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Cloudstreet
Tim Winton
Novel, 1991
Two working-class families share a rambling house in Perth across the 1940s to 60s, steeped in Western Australian coast and river life.
Books set in Australia
Six books by writers from Australia, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with Cloudstreet and Picnic at Hanging Rock.
About the literature of Australia
Australian writer Patrick White won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973, and his novel Voss sends a German explorer across the interior in 1845. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have told stories aloud for many thousands of years, long before the penal colonies begun in 1788 brought written English to the continent. In the late nineteenth century, bush ballads, of which Waltzing Matilda is the best known, helped shape a popular picture of the outback.
Robert Hughes, an Australian-born historian, tells the brutal story of convict transportation in The Fatal Shore. Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang gives the outlaw Ned Kelly a raw Irish-Australian voice in rural Victoria. Sally Morgan's memoir My Place traces her search for her Aboriginal family heritage in Western Australia. Convict origins, the bush and Indigenous dispossession recur throughout.
By writers from Australia
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Picnic at Hanging Rock
Joan Lindsay
Novel, 1967
A schoolgirl disappearance on Valentine's Day 1900 in Victoria evokes the uneasy, ancient bush against colonial propriety.
Voss
Patrick White
Novel, 1957
A German explorer's doomed 1845 expedition across the Australian interior, exploring colonial Sydney society and the harsh desert.
True History of the Kelly Gang
Peter Carey
Novel, 2000
Ned Kelly's outlaw life in 19th-century rural Victoria is told in raw Irish-Australian vernacular.
Jasper Jones
Craig Silvey
Novel, 2009
A teenager in a 1965 Western Australian mining town confronts racism, secrets and small-town prejudice during a hot summer.
My Place
Sally Morgan
Memoir, 1987
A memoir of uncovering Aboriginal family heritage in Western Australia, revealing the hidden history of Indigenous dispossession and identity.
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