Patrick White in Parliament

• 17 October 1968, House of Reps: Edward St John (Liberal, seat of Warringah), who had signed the letter alongside PW which labelled apartheid-era South Africa a police state, quoted Voss when advocating for New Parliament House. There had been some discussion about putting the house on the lake, even though the plans had always intended for it to be on Capital Hill. St John was supportive of the feng shui of the hill and of its grandeur, both of which he felt the Australian people deserved. He used Voss to argue that the Australians are not mediocre, we just think we have to be.
• 15 October 1970, House of Reps: PW mentioned in passing by Jim Cope (Labor, seat of Sydney), citing how many talented artistic types Australia has produced
• 23 October 1973, Senate: PW mentioned by Senator Kane (Democratic Labor Party, NSW):
• I preface my question, which is directed to the Minister representing the Treasurer, by saying how honoured all Australians are that Mr Patrick White was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature. We all are proud that Mr White’s writing has finally been recognised by such a distinguished body as the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters. Is the Minister aware that the Melbourne ‘Sun’ of 20 October reported a spokesman for the Treasurer as saying that Mr White’s $80,000 prize might be subject to taxation? Is he also aware that the money received by people who win a lottery or a large amount of money in quiz games and the like is not subject to taxation? Does the Minister not agree that whatever steps need to be taken should be taken- even to the extent of introducing special legislation to amend the taxation legislation- to ensure that Mr White’s Nobel Prize winnings are not subject to taxation? I might add that I have seen reports that Mr White is thinking of giving away his prize, but I ask my question irrespective of what Mr White might decide to do with his prize.Senator MURPHY (Labor, NSW): “The question which the honourable senator asks indicates an apparent anomaly. It seems wrong that those who receive a large sum of money through chance should not have to pay tax on that money and that someone who receives a large sum of money through his efforts or through recognition of his efforts should have to pay tax on that money. I have no doubt that the Treasury would always answer that what the honourable senator suggests would raise great problems because it would mean that others who received large sums of money would not have to pay tax on that money, if the same principle were applied, and if it were extended it could create all sorts of problems. However, I think that this is a special case involving a Nobel Prize, which is recognised by all mankind as a mark of distinction, and I will pass on the honourable senator’s suggestion to the Treasurer.”
• 7 November 1973, House of Reps: Race Matthews (Labor, Seat of Casey) asked the PM, Mr Whitlam, whether he would permit PW to appear on the floor – this was a pre-prepared question, which we in Australia call a “Dorothy Dixer”. In response, the PM said “I would be very happy to act on this suggestion. Like all honourable members, I feel pride in the fact that Mr Patrick White’s long and distinguished literary career has now achieved such great international recognition.”
• 29 November 1973, House of Reps: PW’s letter is read into the record (See Letters)
• 11 December 1973, Senate: Senator Kane raised his previous question again as he had not received an answer.
• 20 March 1974, House of Reps: Peter Nixon (Country Party, Seat of Gippsland) snapped at Adrian Bennett (Labor, Seat of Swan) for naming ordinary citizens in the House. In response the Speaker of the House, Jim Cope, cited PW as an example of where an ordinary citizen had been spoken of, as precedent for Bennett’s actions.
• 18 September 1974, House of Reps: Tom Uren (Labor, Seat of Reid) cited PW’s views on Jack Mundey, during a speech in praise of Mundey.
• 13 November 1974, Senate: Senator McAuliffe (QLD) asked Senator Douglas McClelland (Minister for the Media, NSW), whether PW’s Nobel Prize win had been good for the commercial success of the arts. (Seems to have been another Dixer.)
• 5 March 1975, Senate: Senator Burton (VIC) quoted the Whitlam Report, A Change of Direction, on the arts, which cited the 1960s era as one where the Australian artists often left and those who stayed, like PW, “seemed to be crying in the wilderness”. This was part of the bill that gave statutory authority to the Australia Council for the Arts, an important milestone in Australia’s artistic strengths.
• 24 February 1976, Senate: Senator Douglas Scott (National Party, NSW) attempted to justify the Dismissal of Prime Minister Whitlam by the Governor-General – the most significant constitutional crisis in Australia’s history. PW had been vocal about his belief that the Dismissal was a conservative plot (a view that remains for many) and Senator Scott sought to disparage PW’s views too.
• 3 March 1976, Senate: Senator Kerry Sibraa (Labor, NSW) quoted PW saying that former PM John Gorton gave Australia a reputation as “a nation of rustic clowns”, and apparently implying that new PM Malcolm Fraser would take us there again.
• 23 September 1976, Senate: Senator Susan Ryan (Labor, ACT) defended historian Manning Clark against Liberal attacks on him. She cited PW as one of the other local heroes who received the first Orders of Australia – a new honours system to replace knights and dames – alongside Professor Clark.
• 17 March 1977, Senate: Senator Ian Wood (Liberal, QLD) responded to the “gracious” speech delivered by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. He criticised republicans such as PW and Donald Horne, and suggested that they were at odds with the majority of people in the country on the question of a monarch.

• 8 March 1978, House: Dr Dick Klugman (Labor, Member for Prospect) delivered the address in reply to Governor-General Sir John Kerr’s resignation, and cited PW’s views on the 1975 dismissal, which Klugman largely shared.
• 27 April 1982, Senate: Senator Arthur Gietzelt (Labor, NSW) mentioned PW in a question about nuclear disarmament.
• 28 February 1984, House: The plays Signal Driver and Netherwood were entered into the record in response to a question on which books had been reviewed on Australian Broadcasting Corporation book programs in the last 12 months. (This was an era in which conservative opposition to the ABC began to grow and fester.)
• 29 March 1984, Senate: Senator Bruce Childs (Labor, NSW) mentioned the 1982 nuclear rally in a discussion on nuclear disarmament.
• 22 August 1984, House: Michael Hodgman (Liberal, Seat of Denison) attacked the Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, in Parliament, using PW’s own attack to describe “Hawke’s socialist government”. After years of PW arguing against the right, Hodgman was taking advantage of the author’s attacks on the centre-left… although rather a cheat, since PW was further to the left than either man!
• 1 June 1989, House: Dr Dick Klugman referenced PW’s Monash speech to argue that the “Far Left” and the “lunatic Right” were in fact the same, both of them pushing conspiracy theories about the establishment.
• 5 September 1989, House: Future Prime Minister (and at the time, seeming permanent bridesmaid) John Howard (Liberal, Seat of Bennelong) trashed Bob Hawke: “I am reminded of that beautiful comment of Patrick White of somebody screeching like a galah or a cocky when I hear the Prime Minister at Question Time.”
• 26 October 1989, Senate: Jim Short (Labor, VIC) – a former director and literary adviser of the Melbourne Theatre Company – criticised cuts to funding for the Australian Nouveau Theatre (Anthill), citing PW as saying that this theatre “kept the banner of innovative theatre flying”.

• 9 October 1990, House: Mr. Hawke, the Prime Minister (Labor, Seat of Wills), recognised the passing of PW:

That this House expresses its deep regret at the death, on Sunday, 30 September 1990, of Patrick White.

Patrick White, the first and so far the only Australian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, died at his home in Sydney on Sunday, 30 September at the age of 78. It is rare for a non-parliamentarian to be the subject of a condolence motion in this place. Since 1983 the only Australians to be so honoured were the Nobel Prize winning scientist Sir Macfarlane Burnet; the dancer, actor, choreographer and director Sir Robert Helpmann; and the landscape painter Lloyd Rees.

Patrick White deserves our highest recognition, too. He was a fourth generation Australian whose great-grandfather settled in New South Wales in 1826. He was born in London while his parents were on a long holiday, returning as a six-month old baby. He grew up on various station properties in New South Wales. He was educated first at Tudor House, Moss Vale; then he was sent to England, to Cheltenham College, for four years, which he loathed. After two years as a jackeroo, he then read foreign languages at King’s College, Cambridge. He travelled in Europe and the United States, publishing his first novel, Happy Valley, in 1939. He lived in the United States for a year, and wrote The Living and the Dead there.

Patrick White joined the Royal Air Force in 1940, serving in the Middle East as an intelligence officer. He returned to Australia briefly in 1946, permanently from 1948, living first in Castle Hill and, from 1964, at Centennial Park. His novels, including The Solid Mandala, The Aunt’s Story, Voss, The Tree of Man, The Vivisector and The Twyborn Affair, were the subject of critical controversy, but he gradually-even begrudgingly-gained recognition as one of the great modern novelists writing in English and the greatest Australian writer. He wrote in a diversity of forms, including plays, short stories, poems and essays.

His eminence was recognised by the award of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature. The citation referred to his `epic psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature . . . Patrick White for the first time has given the continent of Australia an authentic voice that carries across the world’. The citation referred to his recent novels `which show White’s unbroken creative power, an ever deeper restlessness, an onslaught against vital problems that have never ceased to engage him, and a wrestling with the language in order to extract all its power and its nuances, to the verge of the unattainable’.

He was also named Australian of the Year in 1973. Apart from his creative writing, Patrick White had strong views on a variety of public issues, and he expressed these views with his customary vehemence, even passion. He was on some issues an uncompromising critic of this Government, and it would be hypocritical to pretend otherwise. It was the nature of the man to be bitterly critical when politicians did not see things in the same way he did. But, as his autobiography Flaws in the Glass made clear, his most savage words were directed towards himself.

About his literary eminence and the pioneering role he played in gaining international recognition for Australian writing, there is and can be no dispute. He did much good by stealth. It was typical that he should have devoted his Nobel Prize money to create awards for older Australian writers whose work he felt had not received adequate recognition.

Australia has lost one of its greatest citizens, and it is fitting for the Australian Parliament to record his passing in this condolence motion.

Dr Hewson (Liberal, Seat of Wentworth) rose next:

The Opposition supports the motion moved by the Prime Minister (Mr Hawke). The words that are being expressed today would have made Patrick White feel quite uncomfortable. He did not stand easily in the public spotlight. I am reminded that, when White was awarded the Nobel Prize, he was asked by Gough Whitlam to attend this Parliament and receive the congratulations of the Australian people. He refused, saying:

This is the kind of situation to which my nature does not easily adapt itself.

He did not have much time for the trappings of life, and he even donated his Nobel Prize medal and diploma to the Mitchell Library rather than, as he said, leave them in a drawer waiting for burglars.

Mr Speaker, for some time I was a near neighbour of Patrick White in Centennial Park in Sydney, but I cannot say that I ever got to know him very well. He was an isolated and aloof man. In his own words, he preferred to go it alone, do things his own way. By all accounts, he was difficult and irascible but these things are easily forgiven in a great artist. Great artists are not usually complacent about life.

I guess there are two aspects of Patrick White that should be recognised in speaking to a condolence motion. The first was his undoubted eminence as a writer of world standing. The second was his role, increasingly in his latter years, as a somewhat acid tongued commentator on Australian life and standards.

Australia has produced many fine writers but not until Patrick White or since has there been one of such international stature. Patrick White was an author of great distinction. He wrote from Australia on an international level. His books are as relevant to Europe or to America as they are to Australia. He wrote not so much about life in Australia, though his novels were evocative of the character of this country in many ways. He wrote about the great emotions and tensions of humanity. His novels address the fundamental question: what is life all about? It is not my place to offer a critique of Patrick White’s literature; merely to note, with respect, that he was a great writer and a great Australian.

The second aspect of his character was what Donald Horne has called the `public intellectual’. Patrick White did not take to the public stage to comment on current issues until he was nearly 60 years of age. When he did speak out, it was with a cutting directness that wounded the targets of his ire. He did not have much time for politicians and many in this House, not least the Prime Minister, have felt the lash of his tongue.

Donald Horne put it better than I can when he said in his obituary of Patrick White that he accepted an artist’s responsibility to speak the truth as he saw it. In that line, he spoke with a simplicity, an eloquence, a projection of honesty and a controlled passion of a kind we scarcely ever know in Australia. At times he spoke with a sense of hostility towards what he saw as the petty values of Australians and their politicians. We may feel that his criticism was at times too harsh but I think we can understand and accept that his anger was born out of a great love for this country.

Mr Speaker, we may not share Patrick White’s pessimism about the quality of Australian life and the future of this nation but we must acknowledge that he was idealistic and had a vision in his own mind about what this country should be. That is an important message that Patrick White left us: have a vision for Australia, a clear view of what this nation’s destiny should be and can be.

Mr Speaker, apart from these broad observations, I offer no assessment of the work and life of Patrick White. That is contained in the novels and plays that he wrote and on which Australians can and will make their own judgment. Patrick White’s epitaph lies in his own books, which will live on in the culture of this country as memorials to an Australian of a singular talent.

Mr Fischer (National, Seat of Farrer),at time leader of the Nationals:

Mr Speaker, it is with mixed feelings that I rise to speak in respect of this condolence motion and to support it, following on the Prime Minister (Mr Hawke) and the Leader of the Opposition (Dr Hewson). On the one hand, I have to be honest enough to say that I disagreed with many of the political comments made by Patrick White over a period of time, especially those he chose to make in the Opera House in the early 1970s.

On the other hand, I readily recognise that he was an icon in the literary world, a Nobel Prize winner, an extraordinary writer capturing many aspects of his own experiences and building on those. I point out, as indeed the Prime Minister said, Patrick White joined the Royal Air Force in 1940, when he was posted to the Middle East and in fact served as an intelligence officer-logically enough-in Egypt, Syria, Libya, Cyprus, the then Palestine and Greece. Patrick White was demobilised and discharged from the Air Force in London after World War II and then made a fundamental decision to return to Australia temporarily in 1946 and permanently in 1948.

It has to be said that where many others would have remained in the northern hemisphere in the particular literary circles of that time, it was Patrick White with a fierce and dogged determination who decided to return to Australia and to remain in Australia. Patrick White, of course, had many connections with the Hunter Valley and subsequently through the novel Voss in his own way highlighted part of the exploration of Australia and highlighted the hardships involved.

However, my most profound disagreement with White’s view of life relates to his essential pessimism, referred to by the Leader of the Opposition, especially in regard to humankind. This underpins much of White’s work and political thought. In contrast, I retain an essential-although sometimes hidden-optimism about both people and life generally, notwithstanding these very tough economic times. In short, White has made a very significant impact on the Australian and international literary world in adding a more complex and comprehensive dimension to Australian writing which, of course, has been valued by the world. On behalf of members of the National Party, I support the motion.

Barry Jones (Labor, Seat of Lalor), of course, contributes:

Patrick White, or Mr P.V.M. White as the ‘Daily Program’ has it, was one of only three surviving Australian Nobel laureates and the last to live among us. Sir John Eccles, winner of the 1963 award for medicine, now lives in Switzerland; Sir John Cornforth, the 1975 chemistry laureate, lives in England. Aleksandr Prokhorov is a special case.

I first met Patrick White in January 1974. He had been named Australian of the Year for 1973 after the award of his Nobel Prize. Somebody from the Australia Day Committee telephoned me. He said, `We have been told that you are good at handling difficult people and that Patrick White is a very difficult person; would you be prepared to look after him when he flies down from Sydney to Melbourne for the award, pick him up at the airport, entertain him before and after the lunch and put him on his plane?’. I was happy to do it and agreed that he had a legendary reputation for being difficult. But, I asked, should not somebody from the Committee do it? I was told, `The problem is that nobody on the Committee has read any of his books except The Shoes of the Fisherman. I commented, `You had better not tell him that’. That Shoes of the Fisherman story was a running joke between us until Patrick White’s death.

The Australia Day function was a memorable day on which Phillip Adams helped me out. On that day I told Patrick the story that became one of the main elements in The Twyborn Affair. He discomfited his Australia Day hosts by saying that he would saw up his award and give the parts to those he regarded as more deserving: Manning Clark, Barry Humphries and Jack Mundey. He was a complicated mixture of public activist and private recluse. His judgment of people and issues was generally harsh and not invariably sound. As he wrote:

My pursuit of that razor-blade truth has made me a slasher. Not that I don’t love and venerate in several senses-before all, pureness of heart and trustfulness.

He did not attend the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm, partly because his asthma was bad, and sent Sidney Nolan, then his close friend, to represent him. Characteristically, as the Prime Minister (Mr Hawke) has pointed out, he gave away his Nobel money to those who had more need of it. As the Leader of the Opposition (Dr Hewson) pointed out, he declined Gough Whitlam’s invitation to be feted at the House of Representatives.

In June 1975 he became an original recipient of the Companion of the Order of Australia but, like Nugget Coombs, he returned it in 1976. He directed that there should be no funeral and hoped that his death could occur without public notice.

It is too early to attempt a definitive assessment of his literary achievement and this is not the right forum. Nevertheless, the Age obituary on 1 October 1990 has it right. It stated that he was, `our Dickens, our Balzac, our Joyce, our Faulkner’, who was `outside the mainstream of Australian culture at that time’, a force for universality and modernity against the prevailing orthodoxies of an `embarrassing provinciality’ and the whiff of social realism. David Malouf, Tom Keneally, Peter Carey and David Williamson owe him a tremendous debt for this.

Patrick White brought Australian writing into the great mainstream of Western culture, but, paradoxically, his writing was full of Australian sounds and images. In 1956 he wrote about the Australian scene that greeted him on his return:

In all directions stretched the Great Australian emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions, in which the rich man is the important man, in which the schoolmaster and the journalist rule what intellectual roost there is, in which beautiful youths and girls stare at life through blind blue eyes-in which the buttocks of cars grow hourly glassier, food means cake and steak, muscles prevail, and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves.

Because the void I had to fill was so immense, I wanted to try to suggest . . . every possible aspect of life, through the lives of ordinary men and women. But at the same time I wanted to discover the extraordinary behind the ordinary, the mystery and the poetry which alone could make bearable the lives of such people, and, incidentally, my own life since my return.

Patrick White was a major contributor to changing that scene, filling that void. He was an innovator long ahead of his time. His play The Ham Funeral was written in 1947, five years before Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and long before Berthold Brecht’s works were performed in English. Its successful revival in Sydney in 1989 gave Patrick White great satisfaction and it was seen on television. He wrote of himself:

Always something of a frustrated painter and a composer manque, I wanted to give my books the textures of music and sensuousness of paint, to convey what . . . Delacroix and Blake might have seen, what Mahler and Liszt might have heard.

He wrote:

The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure in perpetual struggle, in becoming.

He quotes in The Solid Mandala the epigraph:

There is another world, but it is this one.

He saw ambivalence in everything, especially himself-`good and evil, body and spirit, joy and suffering, love and hate, life and death, male and female, dream and actuality, time and eternity’, as Joy Hooten put it. He had a deep religious sense and a strong feeling for the numinous.

Four myths about Patrick White should be dispelled: that he was misanthropic, misogynous, humourless and difficult to read. He was not pessimistic about the long term but he had a Swiftian fury about what was happening in the here and now so that the long term could be better.

I said that he was harsh in his judgments, but his impatience was reserved for those who lived only for material values and were preoccupied with the short term, who tolerated cruelty, injustice and prejudice. He was personally generous to many causes, such as Aboriginal education and the arts, including the gift of many paintings to the New South Wales Art Gallery.

He made no secret of his homosexuality but he enjoyed the company of women. Manoly Lascaris aside, the people in his inner circle of friends were nearly all female. He could be bitter and bitchy but he was also extraordinarily funny with a unique gift for satire and mimicry. My last recollection is of his laughter as we talked barely a month ago. I do not know what effect that had on his lungs: his death resulted from chronic failure of the respiratory system.

His themes were often complex, but his style was extraordinarily vivid and lucid. I want to quote two short examples. He said:

I sometimes wonder how I would have turned out had I been born a so-called normal heterosexual male. If an artist, probably a pompous one, preening myself in the psychic mirror for being a success, as did the intolerable Goethe, inferior to his self-abnegating disciple Eckermann. My unequivocal male genes would have allowed me to exploit sexuality to the full. As a father I would have been intolerant of my children, who would have hated and despised me, seeing through the great man I wasn’t. I would have accepted titles, orders and expected a state funeral in accordance with a deep-seated hypocrisy I had refused to let myself recognise.

At one stage he tries to describe the circumstances leading to his death. He was extraordinarily prophetic. This is White’s style at its pellucid best:

Early morning has always been the best time of day. In childhood, gold pouring through the slats as I got up to raid the pantry for crystallised cherries, finish the heel-tapes on the supper table, and settle down to the plays of Shakespeare. Now when I wake, the naked window is washed pale. As I use the eye-drops the first bird-notes are trickling in. Down in the garden, light is a glare. I’m forced to bow my head whether I like it or not; the early mornings of old age are no setting for spiritual pride. Spiderwebs cling like stocking-masks to faces that blunder into them. Dogs point at vanished cats, follow the trail of the night’s possums. At the end of her lead the dog bays and threatens to pull me over in a cataract of light, scents, dew. We collect ourselves as far as it is ever possible.

If I were to stage the end I would set it on the upper terrace, not the one moment of any morning, but all that I have ever lived, splintering and coalescing, the washed pane of a false dawn, steamy draperies of Sydney summers, blaring hibiscus trumpets as well as their exhausted phalluses, ground mist tugging at the dry grass of the Centennial steppes, brass bands practising against the heat, horses cantering in circles to an accompaniment of shouted commands, liquid calls of hidden birds, a flirt of finches, skittering of wrens, bulbuls plopping round the stone bath carved by Manoly in the early days at Castle Hill, as though in preparation for the (final) moment of grace.

I repeat my condolences to his companion Manoly Lascaris, himself a poet, the `central mandala’ of Patrick’s life who contributed uniquely to his creativity. Patrick White will not have a tombstone, but he would have approved the words of his fellow Nobel Laureate W.B. Yeats:

On limestone quarried near the spot

By his command these words are cut:

Cast a cold eye

On life, on death.

Horseman, pass by!

Then Dr. Kemp (Liberal, Seat of Goldstein):

Mr Speaker, one suspects that if Patrick White could read the eulogies that were written of him, he would treat with contempt those who disagreed with him but were overblown in their praise. He was, after all, a man who proudly proclaimed that he did not tolerate-in his own word-`bullshit’. Patrick White was a passionate man and he excited strong passions in others. Whilst it is proper for us to reflect on this, and I will do so in due course, his lasting gift to the Australian people is his writing.

Patrick White’s contribution to the world of literature received the supreme accolade; the distance of time will provide the measure of his achievement. At the presentation of the Nobel Prize-which Sidney Nolan received, as has been said, on his behalf-tribute was paid not only to White’s originality but also to the Australian character of his work.

One cannot follow his career and his life without seeing him as a torn man, loving and hating the country in which he chose to live. During the whole period of his adolescence and early manhood, from the age of 13 to 34, as the Prime Minister said, save for two years only he lived outside Australia: as a schoolboy at Cheltenham in England; as a student at King’s College, which he loved; as a young writer with his first novel Happy Valley in 1939; and as an operational intelligence officer in the Middle East. It was there that he began writing The Aunt’s Story and met his Greek friend Manoly Lascaris who remained with him throughout his life.

On return to Australia in 1946 he conceded that he had never felt such a foreigner. Most Australians, he said, found The Aunt’s Story unreadable and, in his eyes, the novels which followed-The Tree of Man and Riders in the Chariot-were scorned. He felt a foreigner in his own country. But he stayed and from his Sydney home he sought, again in his own words, `the state of simplicity and humility which is the only desirable one for artist or man’.

Whilst passionate, he was a very private man. The accounts of the manner in which he learnt of his award of the Nobel Prize speak of a man who was not a seeker of publicity. On the night the news of the prize broke, he went back to bed rather than cater to the media camped outside his house. His desire for a private life was legendary; interviews and speeches were few and far between. He sought to maintain the increasingly difficult balance between a public persona and a private life.

When one looks back at his last years, it is with some sense of sadness. In the press he was often described as a bitter and angry man, and when one looks at the photos of him in those years-the often bitter grimace-that description is perhaps understandable. He was angered by many aspects of Australian life which most of his fellow Australians valued and celebrated. When Australians of all backgrounds united to celebrate the Bicentenary in their various and different ways, Patrick White described it as `an Australian lie’ and he refused to have anything published during the bicentennial year.

Regrettably, Patrick White probably spoke for more of his fellow countrymen when he expressed his disillusion with political leaders and politicians. He delivered tongue-lashings to those politicians whom he believed unduly associated themselves with certain entrepreneurs. Descriptions such as `would-be super-statesmen’ and `toadies’ found their way into the headlines. His public statements in those years speak not so much of an enthusiastic involvement in contemporary debate but, rather, of actions moved by disillusion and even despair.

In rising to pay my respects today, I do not do so as someone who knew Patrick White personally or agreed with the causes he adopted. We were poles apart-but not so far apart that I am unable to acknowledge and praise the indelible mark he left through the standard of excellence he set in the realm of literature. In winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, he set an example in this art form to which other Australians can aspire.

He continued to lead by example in this field when he used the money from the prize, as the Prime Minister (Mr Hawke) has said, to establish a fund to reward other writers. Patrick White lived comfortably. He would not want it said that in using the funds in this manner he denied himself a comfortable life. To make such a claim would be to engage in the type of behaviour which I have noted he so despised. But it must be said that this was an act of generosity, an act which is still sufficiently uncommon to be noted and an act which has served to encourage the further development of literature in this nation.

In the weeks since his death, there has been debate about various aspects of Patrick White’s career and work. He enjoyed probing and he was not squeamish about making people uncomfortable. Those whom he criticised and even condemned in his frustration have spoken warmly of him today. It says something for Australia that these addresses of condolence have been delivered in this House, and I support the motion.

And finally Dr Theophanous (Labor, Seat of Calwell)

In paying tribute to Australia’s greatest writer, Patrick White, I do not want to traverse the same ground as many other speakers. Suffice it to say that I think that Patrick White was a great man in world terms in that, in the tradition of all great writers, he was able to be a philosopher. That is to say, he was able to reflect on and to make his writing reflect on the problems concerning humanity-the social problems and, in particular, the metaphysical problems concerning the nature of human life. In that sense, he was the first writer actually to use the Australian setting to raise these questions in this way, and that is why his works are considered universal.

It is very important for us to recognise this because a lot of art in Australia tends to concentrate on parochial things rather than using Australia as a base on which to concentrate on universal themes concerned with general philosophical issues. I know that my friend the honourable member for Lalor (Mr Barry Jones) has raised these questions before but I believe that the example given by Patrick White in this regard is very important and should be followed.

Patrick White’s great respect for the Aboriginal people is also significant. Although we may have disagreed with the stand he took on the Bicentenary, Patrick White did understand the Aboriginal people’s metaphysical and spiritual links to the land and was able also to identify Australia with some of his higher spiritual concerns. In that sense he has made a very important contribution. I hope that perhaps some lasting memorial to Patrick White can be established by this Parliament or by the Government. It would be good if there were a prize or some other way in which his contribution could be recognised in perpetuity.

• 11 October 1990, House: Dr. Bob Catley (Labor, Seat of Adelaide) followed up on the previous obits to mourn White, but also to argue for greater support for writers still with us.

• 28 May 1991, Senate: Senator John Coulter (Liberal Democrats, South Australia) moved a condolence motion for Professor Manning Clark, who had recently passed away; PW was cited as precedent for such an act in a chamber of the Parliament.
• 27 October 1993, House: Kevin Andrews (Liberal, Seat of Menzies) chastised the decade-old Hawke/Keating government over cultural literacy, noting that only a fifth of university students in a recent study knew the name of the author of Voss.
• 17 December 1993, House: On the retirement of the Treasurer, John Dawkins, Kim Beazley (Labor, Seat of Swan) recalled the condolence motion for PW three years earlier.
• 12 October 1994, House: Michael Cobb (National Party, Seat of Parkes) was explaining why he would support a bill to decriminalise homosexual acts in Tasmania even though he didn’t really support the act in ethical principle. Cobb mentioned White and Lascaris as an example of why – although he didn’t approve of homosexuals – he would defend their right to be so in private.
• 17 October 1994, Senate: Senator Alston (Liberal, Victoria) slammed the writer Rodney Hall for how much government arts money he was receiving. Senator Stephen Loosley (Labor, New South Wales) responded by listing numerous other great writers, including PW, whose careers had been supported by arts. Loosley argued that Alston and his party were anti-arts, and were willing to accuse anyone who liked culture of being elitist.
• 15 November 1995, House: Excerpts from the Environment, Recreation, Communication and the Arts Legislation Committee read into the record, with a Mr Horton citing the recent purchase of the only PW manuscript known to exist.
• 19 June 1996, Senate: A document read into the record from the Australia and New Zealand Studies Centre which talks about some PW first editions that were contributed to the Centre.
• 2 September 1997, Senate: Senator Marise Payne (Liberal, NSW) cited Nine Thoughts from Sydney in her maiden speech! What a find.
• 7 October 1997, Senate: Environment, Recreation, Communication and The Arts References Committee, Dr. Chris Nobbs advocated for protection and funding of cultural and heritage assets, listing PW as one of our cultural assets.
• 21 October 1997, Senate: Dr Clive Hamilton’s response to criticisms from Senator Parer, includes his mention of PW as one of many great people who has written on spiritual journeys.
• 24 November 1997, House: Barry Jones mentioned PW having been named as one of the 20 Greatest Australians by a panel in The Australian 22-23 December 1990.
• 10 August 1999, Senate: During a debate on the referendum for an Australian Republic, Senator Barney Cooney (Labor, Vic) cited PW as one of many great Australian republicans, who were able to envisage an Australia that was complete and whole even without a monarch.
• 27 June 2000, Senate: Senator Michael Forshaw (Labor, NSW) during an adjournment to remember the recently deceased Judith Wright, cited her as being “to poetry what Patrick White was to the Australian novel and Sidney Nolan and Drysdale were to Australian painting.”

• 6 February 2001, House: The Prime Minister, Mr Howard, praised Australia’s researchers and scientists, noting the numerous Nobel Prizes for Australians, all of which – except PW – were in that industry.
• 26 February 2001, House: Peter Slipper (Liberal, Seat of Fisher) quoted PW saying that sport was Australia’s god, although here Slipper was saying it in a positive, as he commemorated the passing of legendary cricketer Sir Donald Bradman.
• 10 May 2001, Legal and Constitutional Legislation Committee: Mr. Grant from the Australian Publishers Association noted the difference in Australia’s publishing industry between the early days of PW and the present.
• 28 May 2001, Senate: Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee. Senator Robert Ray (Labor, VIC) seems to have been hoping for a headline, asking about several published volumes and calling PW “the most boring writer that Australia has ever produced”. Senator John Faulkner (Labor, NSW) seems to have tried to defend the Nobel Laureate.
• 19 June 2001, House: Danna Vale (Liberal, Seat of Hughes) reiterated the Prime Minister’s point from 6/2 about Australia’s Nobel recognition.
• 11 February 2003, House: Bob Katter (Independent, Seat of Kennedy) reiterated the above point yet again.
• 17 June 2004, House: Michael Danby (Labor, Seat of Melbourne Ports) cited PW alongside other cultural legends Sir Robert Helpmann and Peter Allen, in opposing the Howard Government’s bill to enshrine heterosexual marriage in legislation. (The heterosexual marriage law was successful but lasted only 13 years, before it was overturned by the will of the people.)
• 29 June 2005, Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee: A Ms Dysart of the Australia-China Council explaining some of the cultural exchanges between the two countries, noted that Chinese students were now studying PW’s literature.
• 13 August 2007, Senate: Senator George Brandis (Liberal, QLC) mocking contemporary literature theory by quoting The Australian which rather cruelly suggested that modern literature professors urged students to view a PW novel as equally important as a “Return ticket to Flinders Street station” in terms of literary merit.
• 14 September 2009, House: Stephen Gibbons (Labor, Seat of Bendigo) cited PW as an example of a great Australian writer, in light of a Productivity Commission recommendation that import restrictions on books be lightened, allowing overseas (i.e. American) companies to have a greater impact on the Australian publishing market.
• 13 October 2009, Senate: Mentioned by Senator Steve Hutchins (Labor, NSW) in passing during a discussion on the statistics of post-grad students in Australia.
• 24 May 2011, Senate: Anne-Marie Schwirtlich, new Director-General of the NLA, at the Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee, advised Senator Gary Humphries (Liberal, ACT), that the Library was planning a PW touring exhibition.
• 1 June 2011, House: Steve Gibbons (Labor, Seat of Bendigo) mentioned PW while praising other award-winning Australian writers such as Fiona McIntosh, Sonya Hartnett, and the eternally wonderful Shaun Tan.
• 26 June 2013, House: Dr Andrew Leigh (Labor, Seat of Fenner) quoted designer Romaldo Giurgola, in a discussion on the 25^th anniversary of the opening of Parliament House in Canberra. Giurgola had said he came to understand Australia – his adopted country – in part by reading writers such as Miles Franklin, Henry Lawson, Les Murray, and PW.

10 February 2022, Senate: Senator Jenny McAllister (Labor, NSW) briefly mentions PW as a subject in the voluminous amount of written material left behind by noted journalist and essayist Craig McGregor, who had recently died.

13 September 2023, Senate: Senator Deborah O’Neill (Labor, NSW) rose to congratulate retiring Senator Marise Payne, after 25 years of service, referencing Payne’s maiden speech (listed above) in which she cited PW’s poem Nine Thoughts from Sydney.