I carried the novel into bathrooms and bars. I read between calls for car crashes and domestic abuse. We were not allowed to read or even watch television while we were on the phones, but during the week that I read The Tree of Man I smuggled it in to the call center hidden inside my headset case. It changed everything.Īt that time, my university degree completed, I worked on the phones in a call center for the country’s emergency services. One morning I left the bed of the man who had hung White’s photograph and walked to a used bookstore on Glebe Point Road, Sydney where I bought the 1955 novel, The Tree of Man. I had grown up with my father’s used copies of White’s novels, and had studied some of those books in university, but it was not until I found myself waking up beneath the dark glower of Australia’s only Nobel Laureate in Literature that I took a real interest in the author and his works. When I was 22 I was in love with a man who had a framed photograph of Patrick White hanging above his bed.
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