The release of the precious collection of previously unknown papers, including manuscripts and notebooks, comes 16 years after the Sydney author's death.
It had long been thought the writer had destroyed his manuscripts and personal papers, the Director-General of Australia's National Library Jan Fullerton said today.
"Patrick White himself fuelled comments that he destroyed all his manuscripts, viewed as a great loss to scholarship," Ms Fullerton said.
"This acquisition completely changes our understanding of how White lived and worked, making the new collection all the more special and valuable to the nation."
The find is of "immeasurable importance" for literary scholars all over the world, Ms Fullerton said.
"The breadth of this new collection illuminates the things that White treasured for 60 years and is a window into his personal and literary life that until now has been inaccessible," she said.
White's literary agent and executor of 30 years, Barbara Mobbs, approached the library with an offer for the 60-year-old collection.
The library then commissioned a detailed examination and independent and internal evaluations of the contents of 33 boxes and paid an undisclosed sum for the collection, National Library Director of Publications and Events Dr Paul Hetherington said.
"The National Library was approached first and we are delighted that we were because we have been collecting material relating to Patrick White for a long period," Dr Hetherington said.
The collection contains research for, and the beginnings of, all of White's novels as well as personal photographs and notebooks from the 1930s and recipes reflecting his interest in international cuisine.
"To have this material now available for scholars to use for research and to inform our knowledge of White's working habits and his life and relationships with people ... is an extraordinary find," Dr Hetherington said.
Literary buffs would appreciate iconic objects like White's often-worn beret, beanie and annotated speeches about his favourite causes, he said.
"There's material here that people didn't know existed," Dr Hetherington said.
"There's also a couple of unpublished novels in this collection, they're both incomplete, but they're substantial… there's also some unknown works represented included some manuscripts and, as well as that, there's drafts of poems, some of which have not been previously known about."
White often said the main value of his work was in his finished work and he was not interested in preserving manuscripts, Dr Hetherington said.
"What's important overall is that this provides a whole range of possibilities to understand White better, to understand his working methods better and to understand the different ways he approached different kinds of work."
Selected items from the collection will be on display in the Library's visitor centre, in Canberra, from this Saturday.
The collection runs to thousands of documents and fills 33 archive boxes.
Most attention has focused on the unpublished novels The Binoculars and Helen Neil and The Hanging Gardens, but it also includes homely domestic details including a hand-written menu for a week (Monday - chicken, Tuesday - lentils) and his recipes - perhaps enough for a literary cookbook.