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…
Tag: Mordecai Himmelfarb
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…
