Patrick White Biography – Patrick White Catalogue

BIOGRAPHY:

The Early Years

(1912 – 1932)

Albert Namatjira, Palm Valley (1940s)

“When New Zealand is more artificial, she will give birth to an artist who can treat her natural beauties adequately. This sounds paradoxical, but it is true.”
Katherine Mansfield

Patrick White at Mt Wilson as a schoolboy.

Scion of two wealthy Australian landowning families, Patrick White – born 28 May 1912 – grew up knowing that he would be expected to make something of himself. The Whites had arrived from England in 1826 and developed a reputation as graziers across New South Wales. Father Dick (Victor) wanted the best for his children, in that slightly distant manner a father typically assumed in those days. The Withycombes, meanwhile, were minor Sydney aristocracy, and mother Ruth actively pushed her way into the best social spheres. “Paddy” grew up a shy and asthmatic child, but also one who was intellectually curious and imaginative. While life in the White family was much more comfortable than it was for many people in the country, Australia between the wars was still a tough existence. This was an era before common household appliances, indoor plumbing, mass media, and easy access to the rest of the white Anglo world, to which Australia aggressively saw itself as belonging. Everyone in the household had to play their role, and Paddy would grow up to be the kind of man who had no compunctions about doing house and field work. Paddy came to understand the virtue of self-sufficiency, the effectiveness of a certain coldness and restraint in one’s personal affairs, and the importance of never expecting too much of the world: the glass might not be half-empty, but it certainly was only going to drain with time.

Never quite comfortable with the pretentious world of Australian “society”, yet certainly at odds with the harsher life of those Whites on the farm, Paddy found his means of expression through reading and writing. It helped that he suffered bouts of asthma and ill health that sometimes separated him from the rough-and-tumble of other boys his age. By the age of 10, he was sketching out plays and other stories, even submitting a couple of vignettes for the children’s section of the Sunday Times, published under the nom-de-plume “Red Admiral”. Shipped off to the UK to complete his schooling, the teenage Paddy discovered himself: a figure of often passionate thought, an individual with a fierce sense of purpose, sometimes determinedly irrational (he harboured a lifelong interest in astrology) and a homosexual, something he never seems to have doubted. Most important, at this crucial age, was the strong sense that he was not made for the life his family had laid out for him. (When Paddy was 7, a friend of the family described him as a “changeling” in contrast to his parents and sister, and the comment remained with the boy.)

In 1930, 18-year-old Paddy had designs on being an actor, but returned home at his parents’ behest to spend two years as a jackaroo, a farm labourer, in the Southern Highlands region of New South Wales. (In The Twyborn Affair, Judge Twyborn notes that it’s called “jackarooing” when someone of a high class does it.) These two years left an impact on the young man’s imagination, of cold nights at the heart of the beautiful “weird melancholy” – to steal Marcus Clarke’s famous phrase – of the Australian landscape, as well as coming to understand the men who had chosen this often isolating, but more traditionally masculine, path in life. This was never going to be the path for White, however, who convinced his parents to ship him to the other side of the world, to Cambridge University, at the conclusion of this two-year sentence.

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