Books: Australian Bark Painting

Voss (422 pp.)—Patrick White—Viking ($5).

Patrick White is an intellectual Australian novelist who hates to write about intellectuals and loves to write about Australians. His thoughtful novels (this is his fifth) make him somewhat enigmatic to his countrymen. Can such deep thoughts be harbored about such seemingly simple people as he portrays?

Author White, his country’s only considerable novelist since the death in 1946 of Henry Handel Richardson, has filled his most ambitious book to date ostensibly with the adventure story of an explorer. But beneath the surface, it is really a self-examining essay in which the continent’s odd geography, zoology and climate serve as a metaphor for White’s real theme—the uncharted journey into the dry, unblazed interior of the Australian mind. Landscape is the protagonist. It is said of one character: “His failures took shape, but in flowers and mountains.” Another character speaks of “the grey of mediocrity” (the color of the Australian earth and foliage) and the “blue of frustration” (the color of the rainless skies), and these comprise the palette on which White works out his composition.

Mysterious Initial. Voss, White’s fictional explorer, is clearly drawn from the character of the German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, an eccentric, bungling visionary who disappeared with his party in the interior of Australia in 1848. Later, the initial “L” was found carved on many trees, and expeditions vainly sought to trace down tales of a Wild White Man thought to be a survivor of Leichhardt’s venture. Seizing on this episode and the surrounding legends, Author White sends Voss and his companions on a rambling journey into disaster. The novel’s finely told climax adds up to a masterly impression: a surrealist landscape of dead trees, the hallucinations of men dying of thirst and hunger, and the trancelike thoughts of nomad aborigines merged into a crude but forceful design like the bark paintings of the aborigines themselves.

In a sense, the book shows the face of a nation seen as in a mirage of 100 years of history. For Australia’s story, as it is told in the school books to this day, is not one of national revolution or wars of liberation, but a simple narrative of what seekers and explorers found inside the place, in that fatal zero known to Australians as the “Dead Heart” of the continent.

Stewed Crow. Interwoven with this main theme is one more private to White: the girl who was left behind wins the lost cause. Laura Trevelyan is a spinster, a philosopher among the Sydney Philistines. She loves Voss enough to know the real nature of his quest and that she is, in spirit, “the sole survivor” of his doomed expedition. Amid the crudity of a still colonial society, the quality of a Laura Trevelyan will prevail, White seems to say.

A Cambridge-educated ex-jackeroo* returned to his ancestral New South Wales, Author White, 45, sees his Australia with the hard, clear eye of an estranged blood relative who has come back home. Unfortunately, he has developed a complicated, elliptical subjunctive style; it is excellent for describing the shifting pastel colors of the bush and the doom of the changeless blue sky overhead, but proves too rich an instrument for reproducing the leg-iron clank of Australian speech.

The book ends with the verdict of a Pommy (Englishman), who says: “I have been travelling through your country, forming opinions of all and sundry and am distressed to find the sundry does prevail . . . Do you know that in one humpy [shack] I was even faced with a stewed crow!” If it is Author White’s intention to make his compatriots eat crow, at least he has added passion, precision and honesty to the recipe. Long a gourmet of ideas. White has obviously come to hanker for the simple fare of his childhood. It is an index of his stature as an artist that he can make this raw dish from down under travel so well so far.

*Australian for apprentice hand on a sheep or cattle station.