration, only typography. But the lettering is arranged to form a crucifix, with the words ‘AND THE DEAD’ standing out from the slightly angled crossbar. Four stars suggest a southern cross.

A sharp contrast between the British and US American responses came from The Aunt’s Story in 1948. Doubtless at White’s suggestion, Routledge and Kegan Paul used a black-and-white illustration of ‘The Garden’, a neo-Vorticist painting by Roy de Maistre to whom Happy Valley had been dedicated. The front flap carried the first publisher’s photograph of White as well as his hand-crafted biographical note where we learn that after reading Modern Languages at Cambridge, he ‘decided for writing and against sheep’. This potted self-portrait foreshadows White’s notorious 1957 Essay ‘The Prodigal Son’.

Viking’s front panel for The Aunt’s Story appears trivial. The title and author’s name are set in boxes linked by black lines to three childlike drawings, against a yellowy-green background, like a New Yorker cover during a printer’s strike. The panel again related the complexities of White’s fictions to Virginia Woolf. Previous promotions had mentioned Lawrence, Eliot, Joyce and Proust. Now, the name of Dostoyevsky appeared on a White blurb. Appreciation of White’s reception remains incomplete without paying attention to these promotions.

Although he remained with Viking in New York to the end of his life, White again changed his British publishers to Eyre and Spottiswoode for The Tree of Man in 1956, and for the last time to Jonathan Cape for The Vivisector in 1970. If you are anxious to know if disputes over cover designs played any part in these shifts, you too will by now be deep in David Marr’s biography.

The British jacket on The Tree of Man was an illustration by Don Finley, showing a man overshadowed by what are more or less gum trees. The Viking cover, on the other hand, was overladen with symbols. Neither came close to White’s capacity for conveying the metaphysical through the mundane.

Voss (1957) saw the first of the Sydney Nolan covers. The title, in a dirtied yellow, stood out against the gathering storm of blue sky while the pen-and-ink figure of the protagonist stared at nothing; and everything. The rear panel repeated this combination of colours but with only the author’s name emblazoned. Variations of Nolan’s evocative sketch of Voss appeared on all Penguin editions between 1960 and the early 1980s, when a larger format was disgraced by a bearded profile in a silly hat, one of the consequences of the Nolan-White brawl.

Despite their good sales in Australia, all the Penguin editions had been imported from Great Britain. Nonetheless, the first version of Voss appeared with two different prices printed on the front cover, 5/- for Britain and 7/6 for Australia, instead of having the antipodean price stuck over the British one. A Penguin Modern Classics edition in 1963 carried the company logo between crossed boomerangs.

Less successful than the Nolan simplicity was George Salter’s design for the Viking edition of Voss which took up two elements from the narrative – the letters and the Aborigines – though in a way that intimated the shattering uncertainty between the characters. Salter’s attempt should not have given prospective buyers any wrong ideas about the world White was inviting them to enter.

An abstracted Nolan landscape in browns and bleached blues wrapped around the British Riders in the Chariot (1961). This time, Salter had more success with the front panel of the Viking, showing a section of a sun-moon high above a green and red patch of hell in the lower left comer. The words were set against a sky saturated with blue. Salter’s attempt to reduce the storyline to a cartoon spoilt the rear panel.

Desmond Digby’s cover for The Solid Mandala (1966) conveyed the mysteries of the Brown twins while the US edition again seemed ill at ease with anything other a literal depiction of one tiny element, in this case Arthur’s glorious marbles.

One other minor change arrived with the British edition of The Solid Mandala when the list of White’s novels no longer included Happy Valley. His first published novel continued to be mentioned in the US editions until The Eye of the Storm, eight years later.

For The Vivisector (1970) – dedicated to Cynthia and Sydney Nolan – White’s newest British publisher, Jonathan Cape, risked allowing a painting by Tom Adams to compete with those of Hurtle Duffield.

The Penguin Vivisector has retained a John Brack image, ‘Still Life with Self Portrait’, though on the more recent and king-sized editions this work has been shown with only its sides trimmed instead of with the top and bottom sliced off as well.

Viking took the safer course with a novel about a visionary painter by reverting to the kind of jacket prevalent in the nineteenth century, using only the essential information, as they were to do for The Cockatoos (1975).

The Eye of the Storm (1973) from Cape had an ideal work from one of White’s favourite artists, Desmond Digby, to whom White dedicated A Fringe of Leaves. Digby’s work on the jacket of the Viking Four Plays (1966) is equally apposite. The Viking edition of The Eye of the Storm came out only with words, as would its Flaws in the Glass (1982). In the meantime, The Twyborn Affair had appeared with author and title separated from the frequent US American identification of the work as ‘A Novel’ by no more than a butterfly.

Cape’s A Fringe of Leaves (1979) was the last new work by White to carry a Nolan painting, this time from his Mrs Fraser series. Viking did their worst ever with a jacket painted by Cornelia Gray who, like André Brink in his novel An Instant in the Wind, transposed the events to the coast of Africa.

Reversion to jackets carrying only typography – albeit of almost regal textures – overtook the British editions of White’s last three books, The Twyborn Affair (1979), Flaws in the Glass (1981) and Memoirs of Many in One (1986). The Cape designer added a small androgynous-looking bust to The Twyborn Affair, but no decoration or image of any kind to White’s self-portrait or to Memoirs.

For this final long work, the US edition used an entirely inappropriate female face heavily made-up with symbolism. One continuing weakness in the US designers, apart from McKnight Kauffer, has been this compulsion to be obvious about what the texts were at pains to reveal tangentially.

If lovers of literature, not to mention scholars, are to glean from dust jackets ever more insights about the changing self-image of authors and shifts in how their audiences have been encouraged to perceive them, librarians will have to abandon their bad habit of throwing the wrappers out with the rubbish.

Professor Zhu Jiongqiang works in the Department of Foreign Languages at Hangzhou University in the People’s Republic of China. A specialist in Australian literature, he has translated Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm into Chinese, and has written extensively on Australian writing in both Chinese and English. In this translated extract from a discussion about the history and current trends in Australian literature, Professor Zhu places Patrick White in the context of literary schools. He finishes by suggesting that new styles of writing are emerging from the kinds of writing introduced by White and that a new Asian Pacific culture – the culture of Australia – is coming into prominence.

From the end of the Second World War, the most illustrious and noteworthy writer in Australia was Patrick White. Someone said that contemporary Australian literature is Patrick White and there is some truth in this remark.

The subtitle of this book, ‘The Revolution in the Australian Theatre since the 1960s’, is the clue to its subject and its thesis. If it is plain that Australian theatre and, in particular, Australian drama, is now an established fact, a splendid feature of the cultural landscape, this is only a recent growth.

The author has been peculiarly placed to watch this growth, to assist it and even to inspire it. Since 1974, as theatre critic for the Melbourne Age, he has seen and reviewed more than 2000 productions, more than 1000 of them plays by Australian writers.

One of the strengths of this, K.F. Pearson’s second collection, is the range of the poetry it contains: both geographical – from Adelaide (and suburban Adelaide at that) through Polynesia to the Arabian Gulf; and historical – moving between the present and Quattrocento Italy.

The most impressive poems in the book are undoubtedly those in the section ‘Autobiographical Moments’, in which he explores Renaissance artists and writers. These are poems of considerable interest and ingenuity, for not only does Pearson create a fine sense of the era, but he also finds, in the lives and concerns of these artists, many issues of contemporary relevance. In ‘Fragment of an Autobiography’, for instance, Cellini discusses the reworking of ancient artefacts in modern form and using modem materials; in ‘A Circle in Florence’, the need for lateral thinking (I had thought the story of the egg made to stand on its end was attributed to Columbus, but never mind); in ‘The Origin of Excellence’ it’s the need for training, for ‘true apprenticeship’.

A collection of documents that dramatises particular nationalist traditions and debates with the dynamism of a really good anthology.

First a confession. I’ve never been excited by the idea of reading a book of documents. Such collections come in useful if you’re a teacher or a historian (exactly what did Menzies say in his ‘melancholy duty’ speech at the outbreak of the Second World War?). But the material always seems to me decontextualised, reduced to a display of meaningless, numbered fragments, remnants from an unknowable void. And I can’t help wondering what’s been left out or how I’m being manipulated. A traditional history text proclaims its arguments. But in a book of documents the organising intelligence is all but silent. And so I’ve developed this prejudice: I think of books of documents as both dodgy and dull.

Meg Sorensen goes looking for the author of the award-winning One Dragon’s Dream and finds him doing dreadful things to cows – but still writing and illustrating.

What a tragedy it would have been if after ten years the French had decided to let de Brunhoff’s masterworks fall by the wayside; if the Americans had shelved Sendak in favour of something more ‘current’, or the English publishers of Beatrice Potter had let her little masterpieces languish without giving them a kick-start every decade or so!

In any generation there will only be a handful of ‘greats’ – masters of the art of picture books whose work deserves to live on. But this doesn’t happen by magic. A publisher has to be behind the nurturing of a classic book, if not with the full force of their publicity machine, then at least by ensuring its continuous availability. Time may well separate the gems from the dross, but only if they are actually visible. To ensure a potentially ‘classic’ picture book stays in the public eye long enough to give it a fair trial demands vision on the part of the publisher and, to no little extent, a commitment to life of quality books. How much easier the disposable ‘flavour of the month’ mentality of just tossing out another hundred or so titles and hoping one or two hit the jackpot.

Every year a new batch of babies is born and to each generation of children classic books from Dahl to Dodgson are as new and exciting as the day they were first published. A never-ending supply of young readers could be touched by the magic of the wonderful picture books of Peter Pavey, yet I wonder if, even now, children are being denied that bounty.

On a recent round of Melbourne bookshops specialising in children’s books, I could find only one copy of Pavey’s classic picture book One Dragon’s Dream (winner of the 1980 Children’s Book Council Picture Book of the Year Award). ‘It’s not really one of the current titles,’ I was told by one of our more reputable booksellers (she offered to order it in for me), while at Myer I got ‘Never heard of him’.

It gets worse. Pavey’s second picture book I’m Taggarty Toad (another quiescent classic) was published in 1980 and, although it is still in print, I have not yet been able to find a single copy. It gets worse. Battles in the Bath followed in 1982 and in 1987 Is Anyone Hungry? Neither of these titles is still in print, although even a cursory glance reveals a superiority to the bulk of recent releases whose only claim to fame seems to be that they are new.

And it gets silly when the children’s publicity department at Penguin claims to be unable to put me in touch with Pavey since, they said, they didn’t know where he was, he’d disappeared, and it seemed he did not want to be contacted.

So I rang him up myself … and he invited me over to talk about his books.

I was curious to know if the lack of availability of his books had left Peter Pavey jaded, or perhaps even sent him looking for work at the nearest advertising agency prepared to pay him big bucks for scratching his bum. As it turns out, this would have been like finding Patrick White tossing off a ‘Louie the Fly’ jingle to finance his new gazebo. No bayside mansions here.

Pavey works and lives on a small farm a couple of hours out of Melbourne. And when he is not making ends meet (doing farm labour and dreadful things with cows) he is still completely obsessed with the process of creating picture books. He is currently working on finding the right illustrative language for two books, with a wealth of other ideas in abeyance. If he can afford to get away from the poor cows for long enough, these could well be the most extraordinary picture books this country has ever produced.

Peter Pavey is not interested in the prospect of just churning out the next book. Rather, he is beset with the notion that each new book must be unique. He says:

I have an attitude that a book is only worth publishing if it contributes something new and exciting to the overall bank of children’s literature; there is no use regurgitating something that has already been done once or twice or a hundred times. A book has to contribute something new in some form or another … it doesn’t have to create a revolution, it has to build on what has already been produced. If that doesn’t happen then I don’t think the book warrants being produced.

The two books which are still in print and Battles in the Bath (which is not) are probably nothing like most picture books Australian children get to see. Highly innovative in style, content, and imagery, on this basis alone these books deserve to be seen. And they are wonderfully entertaining to boot. When One Dragon’s Dream appeared it was called ‘surrealistic’, but perhaps ‘post-modern’ is more applicable now. With dozens of discrete and entirely optional visual messages, the young reader is gently invited to acknowledge the presence of the creator of the magnificent counting book. A paint brush emerges between two trees, pencils fan out of rubbish bins and a row of nibs dot the footpath below a road along which ten turtles tow the dragon home to bed. The first of the line of tigers (pictured on ABR’s front cover this month) shows it has strings attached, before it is allowed to move freely into the fantasy. Yet this is not mere artifice.

Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are contains similar messages (that the monsters are already alive in Max’s imagination is signalled early in the book by a drawing of one hanging on a wall) which young children may consciously or even unconsciously decode. But of course this is not essential as both stories are brilliant enough to engage on many levels, from the most sophisticated to the simply ‘fun’. And what it shows is that both artists are deeply committed to the business of exploring the full potential of picture books, not just accepting and restating what may be vacuous conventions. Sendak’s contribution to the art of picture books has been profound. The four books he has so far produced are clear evidence that Pavey is serious and bold enough to be an important part of this evolution.

The story of One Dragon’s Dream is an absolute nonsensical delight. It is an immensely challenging book, demanding blind leaps over ontological chasms, but the skill and (immense) generosity of Pavey’s lovingly rendered images ensure a very happy transition from the real to the fantastic. A journey of discovery in the delightfully dangerous realms of the imagination, this book is great big YES to the potential for imagining that exists in every child. Concerning this, Pavey says:

Personally, I am interested in the fantastic, in encouraging kids to use their imaginations. I find in schools that kids at grade one are not able to use their fantasies. I’ve been asked to help teachers to come up with ideas to encourage grade one kids to use their imaginations and I think that is so sad. The education system encourages kids to learn the realities of this world and that has to be counterbalanced with a capacity to be allowed to use their imaginations – to dream. It is that imagination that will in the long run make this world a better place … to be able to invent and solve our problems that we haven’t even faced. They have all this reality … they need their fantasies to be encouraged.

Pavey believes a picture book can help to reinforce and encourage children to be brave enough to pursue their own fantasies: ‘It says it is okay to have them. You’re not mad!’

Of course, a child must be able to believe in the world contained in a picture book. If this is a fantastic world perhaps the artist needs to work even harder to maintain credibility. Perhaps too when the creator of picture books for very young children journeys into the unknown, they must carry with them particular responsibilities. Pavey wants to ‘build a different reality, but it is a believable reality – it isn’t foreign and it doesn’t threaten.’

And so, while the work and thought Pavey puts into his picture books makes them entirely convincing, a gentle understanding of a young child’s need for reassurance is evident, although sometimes, he admits, this demands is a bit of a compromise:

I am not the most positive person in the world and I have a number of what I think are really great ideas that probably end in a really negative way and I think books should end in an optimistic way for children. Some people say that certain books have great significance to their lives. If that is the case then I expect the effect should be positive.

His books, he says, are nevertheless for the child within him:

I am aware that I am doing this for children but I don’t set out that way – I do them for myself … for the little child that lives somewhere within me … I try not to make any compromises. I have an idea. I try to be as inventive as possible. Because I know that somewhere along the line the book has to be published – I may be forced to compromise – but I start off being as free as possible.

But this is no journey into the realms of self-indulgence or fatuous display of illustrative wizardry. In this artist’s eyes children are not second-rate humans. He decries illustrators who produce good work for adults then just whip off a kids’ book in a few weeks. Each of his books has taken years to produce. He comments, ‘I believe that children deserve my best. If you don’t give them your best you’re cheating, really.’

The art of making a picture book is not merely the art of matching pictures to words. Indeed in many of the best picture books neither the words nor the pictures by themselves make much sense. It’s when you put them together that the magic really starts to happen. Exploring this complex interplay between picture and words is central to Pavey’s thinking and one of the reasons he gives for his preference for working entirely alone. Not since his first book (Olaf Ruhen’s The Day of the Diprotodon) has he illustrated someone else’s work because working alone gives him ‘the capacity to really work on that relationship’ (between words and pictures):

Writing words to illustrations is a terrible way to go. I think about the idea for a long time and the images come very gradually. I tend to write the words first with some knowledge in my head of how the pictures go and then I go into a rough draft, a complete dummy of the book, so it gives me complete control. I like to work on my own because I have a number of ideas of my own that I want to explore’

Like Sendak, Pavey believes that making a picture book is not just about making great images. Nor is it just about words by themselves. It is an art in itself. It is an art which takes a great deal of courage to embark on and perseverance to maintain. And of course a great deal of time. Pavey, like most artists, has at times found this difficult, but rather than compromise his work and make more money by creating more books of inferior quality, he seems happy to take the opportunity for long stints of work when they arise. Indeed he considers his work a ‘privilege’ and, while the need to ‘survive’ brings restraints, he is pragmatic: ‘if you are able to be really adventurous and creative for a period of time and produce a really interesting book you are very lucky.’

In the last decade, Australia has developed a reputation for publishing some of the best picture books in the world. I asked if he thought we were holding that ground:

I don’t really think that the books that have been produced over the last few years are as interesting as those produced in the previous five years. I think publishing has become more conservative and more traditional. I am not sure if this is to do with the economics of publishing or the economic condition in Australia, but I feel that a lot of books they have produced over the last few years haven’t warranted publishing … Publishers are presented with a number of stories and they make judgements as to which is worth publishing … it takes a certain skill or intuition to be adventurous enough to produce an idea that may be a little different. That takes courage and I am not sure whether publishers at the moment have that courage.

Pavey believes the best way to encourage young illustrators is not by publishing inferior work but by the quality of the work that is published. In this he sees a great responsibility resting on editors.

Pavey himself trained in commercial art at Swinburne Institute from 1966– 70 and shunned the idea of going into advertising, for which he knew he was not suited. Learning about picture books was a self-teaching experience:

I learnt what I do from looking at books. I discovered children’s books at a late age (19) and I thought … Fantastic! And I collected them and the more I collected them the more I thought … Fantastic! Out of that I decided that is what I’d like to do but I wasn’t interested in just making pretty pictures, nor am I really interested in conveying any particular philosophy. I am not trying to teach anything at all. I just try to give children a pleasant, exciting experience they enjoy and that might have the spin-off that they actually go and look at another book!

Peter Pavey creates picture books because it makes him happy. He is not a painter who does illustrations on the side. He just makes picture books because that is what he likes doing. It takes a lot of many things to make a really wonderful picture book, but mostly it takes a great deal of love. He comments: ‘producing the books for me has been a really loving experience … although it has been difficult. I would like to be in a situation where I could just be doing the books’.

Humour, whimsy, startlingly original concepts, and meticulously brilliant illustrative technique – Pavey’s picture books shine with everything it takes to win their way into the hearts and minds of children for generations to come. What a loss it would be if they are left by the wayside.

After all the acrimony and gossip generated by the success of Bryce Courtenay, it is surprising to discover that the advertising director and newspaper columnist is a talented writer.

In his second blockbuster, Tandia, Courtenay reveals a nineteenth-century novelist’s ability to paint the large picture, to describe the community as a whole, and to focus within this overall perspective on the minute details of everyday experience. Linking these perspectives is a firm hold on larger-than-life characters. The heroine Tandia, the hero Peekay, the secondary figures such as Mama Tequila the brothel owner, or E.W. the Oxford don – all are both clichéd and persuasive at the same time. This is because they belong to a fictional club reaching back to Dickens – a world in which narrative pronouncement on social problems is achieved through the emphasis on a single signifier of appearance or behaviour. Tandia’s supernatural beauty, Mama Tequila’s capacious figure, E.W.’s pipe – these are enough to relay the values they represent: the sexually victimised innocent visionary, the shrewd, generous, but fated mother-figure, the liberal mentor. But it is from an underlying narrative level of pictorial detail that the real reading pleasure is derived. Courtenay’s writing strengths are with the vignette – his finely toned and intricate pictures of the everyday, rather than the heroic, overblown moment. For example:

In The Dialectic of Sex, published in 1970, the feminist Shulamith Firestone argued that the inequality between the sexes results from the different reproductive functions performed by women and men. In having to go through pregnancy, childbirth, and breast-feeding, women are dependent on men for support. The natural reproductive functions performed by females are not only enslaving women, they are also barbaric in themselves. ‘Pregnancy is barbaric’, Firestone argued, and women should be freed from the ‘tyranny of reproduction by every means possible’. Just as contraception had already been a liberating force for women, so would other new reproductive technologies. Firestone envisaged that ectogenesis – the growth and development of a foetus outside the womb – would be the answer for women, as long as ‘improper control’ was not exercised by men.

Dear Editor,

Caroline Lurie (ABR No. 131) cited four common criticisms of deconstruction. I think a more important reason is the danger deconstruction poses to the privileged position of the author as the source of one or multiple meanings for a text. It is significant to note that it is mostly the authors (both of narrative and critical discourses) who are so upset about deconstruction.

It is true that the physical act of writing is accomplished by the author, and combined with the work of many editors, proof-readers and publishers, it takes the form of a written discourse. But, the function of the author does not end there. The author’s name, as pointed out by Foucault, performs a certain classificatory function, enabling different narrative discourses to be distinguished. Historically, according to Foucault, in all cultures, not all discourses had the privilege of an author or an author-function. The authors’ appropriation of discourses, representing a type of transgression, was sanctioned so that such discourses could be controlled and regulated.

In the capitalistic system, where all forms of culture (literature, art, cinema, music, sport) have become market commodities, the author-function, endowed to a particular discourses, plays an important role in creating, preserving, and perpetuating a power structure in the society. Only some particular types of discourses are privileged to become appropriated, recognised, rewarded and sometimes punished. The presence of an author helps to regulate the discourse through an elaborate set of copyright rules, contracts, advertising and critical reviews. For example, John Steinbeck’s name, on new paperback releases, is many times larger than the title of the book.

Deconstruction, gradually effacing the personage of the author, hits at the very base of the whole power structure.

Subhash Jaireth

Townsville

Dear Editor,

I am about to set off for Wagga Wagga to participate in the ASAL Conference for 1991 and give a brief paper on Charlotte Barton: Australia’s first writer for children.

One of my first points will be to pay credit to Mrs Marcie Muir who, in 1980, published a Wentworth Press monograph which revealed the correct identity of this author for the first time. The book, A Mother’s Offering to Her Children, published in Sydney on 18 December 1841, bore the pseudonym: By a Lady Long Resident in New South Wales.

In your May issue (No. 130) Subtext, you report: ‘At the 8 April auction of the Woodhouse Collection of rare Australian books of record sum of $17,600 was paid for Lady J.J. Gordon’s A Mother’s Offering to Her Children ...’ Marcie Muir proves conclusively that the author was, indeed, Charlotte Barton.

It is of interest that the State Library of Victoria currently catalogues the 1841 first edition of this work (incorrectly) under: Harriet Bremer (Lady J .J. Gordon), and the Jacaranda Press 1979 facsimile edition (correctly) under Charlotte Barton.

Mrs Dinny Culican

East Kew

Dear Violet,

A rose by any other name would smell a rat. I draw attention to the subtext of Subtext of Carlton Book Review (ABR No. 132).

Reference is made there to a ‘Melbourne Writer’s Centre’. Who can this writer be, and why are we gazing at the writer’s navel?

I mention these things in my capacity as co-ordinator of the Victorian Writers’ Centre, and I pause here to describe to you some of the features of the Victorian Writers’ Centre.

This Centre was opened early in 1990 at 12 Parliament Place, East Melbourne. It is a focus for writers and readers in Victoria, having a membership of 650. It publishes a monthly newsletter Centrefold, through which members learn of workshops, readings, meetings, seminars and other events at the Centre. Members are invited to contribute articles to Centrefold. At the Centre we dispense information and give guidance to writers. We have a writers’ reference library, and a register of writers which is frequently consulted by colleges, schools and other groups in search of workshop leaders and speakers. We publish a Handbook for Victorian Writers ($6 posted). Our telephone number is (03) 6547300 and we are listed in the Telephone Directory under V.

Carmel Bird

Director

Victorian Writers’ Centre

Ed’s note: Oh dear, oh dear. I’m sure I shan’t forget now where to stick the apostrophes. And I’m really sorry our office is in Carlton (I wish it weren’t because I really am getting heartily sick of picking my way through stubbies and condoms to get in the door in the morning, but there, I guess that’s the bohemian life for you). And may I please assure you that I have not gazed at a single writer’s navel all month, or any writers’ navels, for that matter. Nasty things, they are.

Dear Editor,

It is appropriate that Ania Walwicz has had the last word on the Dessaix debacle (‘nasty work indeed!’), but the preposterous accusations against the UTS of ‘fascist-style control’ and ‘a call for censorship’ in your June editorial (No. 132) cannot go unanswered. Considering that the only response to Dessaix from UTS that you published was a brief laudatory missive from the acting Head of Humanities, Stephen Muecke (whom Dessaix has cited as a ‘good guy’) your evidence is pretty slim. I assume you are referring to Jeannie Martin’s critique, which you didn’t publish, and my responses – which you dismissed as ‘defamatory’ without even bothering to stipulate where or how. In which case any ‘call for censorship’ surely came from you, perhaps in emulation of Dessaix’s technique of branding migrants from Mediterranean countries with ‘racist and sexist taxonomies’ in order to pre-empt similar accusations against himself.

We did run a public seminar-discussion on the Dessaix article at UTS, at which Muecke and Martin Harrison (also cited as a ‘good guy’) as well as other supporters of Dessaix’s argument were invited to speak – hardly an example of ‘fascist style control of the production of words and opinions’.  None of our statements have at any time questioned Dessaix’s right to speak about multiculturalism, although we do consider that what he had to say was based on a mixture of [this removed because considered defamatory]. The flood of oppositional responses from non-Anglo writers and critics that you have published in ABR would surely seem to back this up.

‘Nice work if you can get it’ falls into step with recent right-wing attacks against multiculturalism in The Bulletin and The Australian, and the recent ‘new McCarthyist’ attacks on ethnic equity lobbies in American universities by John Taylor and others, and this is cause for concern. Informed, constructive, and incisive criticism of multiculturalism of the kind expressed by Sneja Gunew, Ghassan Hage and others are essential, but the fatuous smears and fodder for the right advanced by Dessaix and his ilk need to be rebutted. This does not amount to accusing ABR of being ‘scurrilous’ – a word you appear to have lifted from Ania Walwicz’s letter – merely irrelevant to anyone seriously interested in NESB writing. The fact that barely 20 of the 300 items reviewed in ABR in 1990 are by non-Anglo or Aboriginal writers is surely evidence of this, as is your recent feature on Eastern Australian writing, which seems to invite the reader to conclude that there aren’t any NESB writers in WA.

Dr Tony Mitchell

Cultural Pluralism, Racism and the Media Research Group, UTS

Ed’s Note: Dr Tony Mitchell sent a letter, and a copy to the sponsors of the Australian Voices essays, Telecom Australia, the contents of which, legal opinion advised, were defamatory. Jeannie Martin’s letter stated that in the ‘current economic and social climate’ she was shocked at ABR’s publishing ‘such an alarmingly irresponsible essay’, and that her reply was ‘a complaint to yourselves for publishing such an essay, as ultimately the responsibility lies with the publisher, not the author’.

Dear Editor,

Robert Dessaix begins his article, ‘Nice Work’ by quoting Ania Walwicz who was asked at a festival if she was an ethnic writer and replied to everyone’s delight, ‘No, I’m a fat writer’.

Dessaix reads this statement as evidence of the irrelevance (or even detrimental effect) of the strategies of multiculturalism and categories such a non-anglo-celt or NESB for (and on) ‘good’ Australian writers such as Walwicz. I found the quote fascinating and resonant, but read it quite differently to Dessaix. What it says to me is: I am the writer who lives inside this body.

So Ania Walwicz is an Australian writer who is additionally female, non­anglo-celtic, and (by cultural standards) fat.The more our bodies differ from those considered the ‘norm’ in this culture (the white, anglo-celt, adult, able-bodied, not fat, heterosexual male), the more likely this is to visibly effect what we write and what you hear.

To be a woman writer (or a lady doctor etc) has long been a label; only now are we developing the category ‘anglo-celt’ writer. That is, to designate those of us from anglo-celt backgrounds as speaking from a particular cultural position, in the hope that we will no longer be able to masquerade as speaking from a universal or neutral one.

Perhaps what Walwicz and others are complaining about is the fact that only they get asked about their ethnicity and how this matters to their writing. Just as only women writers get asked about how gender affects theirs; only gays get questioned about sexuality; only black writers get asked about skin colour, and so on.

The various kinds of labelling and anthology making that is going on around the country at the moment is only threatening if you see these as fixed categories that are mutually exclusive and static, or if they are used that way by the literary culture.

Or perhaps if you find yourself resentful of having to accept a label (which occasionally excludes you from a certain kind of experience or direct knowledge) where before you felt you could move through society without one and thus partake of any and every experience or writing position with a kind of god-like immunity, a bodilessness that gave rights to a certain cultural transcendence.

The more sophisticated of the writers on difference (and I would certainly include Sneja Gunew among these) are not in the business of creating or exploiting or exacerbating divisions within Australian society; on the contrary I would see them as in the business of healing these divisions. For such strategies would seem aimed not at reversing the oppositions (so that anglo-celt becomes the maligned term), but at collapsing them.

Beth Spencer

Waverley

Dear Editor,

Mea culpa! I’m sorry there were no quotation marks around ‘local details ... nuances ... little disturbances in language and gesture’, in my ‘Modesty’ essay (ABR No.130). The words are taken, as Lois Nettlefold points out (Letters, ABR No. 132), from Bill Buford’s Editorial to Granta 8 (1983).

The quotation marks were there in my review of Richard Ford’s Wildlife (Sydney Morning Herald 8 Sept 1990) from which I derived the peccant paragraph of ‘Modesty’. And I did attribute the observation to Buford – himself by reputation no great respecter of others’ words – in my review of Andre Dubus’s We Don’t Live Here Any More (National

Times, 3–9 May 1985). And I certainly attributed the remarks to Buford in a ‘Books and Writing’ ABC Radio piece about Raymond Carver sometime in the mid-1980s.

I really can’t explain, to myself or Ms Nettlefold, how I failed to include the quotation marks in my typescript for ABR. It wasn’t modesty. Perhaps it was what I affectionately think of the ‘Man Who Bowled Victor Trumper’ syndrome. (See the story of this name by Dal Stivens in the Murdoch & Drake­ Brockman anthology of Australian short stories, realist and otherwise, OUP 1951.)

Trusting that ‘Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety’.

Don Anderson

Darlinghurst

But I have chosen the little, obscure way
In the dim, shouting vortex; I have taken
A fool’s power in his cap and bells

He described himself as a ‘no-hoper’ (he died in a mental hospital in the poverty of his poetry and Catholic faith). These days, the label ‘a poet’s poet’ is sufficient to scare off anyone interested in approaching a body of work that is both substantial and challenging. With the publication of this annotated collection, containing most of Webb’s known poetry and extracts from his verse dramas, it is just a little dispiriting to see Webb’s work acquire a whiff of canonical sanctity. A short, cautious introduction by the editors Michael Griffith and James McGlade concludes with the respectful praises of five eminent Australian poets, as if a show of hands from the panel of distinguished experts were enough to explain anything of the enigma of Frank Webb to someone coming across his work for the first time. I think he deserves more. In an age where packaging plays such a conspicuous role, it is time to rescue Webb from the shrine of Tradition and to make an effort towards attracting new readers to a poet who magnificently defies idle curiosity.