![]() ![]() In language poetic and passionate, yet at the same time grounded by shrewd, often comic, social observations and naturalistic portrayals of a wide variety of characters – farmers, convicts, aborigines, the colonial middle class and their servants. Voss sets out to cross the continent, and as hardships, mutiny and betrayal. Although they have met only on a few occasions, Voss and Laura are joined by overwhelming, obsessive feelings for each other. But Voss is also a love story, for the explorer has become inextricably bound up with Laura Trevellyn, whose inner life, like his own, is at odds with the world. Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is the story of the secret passion between an explorer and a nave young woman. Voss’s last journey across the desert and the waterlogged plains of central Australia is a true ‘venture to the interior’. ![]() White re-imagines his story with visionary intensity. The eponymous hero, Johann Voss, is based on Ludwig Leichhardt, the nineteenth-century German explorer and naturalist who had already conducted several major expeditions into the Australian outback before making an ambitious attempt to cross the entire continent from east to west in 1848. ![]() Voss describes an epic journey, both physical and spiritual. 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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