Voss
by Patrick White
Summary
Johann Ulrich Voss arrives in the young colony of New South Wales in 1845 with one goal, to be the first man to cross the Australian continent from east to west, and one certainty, that the crossing exists to prove something about himself rather than to serve any settler or scientific purpose his backers have in mind. Before he leaves Sydney he meets Laura Trevelyan, the orphaned niece of one of his sponsors, and the two form an attachment built almost entirely out of conversation and disagreement rather than romance in any conventional sense. She is drawn to, and frightened by, the same absolute self belief that will eventually undo his whole party. Voss sets out with a small group of settlers, servants and two Aboriginal guides, and Patrick White tracks the expedition through drought, flood and slow starvation as the desert strips every rank and manner the men brought with them from the coast.
Once the party splits after one member's death, White lets the novel's two halves drift apart formally as well as physically. In the outback, Voss's own account grows steadily less reliable, closer to delirium than to travel writing; Voss himself is beheaded by Jackie, the younger of the two Aboriginal guides, under pressure from the people whose country the expedition has wandered into, nearly the whole party perishes, and only Judd, a pardoned convict who broke from Voss's authority earlier than the rest, survives to be found again years later. In Sydney, Laura receives no confirmed news and lives out the crossing at a strange psychic distance, convinced she is somehow present with Voss in the desert. The novel closes some twenty years afterward, at a garden party where a public statue of Voss is unveiled, Laura and the aged Judd both in attendance, the explorer already passed from disputed fact into local legend by the time the crowd raises a glass to him.
White writes the outback less as scenery than as a moral instrument that strips every character down to what is actually in them, and the prose matches that severity, dense and often willfully difficult. It suits a patient reader more interested in watching one man's certainty get taken apart by a continent than in a clean account of what became of him, since White never lets Voss's fate settle into a single agreed version even by the last page.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Patrick White the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature, and Voss, published in 1957, is the novel most directly behind that citation. White based Voss loosely on Ludwig Leichhardt, the real nineteenth century Prussian explorer who vanished attempting to cross the Australian interior, at a time when Australian fiction was still widely treated abroad as a minor regional tradition rather than a body of work capable of winning literature's largest prize.
White did not travel to Stockholm; his friend, the painter Sidney Nolan, who had designed the jacket of Voss's first edition, collected the prize on his behalf. White put the money into an award of his own, the Patrick White Award, first given in 1974 and since presented annually to a writer judged to have made a significant contribution to Australian literature. Voss became an opera in 1986, composed by Richard Meale to a libretto by David Malouf. White is usually called Australia's only Nobel literature laureate, though J. M. Coetzee also won the prize, in 2003, as a South African citizen, before taking Australian citizenship in 2006.