The White Woman

by Liam Davison

This is the story of a search for the lost white woman in the wilds of Gippsland, Victoria in 1846 - a quest in defence of virtue and "civilised" values. It is also a story of fear, history, myth and the power of the imagination.

Genres: Australia

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Liam Patrick Davison was an award-winning Australian novelist. He was born in Melbourne, where until 2007, he taught creative writing at the Chisholm Institute of Technology in Frankston.

Educated at St Bede's College, Melbourne and Melbourne Teacher's College. Davison was awarded the National Book Council's Banjo Award for Fiction in 1993 and has been shortlisted for several literary prizes such as The Age Book of the Year Award and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award. His work is characterised by its sharp and perceptive insights into Australian history and landscape.

He was married with two children, Sam and Milly, and lived on the Mornington Peninsula. (Wikipedia)

Liam Davison and his wife Frankie were aboard Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 when it was shot down over disputed territory in Ukraine, and all lives were lost.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was impressed by Liam Davison’s Soundings, but The White Woman is an extraordinary book. I was lost in the world it created from the moment I started reading it.

The White Woman is not an historical novel, but it evokes the period of early European settlement to tell the story of the mysterious White Woman said to have been held captive by the Kurnai People of Gippsland in the 1840s. The existence of this woman has never been proven, but the stories had remarkable longevity as can be seen from this extract at Trove. Indeed if one potters about on the web for a while, one can find a number of scholarly works which deconstruct this legend using any number of isms. They mostly focus on the gendered and racial sub-text: the public horror over the purity of civilised womanhood being sullied by savages, and the way that successive rescue expeditions provided a convenient justification for surveying and in due course acquiring more indigenous land. These scholarly works ooze disapproval.

In Liam Davison’s capable hands, this apocryphal story becomes a fine short novel, one which interrogates these isms without being heavy-handed. The novel takes the reader back into the mindset of the time, while also offering some kind of redemption through the narrator’s latter-day reflections. We did this, the narrator says, and we were foolish and wrong. It is the novel that seems more true to me…

The White Woman is a disturbing book, but – especially if you know the Gippsland Lakes and you’ve been there on a day when the lake is absolutely still – the prose is exquisite too.


For all our eagerness to be there, our confident expectation of what we’d find, none of us was prepared for what we saw when the river eventually opened into Lake Wellington. The banks of the river fell away from us and we were faced with a stretch of water so vast it might have been the sea. Its surface was absolutely still and, in the distance, its shore broke up in fog so a series of small islands seemed to drift on top of the water. Nothing was as we’d expected. Hundreds of swans pocked the water on either side of us. Even with the light diffused through the soft haze, it still hurt our eyes to look too long across the water. It seemed we’d come to a place not filled with light but made of light itself. We clung to the shore for fear of vanishing into it. (p. 41)

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2014/08/15/th...

[Rob Lloyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sublime! This should be an Australian classic. How it isn't one already, baffles me. Davidson managaged to evoke utterly haunting scenes of the Gippsland region in the days when European settlers savagely massacred Indigenous Australian tribes, the true custodians of the land.

[Stephen Whiteside · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great little book. While only about 150 pages long it is very intense, though, and not an easy read. The setting is very close to my heart - the stretch of coastline spreading east from Wilsons Promontory through Port Albert and the Gippsland Lakes to the mouth of the Snowy River. The book is based on the true story of the early 19th century search by white men from the city of Melbourne for a white woman believed to have been kidnapped by Aborigines. It was thought she may have survived one of the many shipwrecks along that stretch of coastline.

The set-up is a little contrived, but works well nonetheless. The narrator participated in the expedition that searched for the woman. He has been approached by the son of another white man who was active in the region at the time. He has refused to tell his son much about his own life, so the son has approached the narrator for some answers. The son's role in the book is to listen intently. We never hear him speak.

Without wishing in any way to downplay the tragic and terrible events that are at the heart of this story, there are parallels with more recent times, where idealists leave the cities for the bush to right some perceived wrong, only to encounter hostility from the locals, who see them as naive, ill-informed and misguided.

No doubt this book and its author would be better known if Liam Davison had not been killed when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over Ukraine in 2014.

[Graham Senders · Rating 3 out of 5]

For the entire first third of this short book, I was shouting at the sky "Why do we need A Fringe Of Leaves told from a male's point of view?" What was this adding to the cultural niche of whites messing things up in the Australian bush?
The plot is straightforward. A white woman, a shipwreck survivor, may be living in the bush with the local indigenous, in the 1840s. And there are men in the colony who strongly feel that she must be saved. And they set out to do so.
I reached a point when I decided 'okay, I can see what the author is trying to do here,' and I decided to continue along for the ride. Since the story becomes about these men who can't connect with themselves or connect honestly with others, one of my areas of interest, I stuck with this until the end.
But I could only think, what if this story had gone deeper.