Patrick White (1912-1990), novelist and playwright, is the only Australian author to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1973). White was born in London to a family of Hunter River graziers and spent his youth between England and Australia, at one point returning from study abroad to work as a jackeroo. After a spell as an intelligence officer in North Africa during World War II, he returned to Australia with Manoly Lascaris. The two men were partners for fifty years, while White's friendships with many others were turbulent and often cruelly curtailed. White's novels include The Aunt's Story, The Tree of Man, Voss, Riders in the Chariot, The Vivisector, The Eye of the Storm, and The Twyborn Affair. Flaws in the Glass (1981) is his 'straight' autobiography. The later Memoirs of Many in One, by contrast, is a novel in which the elderly female protagonist - a kind of exuberantly cross-dressed White - delights in taunting her prim old friend, the character Patrick White.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2003
© Estate of Axel Poignant
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves: who we read, who we watch, who we listen to, who we cheer for, who we aspire to be, and who we'll never forget. The Companion is available to buy online and in the Portrait Gallery Store.
Sarah Engledow describes the fall-out once Brett Whiteley stuck Patrick White’s list of his loves and hates onto his great portrait of the writer.
An interview with photographer William Yang who recalls his encounters with the author Patrick White.
