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Australia Tourism: Recommended Books

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Recommended Books

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Australian literature has come a long way since the days when the bush poets A. B. "Banjo" Paterson and Henry Lawson penned their odes to a way of life now largely lost. The best known of these is Paterson's epic The Man from Snowy River (Buccaneer Books, 1996), which first hit the bestseller list in 1895 and was made into a film. But the literary scene has always been lively, and Australia has a wealth of classics, many of them with the Outback at their heart.

Miles Franklin wrote My Brilliant Career (HarperCollins, 2001), the story of a young woman faced with the dilemma of choosing between marriage and a career, in 1901; Colleen McCullough's Thorn Birds (Avon, 1996) is a romantic epic about forbidden love between a Catholic priest and a young woman; We of the Never Never (Avon, 1984) by Mrs. Aeneas Gunn, tells the story of a young woman who leaves the comfort of her Melbourne home to live on a cattle station in the Northern Territory; and Walkabout (Sundance, 1984) by James V. Marshall explores the relationship between an Aborigine and two lost children in the bush. It was later made into a powerful film.

If you can find it, The Long Farewell (Penguin Books, 1983) by Don Charlwood presents firsthand diary accounts of long journeys from Europe to Australia in the last century. A good historical account of the early days is Geoffrey Blainey's The Tyranny of Distance (Pan Macmillan, 1977), first published in 1966. Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding (Vintage Books, 1988) is a best-selling nonfiction study of the country's early days. For a contemporary, if somewhat dark, take on the settlement and development of Sydney, delve into John Birmingham's Leviathan (Random House, 1999). From an Aboriginal perspective, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (University of Queensland Press, 1997) by Doris Pilkington tells the true story of three young girls from the "Stolen Generation" who ran away from a mission school to return to their families (a movie version was released in 2002).

Modern novelists include David Malouf, Elizabeth Jolley, Helen Garner, Sue Woolfe, and Peter Carey, whose True History of the Kelly Gang (Vintage Books, 2001), a fictionalized autobiography of the outlaw Ned Kelly, won the Booker Prize in 2001. West Australian Tim Winton evokes his part of the continent in stunning prose; his latest novel, Dirt Music (Scribner, 2002), is no exception.

Outsiders who have tackled Australia include Jan Morris and Bill Bryson. Morris's Sydney (Viking) was published in 1992, and Bryson's In a Sunburned Country (Broadway Books, 2001), while not always a favorite with Australians, may appeal to American readers.

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