The most recommended books about Australia

Bacon is a writer in love with language. Her prose is fluid, spontaneous, and consistently engaging, and she sparks characterisation in deft, painterly strokes. Serengotti is a literary crime novel, although it’s much more than that.

It examines culture and displacement, what happens when things turn sour, and how to right yourself. It’s a story of truth and consequences, a puzzle enough to puzzle yet not to confuse. Here, Bacon mines her African-Australian heritage and finds a rich seam. The work is infused with details that push the story forward, enhance the text, and create an environment of understanding.

Whilst much of her work is speculative, this is not the case here, but it matters not. Bacon shows us that magic can exist in the every day without embellishment. Serengotti awaits your exploration.

Melanie is passionate about the great outdoors and has hiked all over Australia. Her book (a second edition is due out in early 2022) covers an incredible 66 walks and her love of the landscape shines through. Some of the walks are well known, such as Tasmania’s Overland Track, while others are lesser-known. Designed for all abilities and time constraints, there’s really something for everyone, whether you want to walk in tropical rainforests or rocky ancient escarpments. It makes me want to pull on my hiking boots and go!

As a big sci-fi fan, I often loved exploring the idea of what would happen if the human race ever met aliens. In Galax-Arena, three children are kidnapped and forced to perform death-defying circus stunts in order to entertain their captors. Not only does the story contain some riveting descriptions of acrobatic feats and tricks, the story explores fascinating concepts of slavery, trust, and what it means to be a child in comparison to an adult. 

Peter Temple wasn’t just a good crime writer; he was a master storyteller. He’s my crime writing hero and I strongly recommend all his books, but as a ‘flawed detective’ it’s hard to go past his series starring Jack Irish and set in Melbourne, Australia. A former attorney, Irish went to pieces after the murder of his wife and now makes a living doing odd jobs like recovering debts. 

In Bad Debts, the first in the series, one of Irish’s clients calls him for help and by the time he answers, the client’s been murdered. Irish is emotionally damaged, an outsider. It’s hard-boiled crime, full of black humour, and featuring a wonderful array of Australian characters.

No list of books about maps and map making would be complete without the inclusion of an atlas. Nor could any such list be complete without reflecting on the remarkable mapping achievements of First Peoples around the world. 

My favorite atlas is the Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia. It is meticulously researched, beautifully presented, and richly narrated. The atlas explores the concepts, technologies, and deep history of mapping by Australian First Peoples and charts the more recent devastating impacts of colonization on Indigenous Australians.

But it also celebrates the rich and vibrant culture of today’s First Peoples in Australia; their incredible diversity of language, culture, art, and science; and their unwavering connection to the land where I live today. 

This is a memoir of life in the Riverina district in early colonial rural Australia written by the wonderfully insightful Mary Gilmore. It’s full of fascinating detail about domestic life and class consciousness, where poor families had to make do with wooden needles and cutlery and women were so used to sitting on blocks that they felt unsafe on a chair; whereas the better-off had standards to maintain so women’s skirts had to be weighted at the hem for fear of showing an ankle while horse-riding. How a line was drawn across the floor at the Wagga Wagga Club Ball ‘to separate the “grandees” from the “commonage”’. She is also fascinated by Aboriginal culture and how they so naturally looked after the land and preserved the fruit, animals, and fish, evidence that ‘the aborigines as a nation were as naturally intellectual as we ourselves.’  

There are loads of great picture books that feature Australian animals but one of my favorites is Diary of a Wombat. It’s a very simple story told from the perspective of a wombat and it highlights their adorable, but also irascible and fairly destructive personalities. It’s incredibly difficult to pull off an ‘animal voice’ without it sounding like a person or a bit patronising, but Jackie French really nails it in this book, probably because of her extensive experience with looking after wombats. And the illustrations by Bruce Whatley are full of fun and joy. It makes me laugh every time I read it.

If wombats read books, I think this is the one they would love best, and what book about animals needs a better endorsement than that? 

This book exposes the breathtaking transformation to by far the most successful sporting organization in Australia, the Australian Football League, over the last twenty years. Warner’s is a cautionary tale relevant to all sports, and especially to the football codes around the world.

The Boys’ Club catalogues unethical behaviour of breath-taking scope and gall, imposed by three men. Warner recounts numerous cases of vindictive threat, intimidation, lying, and bullying. And a misogynistic culture at AFL headquarters.

Ex-Victorian Premier, Jeff Kennett, lamented they don’t report to anyone. They appoint puppets and yes-men to highly paid positions around them, forming a Praetorian Guard that protects the core oligarchy, which pays itself lavishly.

This is still one of the coolest books I’ve ever read. It has wonderfully left-of-centre characters, original plot, and world building, a hint of darkness, and sharp dialogue. I love its Australian flavour (just enough to feel familiar). The setting is also off-kilter enough to be dystopian, but not so much so that it feels alien.

Best of all, at the novel's heart is an engaging, offbeat romance. There are also well-handled themes of alienation, grief, identity, and self-discovery.

(It was part of a gift pack of novels my Australian publisher sent me when I signed my first book deal back in 2011, and I instantly fell in love with it.)

If you like lushly written literary fiction about art, desire, friendship, and ambition, you’ll love The Strays.

Lily and Eva meet as children, and Eva – the daughter of a famous modernist artist – soon draws solitary Lily into her avant-garde family life. As the years pass and the two begin to leave childhood behind, their relationship makes new demands of them both.

Although The Strays features a large cast of characters in its makeshift family of artists, the connection between Eva and Lily is the beating heart of the novel, and is by turns tender, destructive, and tragic.