Cirrus@Austlit

'Many literary sources have been suggested for Patrick White’s fifth novel, Voss, ranging from the surreal symbolism of Rimbaud’s poetry, to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. White himself explicitly acknowledged the influence of two works by Australian women writers in his depiction of colonial society: Ruth Bedford’s family history, Think of Stephen: A Family Chronicle (1954), and M. Barnard Eldershaw’s prizewinning novel A House is Built (1929). Bedford, a granddaughter of Sir Alfred Stephen, Chief Justice of New South Wales from 1844 to 1873, drew on family papers to give a detailed account of the social life of the elite of Sydney from the 1840s to 1880s, commenting on the demands of household management on the women as well as describing picnics, balls, and dinners. Barnard Eldershaw absorbed references to historical events such as the gold rushes and Sydney landmarks like the convict-built Barracks and St Andrew’s Cathedral into their novel. They provide ample detail of architecture, furniture, and clothing in descriptions of the social and domestic life of the Hyde family and associates: sewing, paying formal calls, hosting dinners, concert- and theatregoing. There are resemblances with Voss’s Bonner family, including structural similarities in the contrast of the two principal female characters and their fates. This discussion traces the influence of these works of Bedford and Barnard Eldershaw in Voss.' (Publication abstract)   

'One of Patrick White’s working notebooks, acquired by the National Library of Australia in 2006, is almost exclusively devoted to material related to his breakthrough novel Voss (1957), which marks a new departure in his career. It is a historical novel set in Australia’s colonial period, though with thematic connections to White’s earlier works. Close attention to Notebook 5 shows how extensively White researched its historical background and how he absorbed that research, sometimes transposing details verbatim into Voss. While certain material deals with Ludwig Leichhardt and his expeditions into the interior (for example Daniel Bunce’s Travels with Dr Leichhardt in Australia [1859] and Alec H. Chisholm’s Strange New World [1941]), it is apparent that White is more interested in details of Leichhardt’s various journeys than in debates about the man himself. He read other explorers, notably Edward John Eyre, and settlers of whom John Dunmore Lang is prominent, his notes revealing a particular interest in Aboriginal people. A second strand of White’s research informs those sections of Voss set in Sydney in the 1840s, and a third involves theological and philosophical speculations about the nature of faith that are reflected in the musings of Laura Trevelyan and others. In addition, there are fragments of draft of both Voss and Riders in the Chariot (1961), indicating that White was already incubating the later novel as he was completing Voss. It appears too that he undertook major restructuring of Voss at a late stage.' (Introduction)

'Focus on the Australianness of the novelists discussed in this chapter has occluded other perspectives on their achievements, and I propose to enlist them under a modernist flag...'(Introduction)

'This selection of Christina Stead's student publications was edited by Margaret Harris to accompany her essay, 'Christina Stead's Earliest Publications.''

Source: Abstract.

'Christina Stead composed her own story of how she came to be published, moving from recollections of childhood precocity to the much repeated anecdotes of her employer Wilhelm Blech (Bill Blake) recognising the power of a draft of Seven Poor Men of Sydney in 1928, and in 1931 the publisher Peter Davies (‘Peter Pan’) agreeing to publish her. Deductions about her earliest writings are frequently made from those of her fictional heroines Louisa Pollit in The Man Who Loved Children (1940) and Teresa Hawkins in For Love Alone (1944). Stead’s earliest known publications appeared in the magazines of her high school and the teacher training college she attended. Some of them are newly identified in my discussion, while those previously known have received only glancing attention. This article discusses these publications, in both poetry and prose, together with her editorial work during her student days in Sydney; and proposes a qualification to the view put by the biographer Hazel Rowley that Stead as a student was a withdrawn outsider. The supplementary collection, ‘Christina Stead’s Student Publications’, provides a document of record by reprinting a story, poems and occasional pieces from those formative student years.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Harris and Webby give an overview of the newly discovered notebooks and manuscripts enhanced by their long experience researching White's writing, and their thorough examination of the 'new' collection's breadth and scope.' (Introduction 7)