Patrick White is the only Australian writer ever to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His writing was once described as 'verbal sludge' by an Australian critic. White's writing intersects with the artworks of Sidney Nolan whose desert paintings were White's only way into the outback of Voss.Nolan's Eliza Fraser series inform the language and events of White's A Fringe of Leavesand there are other less obvious connections throughout the two artists' oeuvres.