Hi All, today was our final excursion into the world of Patrick White, especially his representation of Alf Dubbo, the Aboriginal artist as a ministering priest of a renewed Christianity. Patrick White shows us how Alf Dubbo’s belief is restored through his visionary imagination and in this way illuminates the way in which William Blake’s…
Tag: Alf Dubbo
Alf Dubbo (artist), potential redeemer!
Patrick White presents his hero Alf Dubbo -one of the four “Riders” in the Chariot- as a human being who brings into the present the transformative power of his aboriginal creative heritage. He does this through his deep animation of Christian themes, bringing these back to their true meaning in the sources of Christianity prior…
Alf Dubbo and Mordecai Himmelfarb
The Aboriginal and the Jew have a really important place in Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot. They embody two outsiders who have the key to a kind of wisdom that is not available to many. What is extraordinary is the way that Patrick White locates the seminal meeting between these two central characters in a…
Patrick White’s Gift of Reconciliation
Patrick White had the extraordinary insight, back in 1961 to write about the amazing creativity inherent in his Aboriginal character Alf Dubbo who plays a leading role in the novel Riders in the Chariot. The novel won the Miles Franklin award in that year and then in 1965 won the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society. Patrick White’s…
Patrick White: Riders in the Chariot
What a wonderful world Patrick White takes us into in this remaking of the Australian social landscape in line with his own prophetic ambition to re-sacralize a spiritually desolate land. As he says in his essay “The Prodigal Son”: Because the void I had to fill was so immense, I wanted to try to suggest…
Patrick White’s Aboriginal Jesus
Margaret Preston may have been roasted on a spit for daring to present Adam and Eve as an Aboriginal couple in offering this painting to the Blake Prize in the early 1950s. How dare one assume that our forefathers had anything to do with Aboriginality!!! Thus spake the right-wing factions of our country So how…
William Blake and Patrick White
Patrick White was clearly deeply influenced by William Blake. Not only does his novel Riders in the Chariot (arguably his most radical religious novel) begin with a core quote about the power of the prophetic imagination from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but White’s obsession with explicitly exploring the transformative power of art, of literature is central…
Michael Griffith: Home Page- Literature and Life Spring 2025 
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