Speeches, 1984-1989

Containers:

Box 15

Component identifier:

File 2

Content Summary:

Draft speeches by White, mostly typescript, some with corrections. Including: 'The search for an alternative to futility' (c.1984); speech given at the launch of Australia and Nuclear War edited by Michael Denborough (ANU, March 1984); 'Hiroshima Day' (Sydney 1984); 'Peace and other matters' (Auckland, November 1986); 'To Artur Lundevist' (1986), on the occasion of his 80th birthday in Stockholm; 'A sense of integrity' (La Trobe University, July 1988); in absentia speech written for Friends of Wolli Creek rally (October 1984).

Immediate source of acquisition:

During White's lifetime, he asserted that he kept no manuscripts or personal papers, burning his drafts on completion of each work. For many years after his death, it was believed that a single manuscript draft of Memoirs of many in one (1986), donated by White to the anti-apartheid Canon Collins Education Trust for Southern Africa in 1988 and subsequently purchased at auction in 1991 by the National Library of Australia and the State Library of New South Wales, was the only surviving record of White's literary manuscripts. While White does appear to have destroyed a considerable portion of his manuscript material, he clearly retained many literary papers and personal papers until his death. The papers in this collection were in the custody of Manoly Lascaris (White's partner) who died in 2003, and of Barbara Mobbs, White's long-term literary agent and Literary Executor, who presented the collection to the National Library of Australia in 2006.

Names:

White, Patrick, 1912-1990

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