Christos Tsiolkas

I don't think I could have done that when I was younger because he was one of the dead white males.

I think that's another thing I refer to in the, um,

And I think I had come through my tertiary education.

I was at Melbourne University at a time when postmodernism was the dominant way of reading when it came to literature.

And I think postmodernism...

was not very sympathetic and I don't think very attentive to someone like Patrick White.

Yes.

That was the astonishment and the surprise, all those.

And kind of the pissed-off-a-dice came from the fact that this had been forgotten.

You know, you... That...

This writer who was very much, you know, he came from the squatocracy, he came from what is now considered a world of privilege, no denial, but he was able in novel after novel and in story after story to get into the industry.

into the consciousness and heart of what it was to be a working woman, to be an Aboriginal man wanting to paint, to be a Jewish refugee, to be a woman discovering herself by flinging herself away from all that had kept her buoyed in the world.

I mean, I just think he had that

astonishing sensitivity as a writer, partly undoubtedly it must have been from growing up as a homosexual man, you know, in the, um, in the middle 20th century that, and the other thing I explore in the book, um,

in the essay is, I think that there was also something that he got from his relationship with his lover, Manolis Lascares, that also informed the kind of writing that Patrick White did.

I'm not saying that Manolis was the writer.

Patrick White, I think, was certainly the writer.

But I think what Manolis did, and Manolis, his family were refugees from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

They were Greek Orthodox.

They were an emigre family that ended up across the globe.