Draft and manuscript

Containers:

Box 13

Component identifier:

File 37

Content Summary:

Contents consist of: an Olympic exercise book, 238pp, with the front cover inscribed 'P. White, 20 Martin Road, Centennial Park 2021' and containing a well-developed stage playscript including convicts, explorers and Aborigines, with set and stage directions, in a late or frail hand (alternating between block printing and typical cursive) in blue ballpoint pen with some revisions in red; and a handwritten foolscap manuscript in five sections, 36pp + 32pp + 32pp + 32pp + 32pp.

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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