Voss

In the 1840s the obsessive German explorer Voss sets out to cross the Australian continent, sustained by a strange, wordless spiritual bond with Laura Trevelyan, a young woman he leaves behind in Sydney. White's novel holds together two worlds: colonial Sydney, with the Bonner household and the harbour from which the expedition departs, and the vast unmapped interior, drawn from the real inland journeys of explorers like Leichhardt, where the party is broken and Voss meets his death.

Laura Trevelyan

The Bonner house, Sydney

Chapter 1

In the Bonners' drawing room the proud, unbending Voss and the reserved, intelligent Laura meet and strike the strange current that binds them across the whole book. Colonial Sydney, all propriety and commerce, is the world Voss disdains and Laura outgrows, and the fixed point from which she follows him in spirit.

Chapter 1

explicit The novel opens in the comfortable Sydney house of the merchant Bonner, Laura's uncle; sited in the real colonial town, in the well-to-do quarters near the harbour.

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