Happy Valley is, in fact, a panoramic novel of Australian life which reflects White’s own experience in the Monaro as a jackaroo, and the fact that it is situated in a country town and distributes the narrative interest fairly evenly among a group of characters gives the book a peculiar novelty and freshness - not least because White apparently forbade the book’s republication, perhaps because of the way it reflects some unflattering details about a local Australian Chinese family, perhaps because Happy Valley is so manifestly the work of a young writer who is finding his feet.īut the latter point is easily misunderstood. Phillips, the future propounder of the Australian Cultural Cringe syndrome, was one of the judges. In fact Happy Valley is as self-consciously Australian a book as any cultural nationalist could hope for and it’s not for nothing that the novel, published in London in 1939, was awarded the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society in 1941, the year when A. Everyone knows the legend, rooted in truth, that Patrick White finds his voice as a consequence of the war and after discovering the love of his life in Manoly Lascaris and that the first in the long line of his masterpieces is The Aunt’s Story which he brings back to Australia with him in 1946, the token of his love/hate for the country which provides the enduring matter of his great works, the intimately suffered homeland which he cannot separate from the compulsions of his own heart. Happy Valley is the first of Patrick White’s novels and it is a consistently compelling book, as well as the exhilarating performance of a great writer in the making.