Transfigured Histories: Recent Novels of Patrick White and Robert Drewe
Abstract
Focusing on Drewe's The Savage Crows (1976) and White's A Fringe of Leaves (1976), Stow compares the authors' approaches to history and the fictionalising of historical circumstances. He argues that Drewe offers a 'not wholly successful attempt to show that the past lives and reverberates in the present', while White mobilises history as a fable that allows him to consider 'all times and places' (38).
Please sign in to access this article and the rest of our archive.
Published 1 May 1979 in Volume 9 No. 1. Subjects: Aboriginal contact history, Aboriginal massacres, murders, poisonings, Aboriginal-White relations, Bush, Lost in the bush, Shipwrecks & shipping accidents, Tasmania, Women, Patrick White, Robert Drewe.
Cite as: Stow, Randolph. ‘Transfigured Histories: Recent Novels of Patrick White and Robert Drewe.’ Australian Literary Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 1979, doi: 10.20314/als.6103f20b27.