Shortly after Patrick White’s death an admirer published a compendium of tributes to the famous Australian writer: Patrick White: A Tribute, edited by Clayton Joyce. Contributors ranged from academics such as Dorothy Green and Manning Clark to well-known columnists and politicians. The tributes were generous but not entirely laudatory. The historian W.J. Hudson, for example, confessed that he had never met Patrick White and doubted, if by chance they had met, that the conversation would have run smoothly—it seemed that very few of the Nobel laureate’s plays or novels were to Hudson’s liking, and he wasn’t stirred by the issues…