Dead is Dead. But Dead is not Done. Not over.

- Gertrude Stein

We gathered early in the morning. Barbara Mobbs had the ashes in a smart paper shopping bag. Manoly Lascaris hadn't wanted them scattered with Patrick White's in the park in front of the house but in "the sea around Sydney". There was talk of a yacht to take them out past the Heads but in the end Mobbs, the shrewd guardian of White's career and estate, decided we would do the deed from some "very Greek rocks" at Clovelly. At about 7 am, eight of us struck off across the park. All those Manoly had charmed and intrigued in his long life had come down to these few: the loyal literary executor, three nurses, the biographer and a handful of Manoly's "young friends". Kerry Walker, wearing a heavy coat and dark glasses, carried a bowl of white daisies. We came out on the lip of a cliff to find bare rocks below us. Mobbs said, "The tide is out."

We climbed down and after some hesitation found a spot where waves were washing through a rock pool. A couple of fishermen had lines in the surf not far off. One of the young friends wanted to read a love poem by Cavafy and said a few words about Manoly meeting the poet in Cairo, an old man in a yellow suit with teeth stained from cigarettes. I said, "He told me it was Alexandria." One of the nurses added, "They met in the bank." As it happens, both Lascaris and White were rather sniffy about Cavafy, preferring the verse of his fellow Greek George Seferis. We stood stiffly at the edge of the rock pool as the lines were read about two men fucking in a café through "half-opened clothes". It was terrible but no one flinched.

I held the plastic box while the poetry reader worked away at the lid with a knife. It popped open. We all looked in, as if we'd see something telling or unexpected there. I handed the box to Mobbs. She demurred briefly, then went to the edge and scattered a handful of ashes that fell straight to the bottom. The water was only a foot or so deep. We all took a turn and there was soon a carpet of white on the floor of the pool. The flowers - hibiscus as well as daisies - did what the ash was supposed to do and drifted away very beautifully. We stood about in the sun for a bit and then drove to a café in Bronte for breakfast. Grizzled men were coming up from the beach and beautiful Cavafy boys climbed out of delivery vans. We swapped Manoly stories. He was a great storyteller and a great source of stories. Over coffee Mobbs recalled remarking to him at some point in his long widowhood in Centennial Park: "‘You have had a big life and now you have a small life.' And he replied, ‘Both are equally satisfactory.'"

Lascaris's death freed her to pull off perhaps the greatest surprise in this country's literary history. In mid 2006 she offered the National Library of Australia a stockpile of White's letters, notebooks and manuscripts. Outside a very small circle, their existence was entirely unknown. The library was both amazed and abashed. On display at that moment in a travelling exhibition of its treasures was a gruff 1977 letter from White to the library's director: "I can't let you have my papers because I don't keep any. My manuscripts are destroyed as soon as the book is published and I put very little into notebooks, don't keep my friends' letters as I urge them not to keep mine, and anything unfinished when I die is to be burnt."

Mobbs was directed to do just that in White's will but found she "couldn't burn them in a blue fit". By the time of his death, she had been working for him in one capacity or another for 17 years. He dedicated his last novel, The Memoirs of Many in One in 1986, to the woman he called ‘The Flying Nun'. Though the will was emphatic, she believed that had he really wanted this evidence of his long literary life to disappear, he would have burnt the papers himself. White and Lascaris spent days destroying letters and manuscripts before moving from the outskirts of Sydney to Centennial Park, in the 1960s. Had White wanted to stage another conflagration before his death he only had to ask Mobbs for a hand. Many times he showed her the notebooks, letters and manuscripts crammed into his desk but, she said, "He never told me to get the matches."

The survival of 32 boxes of White's papers was revealed with immense hoopla. ‘Patrick White's return from the pit,' read the banner headline in the Sydney Morning Herald. For the first time in many years, White was back on the front pages of the papers. But here was something curious: while the press, fans and scholars dived on the biographical material - the notebooks and letters - we shied away from the manuscripts. It says a great deal about the sinking reputation of the most prodigious literary imagination in the history of this nation that we were all more curious about the life than the writing. After being displayed for a few triumphal weeks, the three manuscripts were returned to the library's strongroom all but unexamined.