Christos Tsiolkas

But it also came for all that at a particularly... at the right time for me to do it, to do it as an older man.

I've not resolved, far from it, the questions and issues and...

antagonisms and confusions I have about what it means to be Australian.

That's never going to be fully resolved.

But it was at a time where, I mean, I was ready to read someone like White and to read him fairly.

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...

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-dess 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...

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 because...

Undoubtedly, it must have been from growing up as a homosexual man, you know, in the middle 20th century.

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