Patrick White (1912 - 1990)
1973 Award

Winner of Nobel Prize for Literature

White said that his novels are all about love and 'the relationship between the blundering human being and God'. His homosexuality had taught him what it was to be an outsider and had broken down the rigid dichotomies between male and female. White won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973 and used the prize money to establish the Patrick White award for unrecognised older writers. Although he lived a reclusive life he played an active part in demonstrations on social issues.

He had a deeply ambivalent attitude to his country, loathing what he saw as a culture of mediocrity and spiritual emptiness. He described the Australia Day ceremony as 'one of the most awful experiences: the Australia Day Committee... [have] been through all the tennis players and swimmers...the Lunch was not at all attractive and the speeches were endlessly boring'. In accepting his award White offended many when he said that 'Australia Day is for me a day of self-searching rather than trumpet blowing' and talked about Aboriginal dispossession, the destruction of the built heritage and our nineteenth century-style penal system. He refused to undertake a tour of honour.