Patrick White was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He was educated in England at Cheltenham college and King's College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war. He returned to Australia after the war. 
He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as a man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. He died in September 1990.

Patrick White

Patrick Whiteside is a psychiatrist interested more in promoting mental health than in treating mental illness. Now retired from clinical practice, he has also written books on spirituality and personal development (see www.happinesssite.com). His monthly blog can be found on the Psychology Today website. Patrick lives happily with his wife, Sarah, in West Sussex UK .

Patrick Whiteside

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This collection of speeches by the Australian Nobel prize-winning author have provoked extreme reactions in Australia. While members of the establishment and parts of the media have dismissed him as a bitter old man, the young and needy have responded to him with something close to adulation.

Patrick White Speaks

In this book the author addresses the problem of growing old and the "warts of the soul" which, if gouged out, ruin the flesh. We must wait, he says, for the evil in us to die naturally. Presenting a peeled potato, a dance in the kitchen and a visit to the aged mother of a childhood friend, he considers our struggle, our efforts to achieve aesthetic perfection and suggests some resolutions. Patrick White is a Nobel Prize-winning author. His novels include "The Tree of Man", "Voss", "The Vivisector", "A Fringe of Leaves", "The Twyborn Affair" and "Memoirs of Many in One".

Three Uneasy Pieces

The appearance of this self-portrait by Patrick White is a literary event for which his readers and admirers have long hoped. He explains how on the very rare occasions when he re-reads a passage from one of his books, he recognizes very little of the self he knows. This ‘unknown’ is the man who interviewers and visiting students expect to find, but ‘unable to produce him’, he prefers to remain private – or as private as anyone who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature can ever be. But in this book is the self Patrick White does recognize, the one he sees reflected in the glass. 
 
It is a remarkable book. In a shifting sequence we learn of youth in Australia; the ‘expensive prison’, his English boarding school; Cambridge with holiday trips to Germany; London in the Blitz; RAF wartime intelligence and compensations of life in Australia. There are journeys to cities and landscapes round the world which take on more reality than places one has actually visited. 
 
He tells us whom he has loved and hated and of his opinions – political and literary. He introduces us to a host of characters from Australian cousins to Stravinsky and Queen Elizabeth – and of course to Manoly Lascaris, who in 1942 ‘became the central mandala in my life’s hitherto messy design.’ He describes what he sees in the glass’s reflection with such power that it seems no artist can have attempted or executed a self-portrait so lifelike before.

Flaws In The Glass

A Self Portrait

Set in Australia in the 1840s, A FRINGE OF LEAVES combines dramatic action with a finely distilled moral vision. Returning home to England from Van Diemen's land, the Bristol Maid is shipwrecked on the Queensland coast and Mrs Roxburgh is taken prisoner by a tribe of aborigines, along with the rest of the passengers and crew. In the course of her escape, she is torn by conflicting loyalties - to her dead husband, to her rescuer, to her own and to her adoptive class.

A Fringe of Leaves

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