Patrick Victor Martindale White (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_White) was an Australian author who was widely regarded as a major English-language novelist of the 20th century.
From 1935 until his death, White published 12 novels, two short-story collections and eight plays. His fiction freely employs shifting narrative vantagepoints and a stream of consciousness technique. In 1973, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In Voss (1957) the plot is of epic simplicity. It’s 1845 and Johann Ulrich Voss sets out with a small band to cross the Australian continent for the first time. The tragic story of their terrible journey and its inevitable end is told with imaginative understanding. The figure of Voss takes on superhuman proportions, until he appears to those around him as both deliverer and destroyer. His relationship with Laura Trevelyan is the central personal theme of the story. The true record of Ludwig Leichardt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Leichhardt), who died in the Australian desert in 1848, suggested Voss to the author.
Patrick White died on 30 September 1990. An obituary may be read here From the Archives, 1990: Patrick White, author and stirrer, dies at 78 (smh.com.au)
Patrick White
ISBN 978-0099324713