Since Voss’s orientation is spiritual and transcendent, however, White’s treatment of the desert shows conceptual and corporeal boundaries between human and environment shifting and fading in their interaction with it. Like her, Voss and his companions experience the desert as beautiful and inspirational, even, at times, nurturant and sustaining. Davidson couches her memoir as an exploration narrative and treats the desert as a ‘lived space’ which she ‘writes home’ having learned how to ‘be’ in it, and so to ‘recover’ the garden in the desert.
Using Keith Garebian’s distinction between ‘desert’ and ‘garden’ we examine how these explorers find and respond to ‘the garden in the desert’. In doing so we challenge Tom Lynch’s reading of the two texts as ‘traversals’ which portray the desert as ‘alien, hostile and undifferentiated void’. Drawing on theory of dirt developed by material ecocritic Helen Sullivan and by philosopher Olli Lagerspetz we demonstrate that the narratives of their travels show them engaged in transformative encounters with the Australian desert.
| Australia History Fiction 1788-1900 | Australian | Australia History Fiction 1788-1900Ĭlassic Literature | Electronic books | Fiction.The 2019 Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference took as its theme the subject of ‘dirt’, and inspired this paper which examines the ‘journeys into dirt’ by explorer figures in Patrick White’s 1957 novel Voss and Robyn Davidson’s 1980 memoir Tracks. | Australia - History - 1788-1900 - Fiction. | Classic fiction (pre c 1945) | Fiction - General. Title details screen (OverDrive, viewed January 11, 2016)Īustralian fiction. "First published in Great Britain by Eyre & Spottiswoode in 1957 First published by Vintage in 1994 This edition published in 2012"-Colophon. From the careful delineation of Victorian society to the sensitive rendering of hidden love to the stark narrative of adventure in the Australian desert, Patrick White's novel is a work of extraordinary power and virtuosity.
Laura, waiting in Sydney, moves through the months of separation as if they were a dream and Voss the only reality. As hardships, mutiny and betrayal whittle away his power to endure and to lead, his attachment to Laura gradually increases. Although they have met only a few times, Voss and Laura are joined by overwhelming, obsessive feelings for each other. Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is the story of the secret passion between an explorer and a naive young woman. Patrick White's novel that brought prominence to Australian literature. North Sydney NSW : Random House Australia, 2012 National edeposit: Available onsite at national, state and territory libraries
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