Will I love Voss?

Voss is White’s best-known novel, a historical fiction based on the German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt’s failed expedition across Australia.

The novel conveys both the determination and uncertainty of the colonial project in the mid-nineteenth century. In places I was horrified by its grotesque depictions of suffering in the outback, but it is also a beautifully written text that captures the explorer’s yearning to understand the land and Australia’s failure to recognize Indigenous personhood – in both the nineteenth century and when White writes in the 1950s.

I return to the novel’s imagery whenever I think about the outback or frontier… show more.

I first read Voss – Patrick White’s 1957 fictionalised account of the doomed expedition and eventual disappearance of German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt - 25 years ago at university. I returned to it a couple of years ago as I embarked on my fifth novel, similarly set in 19th century Sydney, recalling how I enjoyed the novel in my earlier reading but finding myself, in this my second reading two decades later, utterly blown away by White’s stunning and bitingly witty evocation of mid-1800s Sydney society. 

Patrick White was an Australian writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. Voss is one of his best books, and one that I’ve read again and again, as it brings new insights about human psychology and the Australian landscape with each reading. Set in the mid-nineteenth century, Voss is an epic story of a German explorer who leads a doomed expedition across Australia, even while his relationship with Laura in Sydney develops. The novel is a poignant love story written in the most exquisite language, while it subtly draws out cultural differences between the Indigenous inhabitants and… show more.