A Fringe of Leaves - Patrick White (week 2)

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Patrick White is Australia's only recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. His literary style is characterized by a "complex spiritual, psychological and emotional experience" that gives "the continent of Australia an authentic voice that carries across the world."

In A Fringe of Leaves (1976), White presents the story of Ellen Roxburgh (née Gluyas), a poor 19th century Cornish girl who marries into wealth. The first half of the novel is a detailed recollection of her history: a rustic childhood, her transition to upper-class life, adjustment to marriage, and a journey with her husband to the Australian penal colonies.

But on the return trip, the ship wrecks off of the coast of (modern-day) Queensland: death and destruction reigns, and Ellen's meticulously constituted world is dashed upon the shores. Ellen is one of only two survivors: captured and abused by the Aboriginal natives, she is reduced to wearing a fringe of leaves which conceals her only remaining possession--her wedding ring.

The novel is based on the real-life Eliza Fraser (1798-1858), the bearer of a precarious legacy in Australian history. Fraser's allegations of abuse by the natives was disputed in her lifetime. Nevertheless, her story was used to justify the massacre and dispossession of the Aborigines and, since 1836, has been perpetrated in the island's given namesake (Fraser Island) until 2023 when it officially reverted to its traditional name (K'gari).

A Fringe of Leaves is a vision of the terrible ordeals of one woman, beset through almost every stratum of society, in her desperate reach for freedom and personal identity. But it is also a vision of the continent itself--the colonials, Aborigines, and convicts residing there--clashing over self-determination to shape a national identity, and the "fringe of leaves" that may be worn to protect it.

A Fringe of Leaves: