. . muscles prevail, and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves." Wary of being tainted and of self-complacency, he chose to live outside the mainstream and used alleged critical hostility as a spur to renewed creativity. The resulting fiction was at the forefront of the Australian response to modernism and to recent history. In it, the realist tradition of Australian letters is problematized and extended; taboo subjects are broached; minorities are accorded unusual prominence; and the fetid shafts of national memory are probed through narrations that, as he remarked of
A Fringe of Leaves (1976), remind readers uncomfortably of "the reasons why we have become what we are today."
Like many of his literary forebears, Patrick White shaped his work by a dual allegiance to the colony, Australia, and to the motherland, England. By World War I the White family formed an important pastoral dynasty located on the rich upper reaches of the Hunter River, north of Sydney. Belltrees, the family seat, was one pole of his youthful experience in Australia; the other was Lulworth, a mansion in the inner East of Sydney, overlooking Rushcutters Bay, where his father, Victor Martindale White, moved to satisfy his wife, Ruth Withycombe White, in 1916.
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