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The Passion of Private White

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The Passion of Private White

By: Don Watson
Narrated by: Don Watson
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About this listen

 From the bestselling author of The Bush, the highly acclaimed story of a fifty-year relationship between a Vietnam veteran and an isolated clan in north-east Arnhem Land – a unique window into Australia’s deep past and precarious present, by one of our master storytellers.

‘How to sum up this story? It’s uncontainable. It wrangles worlds. It keeps getting wider and deeper like a stone in a pond. At its heart – an extraordinary telling of an extraordinary friendship.’ Paul Kelly

Longlisted for the 2023 Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award

Now in trade paperback, one of Australia’s favourite writers on ‘questions at the heart of Australian history, politics and identity’ (ABR). Fascinating, funny, challenging and beautifully written – ‘a truly remarkable achievement’ (Peter Carey).

The Passion of Private White describes the meeting of two worlds: that of the intensely driven anthropologist Neville White, and the world of hunter-gatherer clans in remote northern Australia with whom he has lived and worked for half a century, mapping their culture and history in breathtaking detail.

As White began to understand this ancient culture struggling between the demands of Western modernity and the equally pressing need to preserve their lands, customs, laws and language, he was also trying to transcend the mental scars inflicted on the battlefields of Vietnam.

Eventually, scholarly observer crossed the line into activist, advocate and defender of the clans’ effort to create a safe and healthy homeland, a seat both of traditional culture and contemporary skills and education. The enterprise meant overcoming everything from insatiable mining companies and official incompetence and neglect, to customs that were fundamental in the old way of life but dysfunctional in the transition to the new. When White began taking his old platoon mates to the homeland, two wildly different groups found in each other some of the solutions and some of the therapy they both needed.

Don Watson has had his own fifty-year relationship with Neville White, since meeting him as an undergraduate in Melbourne. This book is the result: moving, enlightening, devastating and inspiring, it is a towering achievement, a profound insight into both our recent and our deep history, the coloniser and colonised – indeed into the human condition itself.


'A truly magnificent achievement'
– Peter Carey

‘Remarkable, wholly unexpected and original … [by] one of Australia’s finest writers. It sounds like a lugubrious farce and sometimes it reads that way. But it is a deeply serious enquiry into questions at the heart of Australian history, politics and identity.
– Tom Griffiths, Australian Book Review

‘This is the tale of two tribes – one ancient, one modern, both wounded and alienated – and how they came together. It is not, thankfully, a white saviour story: in many ways, it’s Donydji who saves the vets. But it’s also a tale far messier and more interesting than that … about tenacity, commitment, listening – and humanity itself.’
– Linda Jaivin, The Saturday Paper

'A witty and compassionate book about friendship, Indigenous self-determination and people under stress.'
– The Conversation

 Anthropology Australia, New Zealand & Oceania Oceania Mining

Critic Reviews

'A truly magnificent achievement' (Peter Carey)
'Wholly unexpected and original ... a gritty cross-cultural parable that ends with a fragile glimmer of hope.' (Tom Griffiths, Australian Book Review)
'A witty and compassionate book about friendship, Indigenous self-determination and people under stress.'
All stars
Most relevant
This book contains knowledge that all Australians who listen will benefit from increased awareness of the plight of the First Nations people.
Don Watson is a master story teller.

Australians All Let Us Relearn.

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A multi layered story that needed to be told and more importantly to be shared.

Awesome

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Best bit was the storytelling. The voice tempo and depth. The structural tension set against deep historic knowledge and calm. Made me sit out the back and just watch for a while.

Keep thinking about Neville’s story battered and wise

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The detail was necessary in a non-fictional account, but it was hard to process it confidently into general findings about

The complexity of social relationships within this indigenous society and between that group and the Vietnam war vets

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This is one of Don Watson's best books, covering as it does aspects of the Vietnam War, and a particular group of indigenous people in a remote settlement in the NT. Some of what we read about indigenous people and culture is rather vague and general, but Watson makes sure he gives as much detail as he can, about the day-to-day lives of the people he writes about. Like most of us, they are represented as being neither saints nor crooks, but somewhere in between. Neville White is portrayed as a great character in recent Australian history, or not so recent.

A superb portrait of a great man

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In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.