Capricornia

Author	Alexis Wright
ISBN	1920882176

Hailed as a "literary sensation" by The New York Times Book Review, Carpentaria is the luminous award-winning novel by Australian Aboriginal writer and activist Alexis Wright.

Alexis Wright employs mysticism, stark reality, and pointed imagination to re-create the land and the Aboriginal...

Author	George Johnston
ISBN	0207187320

3.5 stars
It was only after I finished reading My Brother Jack by George Johnston that I discovered it had been the winner of the 1964 Miles Franklin award. To win, novels must be of the highest literary merit and present Australian life in any of its phases There is no question in my mind that this was...

Author	Patrick White
ISBN	0099324512

Patrick White’s style is a unique blend of roughness and literacy that can become quite absorbing, mesmerizing even, for its timelessness. The minor details of ordinary lives fuse with poetic vision and transform the common experience of man into the absolute essence that holds the power to make...

Author	Frank Moorhouse
ISBN	1740510372

A contemporary romantic Australian masterpiece, Grand Days tells of the moral and sexual awakening of an idealistic young Australian woman working in the diplomatic corps in Europe in the aftermath of World War I.

On a train from Paris to Geneva, Edith Campbell Berry meets Major Ambrose Westwood...

Author	Thomas Keneally
ISBN	0207197164

The extraordinary Booker Prize shortlisted story of a black man's revenge against an unjust and intolerant society. Thomas Keneally was born in Sydney Australia in 1935. He studied to be a Catholic priest but abandoned his vocation to take up teaching and writing. He is the author of numerous works...

Author	Jeannie Gunn
ISBN	1406500232

I had already read this book many years ago but somehow I had forgotten how sad the ending is! To have so much for just fourteen months and then have to return to Melbourne alone to pick up the pieces of her former life. It must have been really hard.

Anyway, I enjoyed this memoir from 1902, when Australia...

Author

Kenneth Cook

Filmed as The Outback

The Film Ink series presents the novels that inspired the work of some of the most celebrated directors of our time. While each novel is first and foremost a classic in its own right, these books offer the dedicated cinephile a richer understanding of the most illustrious...

Author	Alex Miller
ISBN	0340766913

Betrayed by her husband, Annabelle Beck retreats from Melbourne to her old family home in tropical North Queensland where she meets Bo Rennie, one of the Jangga tribe. Intrigued by Bo's claim that he holds the key to her future, Annabelle sets out with him on a path of recovery that leads back to her childhood...

Author	Randolph Stow
ISBN	0140028358

Do not think less of anyone for hating this if they had to read it in high school. I had to as well and I despised this book. I actually grew up in Geraldton in the 70s and 80s and it seemed as though not much had changed since the 40s, excpept mabe for the war. Hated hated hated it. Trying to explain to some first...

Author	Henry Handel Richardson
ISBN	0848259637

Set in Australia during the gold-mining boom, this remarkable trilogy is one of the classics of Australian literature.
Henry Handel Richardson’s great literary achievement, comprising the novels Australia Felix, The Way Home and Ultima Thule, weaves together many themes. Richard Mahony,...

Author	Watkin Tench
ISBN	1875847278

Watkin Tench stepped ashore at Botany Bay with the First Fleet in January 1788. He was in his late twenties, a captain of the marines, and on the adventure of his life. Insatiably curious, with a natural genius for storytelling, Tench wrote two enthralling accounts of the infant colony - A Narrative of...

Author	Geoffrey Blainey
ISBN	0333338367

'One of the most illuminating books ever written on Australian history.' - The Bulletin

In "The Tyranny of Distance", an Australian classic that has been continuously in print since 1967, Geoffrey Blainey describes how distance and isolation have been central to Australia's history and...

Author

Frank J. Hardy

Power Without Glory caused a sensation when it was released, leading to a famous court case. It is a thinly veiled description of the rise to power of real life figure John Wren (in the book 'John West').

Some other people alluded to in the book include Tommy Bent, Sir Samuel Gillott, the gangster...

Author	Katharine Susannah Prichard
ISBN	0207132178

Coonardoo is the moving story of a young Aboriginal woman trained form childhood to be the housekeeper at Wytaliba station and, as such, destined to look after its owner, Hugh Watt. The love between Coonardoo and Hugh, which so shocked its readers when the book was first published in 1929, is never acknowledged...

Author	Robert Drewe
ISBN	0142003158

The first novel written about the bushcountry gunslinger who was both the national hero and devil incarnate of Australia, Ned Kelly imagines the inner life of a figure described by historian Manning Clark as "a wild ass of a man, snarling, roaring and frothing like a ferocious beast when the tamer entered...

Author	Dorothy Porter
ISBN	1852425490

Mickey is a sweet nineteen-year-old girl, who loves poetry and poets, but has just gone missing in suspicious circumstances. Private investigator Jill Fitzpatrick is hired to find her. In her search for the truth, in what becomes a murder hunt, Jill is seduced by the alluring Diana Mailand, Mickey's...

Author

Christina Stead

High-minded, independent, imaginative, Teresa Hawkins knows only one commandment: ‘Thou shalt love’. Emotionally starved by her ramshackle family, Teresa searches for fulfilment outside her stultifying life as a working girl in a large city. Obsessed with love and sex she pins her affection...

Author	Dymphna Cusack
ISBN	0207197563

The book opens with a stuck lift and an Aussie injured soldier working as a liftman playing a two-up game with some American soldiers (I had to look up this game myself, it’s to do with spinning/throwing coins). Hence, the title Come In Spinner. These soldiers themselves are not the main characters...

Author	Thea Astley
ISBN	0140121382

Like a deal of Astley's fiction, It's Raining in Mango is set in north Queensland, an inhospitable locale in many ways but one which the Laffey family of Mango find compelling and to which they are drawn back after their half-hearted forays into urban life. The book is written in the saga form, spanning...

Author	Peter Goldsworthy
ISBN	0207197741

Peter Goldsworthy’s Darwin. In Maestro, the setting, vibrantly alive, is a character in its own right.

Darwin circa 1967 may seem an unlikely place for literary inspiration, but Peter Goldsworthy’s, Maestro, with its exotic setting and the emotions he attaches to it, is an irresistible...

Author	D'Arcy Niland
ISBN	0141186135

A shiralee is a swag, a burden, a bloody millstone - and that's what four-year-old Buster is to her father, Macauley. He takes the child on the road with him to spite his wife, but months pass and still no word comes to ask for the little girl back. Strangers to each other at first, father and daughter drift...

Author	Kate Grenville
ISBN	0702233307

It’s Christmas time and I’ve been kind in upping two and a half stars to three.

The ‘real’ Joan, and all her imagined selves, are tall, freckled, flat chested, strong willed and want to make history. Quite what makes history is not clear.

The Joans adventure sometimes, love...

Author

Elizabeth Harrower

It was interesting reading this Aussie classic written in the 1960s and set at the start of WWII through to the 1940s. The lives and expectations of women were so different at that time so the novel must be read with that in mind.

Laura and Clare Vaizey are happy at their Sydney boarding school when...