‘In the End, There Was No End’: Colonial Modernism and Moral Perfectionism in Patrick White’s The Tree of Man

Abstract

Abstract The modernism of Patrick White’s 1955 pastoral epic The Tree of Man is the focus of this study. The novel tracks the generational transition within one pioneering family around the time of the First World War in rural Australia, and its structure approximates the biblical pattern of edenic beginning, tragic fall, and eschatological recovery. Biblical motifs are evident in the novel’s treatment of natality and death, and in the way narrative landscapes are sign-posted with symbolic trees and riven by apocalyptic floods and fires that portend epiphany and judgement. My analysis of the novel draws on scholarship that characterises modernism in relation to settler colonialism, the temptations of scepticism, the negotiation of Christian inheritances, and the ambivalent ‘endings’ that occur in the wake of modernity’s ‘new beginnings’.