The character of Johann Voss is based on an actual nineteenth-century explorer, Ludwig Leichhardt, who attempted to cross the entire continent of Australia from east to west in 1848 but disappeared in the attempt. With visionary intensity, Patrick White imagines Voss's last journey across the desert and the waterlogged plains of central Australia. But this magisterial novel is also a love story, for the explorer is inextricably bound up with an orphaned young woman whose inner life, like his own, is at odds with the world. In language poetic and passionate yet grounded in shrewd, often comic, social observations and naturalistic portrayals of farmers, convicts, employers, servants, and aborigines, White creates both a spellbinding adventure and a myth for our time.