‘The third occasion on which he came in contact with the Feinsteins Waldo knew there was no escaping something that was being prepared. Mrs Feinstein’s formal note deliberately arranged it for the Saturday. So that you are able to introduce us to your brother, the writing ended underlined.’
From the Meanjin archives, fiction by Patrick White first published in 1965.

First mother went away. Then it was our father, twitching from under our feet the rugs, which formed, he said, a valuable collection. We were alone for a little then. Not really alone, of course, for there was Fraulein Hoffman, and Mademoiselle Leblanc, and Kyria Smaragda our housekeeper, and Eurydice the cook, and the two maids from Lesbos. The house was full of the whispering of women, and all of us felt melancholy. Then it was explained to us by Mademoiselle Leblanc that she and Fräulein Hoffman had gone out and sent a telegram to Smyrna, and soon the aunts […]

Good afternoon. You are the successful candidate for the Federal seat of Adam, in the recent election? That is so. And you were the only Independent elected at that election? Quite true. Our readers are interested in the manner in which you accomplished the remarkable feat of bucking three Party machines and being elected. The story is a long one. Have you half a day to spare? Please go ahead. Well, first I must go back to 1939, when I was nineteen years of age. Yes. You may recall that the war allegedly began in that year. I do. I […]

Probably it was much the same as any other summer’s day—the paddocks bleached; the hills blue as grapebloom; the sun burning down through the still, slow afternoon. And the car that rattled past raised a slanting plume of dust that hung over the paddocks—the way it always did in summer. Della and I were on our way to the swimming-hole. And the swimming-hole was—well, just as it always was in summer—still and rushy-cool, an edge of damp clay above the water-line marking its shrinking. I remember, too, how the dust puffed up between our toes with the feel of summer. […]

I SAY WE HAVE a bitter heritage, but that is not to run it down, Tourmaline is the estate, and if I call it heritage I do not mean that we are free in it, More truly we are tenants: tenants of shanties rented from the wind, tenants of the sunstruck miles. Nevertheless I do not scorn Tourmaline. Even here there is something to be learned; even groping through the red wind, after the blinds of dust have clattered down, we discover the taste of perfunctory acts of brotherhood: warm, acidic, undemanding, fitting a derelict independence. Furthermore, I am not […]

He seemed uncomfortable as he stood in the cab gangway. Sometimes he absently watched my mate, Jack Regan, handling the controls of the locomotive. But mostly he stared thoughtfully at the edge of the permanent-way running swiftly beside our train; hoping, perhaps, that the rhythmic clicking of the rails or even the crispness of the engine exhaust beat would unravel some mystery for him. All that Jack and I knew about him was that he was relieving old Fred Hasler, the regular travelling foreman, who was on sick leave. Beyond showing his duty pass he had not introduced himself; yet […]

Fragment of Voss, a novel. So the party entered the approaches to hell, with no sound but that of horses passing through a desert, and saltbush grating in a wind. This devilish country, flat at first, soon broke up into winding gullies, not particularly deep, but steep enough to wrench the backs of the animals that had to cross them, and to wear the bodies and nerves of the men by the frantic motion that it involved. There was no avoiding chaos by detour. The gullies had to be crossed, and on the far side there was always another tortuous […]

Someone pressed a button and the whirring and fangling of the power shears broke the comparative quiet of the truck shop. For a few minutes the noise filled the long narrow building, then the big wheels slowed and it was quiet again. Looking through the spinning fly wheel I saw the ‘Mount’ framed perfectly in the southern door of the truck shop, and my thoughts sped down through the years to Jacky and his ‘diamonds.’ Back to the times when wages were low; when jobs were hard to get, and when a job on the trucks was a penalty. A […]

The city was asleep on its right side and shaking with violent nightmares. Long puffs of snoring came out of the chimneys. Its feet were sticking out because the clouds did not cover it altogether. There was a hole in them, and the white feathers ‘were falling out. The city had untied all the bridges like so many buttons to feel at ease. Wherever there was a lamplight the city scratched itself until it went out. Trees, houses, telegraph poles, lay on their side. The rag picker walked among the roots, the cellars, the breathing sewers, the open pipe works, […]

Now what does the clock show? Only three! Still two hours of it! Two hours that are like a hill you have to climb over with a ton on your back. Don’t let the hours be piled into a hill—let them be a straight slope you can go running down fast. The machines are making the noise of a train, of an express train, streaming down the long, straight rails. You be a passenger—you be a girl riding on a fast train. Of course there’s no scat for you on the train, but you can walk up and down. As […]

Ever hear how I bowled Victor Trumper for a duck ? he asked. —No, I said. —He was a beautiful bat, he said. He had wrists like steel and he moved like a panther. The ball sped from his bat as though fired by a cannon. The three of us were sitting on the verandah of the pub at Yerran­derie in the Burragorang Valley in the late afternoon. The sun fell full on the fourteen hundred foot sandstone cliff behind us but the rest of the valley was already dark. A road ran past the pub and the wheeltracks were […]