books tagged “Australia”

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Cloudstreet: Library Edition
by Tim Winton

ISBN 1555971830 (1-55597-183-0)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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Book summary:
Hailed as a classic, Tim Winton's masterful family saga is both a paean to working-class Australians and an unflinching examination of the human heart's capacity for sorrow, joy, and endless gradations in between. An award-winning work, Cloudstreet exemplifies the brilliant ability of fiction to captivate and inspire.
Struggling to rebuild their lives after being touched by disaster, the Pickle family, who've inherited a big house called Cloudstreet in a suburb of Perth, take in the God-fearing Lambs as tenants. The Lambs have suffered their own catastrophes, and determined to survive, they open up a grocery on the ground floor. From 1944 to 1964, the shared experiences of the two overpopulated clans -- running the gamut from drunkenness, adultery, and death to resurrection, marriage, and birth -- bond them to each other and to the bustling, haunted house in ways no one could have anticipated. [via]
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Dirt Music
by Tim Winton

ISBN 0330490265 (0-330-49026-5)
Softcover, Macmillan Pub Ltd

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Book summary:
Arguably one of the finest of all Australian novelists, Tim Winton shows that he remains in top form with Dirt Music, a wistful, charged, ardent novel of female loss and amatory redemption. The setting is Winton's favorite: the thorn-bushed, sheep-farmed, sun-punished boondocks of Western Australia. The cast is limited but spirited: the two chief protagonists are Georgie Jutland, a fortysomething adoptive mother with a vodka problem, and Luther Fox, a brooding, feral, bushwhacking poacher.
The plot is something else altogether: an elegantly wearied, cleverly finessed mutual odyssey that opts to follow the sometimes intertwining, sometimes diverging lives of poor Georgie and Luther as they try to deal with the odd alliance they comprise, as well as the complex and fractured lives they want to leave behind. The way Georgie deals with her unwitting inheritance of two dissatisfied adopted kids is particularly touching, poignant, and well written.
Best of all, though, is the prose. Somehow it manages to be simultaneously juicy and dry, like a desert cactus. This is especially true when Winton touches on the scented harshness of the Down Under outback: "the music is jagged and pushy and he for one just doesn't want to bloody hear it, but the outbursts of strings and piano are as austere and unconsoling as the pindan plain out there with its spindly acacia and red soil." This is a wise and accomplished novel. --Sean Thomas, Amazon.co.uk [via]
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Down Under
by Bill Bryson

ISBN 038540817X (0-385-40817-X)
Hardcover, Doubleday

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Book summary:
A copy that has been read. but remains in excellent condition. have no pen mark, all copy are intact. Picture is the description. Thank you for shopping with us. [via]
More editions of Down Under:
- Down Under: ISBN 038540817X (0-385-40817-X)
  Hardcover, Doubleday
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English Passengers
by Matthew Kneale

ISBN 038549744X (0-385-49744-X)
Softcover, Anchor Books

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Christopher Columbus was looking for a passage to India when he ran full-tilt boogie into the Americas. One of the narrators of Matthew Kneale's ambitious historical novel English Passengers has more modest aspirations: Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley wants only to smuggle a little tobacco, brandy, and French pornography from the Isle of Mann to a secluded beach in England. Yet somehow in the process, he and his crew end up weighing anchor for Australia. Worse, they're forced to carry three temperamental Englishmen bound for Tasmania on a mission to discover the exact location of the Garden of Eden. The year is 1857, and the study of geology is beginning to make serious inroads into areas of religious doctrine. When the Reverend Geoffrey Wilson runs across a scientific treatise that puts the age of Silurian limestone somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand years, he is scandalized: "This was despite the fact that the Bible tells, and with great clarity, that the earth was created a mere six thousand years ago." His many attempts to prove the Bible's accuracy lead, eventually, to a scientific expedition comprising himself, Timothy Renshaw, a dilettante botanist, and Dr. Thomas Potter.
Now jump back 30 years, to 1828, when a revolution of sorts is stirring on the island of Tasmania. Over the years, white settlers have been encroaching on aboriginal land and relations have deteriorated into violence. At the heart of the action is Peevay, a young half-breed abandoned by his aborigine mother, who had been kidnapped and raped by a white escaped convict. Now his vengeful mother is leading a war against the whites, and Peevay, desperate to win her love, has joined her. Chapters from the past narrated by Peevay and augmented by letters and dispatches from white settlers alternate with the sections told by Kewley, Wilson, Renshaw, and Potter. Eventually, of course, the two time lines intersect with momentous results.
War, mutiny, shipwreck, and not a little farce make English Passengers a gripping read, but it is Matthew Kneale's literary ventriloquism that renders it remarkable. In a novel with so many different points of view, the individuality of each voice stands out. There is, for instance, the mutinous Dr. Potter, whose descent into paranoia and egomania results in diary entries reminiscent of a 19th-century psychotic Bridget Jones: "Manxmen = treacherous even to v. last. Self heard Brew (lashed to mainmast as per usual) instructing helmsman to steer N.N.W. When self questioned he re. this he claiming we = carried into Bay of Biscay by difficult sea currents + must set course to avoid Breton Peninsular. He pointing to distant point of land to N.N.E. claiming this = Brittany. Self = doubtful." But perhaps the most compelling voice in English Passengers belongs to Peevay, who paints a vivid picture of aboriginal life in a foreign tongue he nonetheless makes his own:
When we sat so in the dark, after our eating, Tartoyen told us stories--secret stories that I will not say even now--about the moon and sun, and how everyone got made, from men and wallaby to seal and kangaroo rat and so. Also he told who was in those rocks and mountains and stars, and how they went there. Until, by and by, I could hear stories as we walked across the world, and divine how it got so, till I knew the world as if he was some family fellow of mine.
By the close of this epic tale, the world Peevay had known is gone forever and the lives of the Manx sailors and English passengers have been irrevocably changed. Based on real events in Tasmanian history, Matthew Kneale's novel delivers a home truth about Australia's brutal colonial past, even as it conveys the wonder and allure of the age of exploration. --Alix Wilber [via]
More editions of English Passengers:
- English Passengers: ISBN 0385497431 (0-385-49743-1)
  Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
- English Passengers: ISBN 038549744X (0-385-49744-X)
  Softcover, Anchor Books
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Eucalyptus
by Murray Bail

ISBN 1860464955 (1-86046-495-5)
Softcover, Harvill Pr

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"The idea that Holland's daughter was like the princess locked in the tower of a damp castle was of course false. After all, she was living on a property in western New South Wales."
Once upon a time, on a property in western New South Wales, a man named Holland plants hundreds of varieties of eucalyptus trees, then decrees that only the suitor who can name each and every one of them will be worthy to marry his beautiful daughter, Ellen. Men try and fail: there is the gentle schoolteacher who "had correctly named eighty-seven eucalypts and was doing it well when he went blank at the fatly handsome Jarrah up against the fence behind the house"; and the New Zealander who "came up against, and was defeated by, one of the many Stringybarks..." Old men, young men, commercial travelers, sheep-shearers--even a "smiling Chinaman ... all the way from Darwin." Not one is successful. Then, one day, along comes Mr. Roy Cave, a man renowned in the eucalyptus world, someone who "employed with lip-smacking relish the terms 'petiole,' 'inflorescences,' 'falacte' and 'lanceolate,' and he was also comfortable with 'sessile', 'fusiform' and 'conculorous.'"
Even in so wonderfully fractured a fairy tale as Murray Bail's Eucalyptus, it's obvious that Roy Cave is hardly the stuff romantic dreams are made of. Indeed, despite her father's warning to "beware of any man who deliberately tells a story," Ellen's Prince Charming turns out to be a mysterious young stranger who finds her wandering among her father's trees and spins her tale after tale, each one tied to a different kind of eucalypt. As the weeks go by, Mr. Cave continues to successfully identify every tree on the property, thus drawing ever closer to his prize. Meanwhile, Ellen's other suitor captures first her imagination and then her heart with stories of apprentice hairdressers who fall in love with plain-Jane heiresses; solicitors' daughters involved with married men; and lonely canary breeders who almost find happiness with spinster piano teachers. What all of these off-kilter stories have in common is a theme of missed opportunities, and lovers who realize too late that they were made for each other. Will Ellen, too, end up like one of these the sad-hearted heroines, or will her would-be lover find a way to thwart Mr. Cave's relentless victory march through the Eucalypts to claim her hand?
There is so much to love about Bail's novel that it's difficult to identify exactly which of its qualities make it such a complete delight. Is it Ellen's "speckled beauty ... so covered in small brown-black moles she attracted men, every sort of man"? Is it the detailed descriptions of the landscape? The way Bail uses them to comment on human nature, on the nature of storytelling and of language itself ("a paragraph is not so different from a paddock--similar shape, similar function")? Or is it the wacky charm of the Scheharezade-like suitor's urban tales? ("Still in the vicinity of low-height eucalypts he went on to mention, in a thoughtful voice, how in an outer suburb of Hobart an actuary with a well-known insurance company needed a stepladder to woo a widow who passed by his house every day.") Whatever the source of Bail's peculiar magic, Eucalyptus casts a spell that will carry readers from first page to last and leave them wishing for a thousand and one more stories just like it. --Alix Wilber [via]
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Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living
by Carrie Tiffany

ISBN 0743286383 (0-7432-8638-3)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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Book summary:
In this sensual, witty, and startlingly original first novel, Jean Finnegan searches for her place in a tumultuous world wracked by the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II. Carrie Tiffany captures the frailty and beauty of the human condition and vividly evokes the hope and disappointment of an era.
Billowing dust and information, the government "Better Farming Train" slides through the wheat fields and small towns of Australia, bringing advice to the people living on the land. The train is staffed by irresistibly eccentric agricultural and domestic experts, from Sister Crock, the prim head of "women's subjects," to Mr. Ohno, the Japanese chicken specialist, to Robert Pettergree, a scientist with an unusual taste for soil. Amid the swaying cars full of cows, pigs, and wheat, a strange and swift seduction occurs between Robert and Jean. In an atmosphere of heady scientific idealism they settle in the impoverished Mallee farmland with the ambition of transforming the land through science.
In luminous prose, Tiffany writes about the challenges of farming, the character of small towns, the stark and terrifying beauty of the Australian landscape, and the fragile relationships among man, science, and nature. Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living is a passionate and heartbreaking novel from an astonishing new writer. [via]
More editions of Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living:
- Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living : A Novel: ISBN 0743286375 (0-7432-8637-5)
  Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
- Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living: ISBN 0743286383 (0-7432-8638-3)
  Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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The Fatal Shore
by Robert Hughes

ISBN 0394753666 (0-394-75366-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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A description of the transportation of men, women and children out of Georgian England into a horrific penal system in Australia. [via]
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The Floating Brothel
by Sian Rees

ISBN 0786867876 (0-7868-6787-6)
Hardcover, Hyperion Books

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A seafaring story with a twist -- the incredible voyage of a shipload of "disorderly girls" and the men who transported them, fell for them, and sold them.
This riveting work of rediscovered history tells for the first time the plight of the female convicts aboard the Lady Julian, which set sail from England in 1789 and arrived in Australia's Botany Bay a year later. The women, most of them petty criminals, were destined for New South Wales to provide its hordes of lonely men with sexual favors as well as progeny. But the story of their voyage is even more incredible, and here it is expertly told by a historian with roots in the boatbuilding business and a true love of the sea.
SiGn Rees delved into court documents and firsthand accounts to extract the stories of these women's experiences on board a ship that both held them prisoner and offered them refuge from their oppressive existence in London. At the heart of the story is the passionate relationship between Sarah Whitelam, a convict, and the ship's steward, John Nicol, whose personal journals provided much of the material for this book. Along the way, Rees brings the vibrant, bawdy world of London -- and the sights, smells, and sounds of an eighteenth-century ship -- vividly to life. In the tradition of Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea, this is a winning combination of dramatic high seas adventure and untold history. [via]
More editions of The Floating Brothel:
- The Floating Brothel: ISBN 0747272867 (0-7472-7286-7)
  Hardcover, Headline
- The Floating Brothel: ISBN 0786867876 (0-7868-6787-6)
  Hardcover, Hyperion Books
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The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ship and its Cargo of Female Convicts
by Sian Rees

ISBN 0786886749 (0-7868-8674-9)
Softcover, Hyperion Press

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Now in paperback, the incredible true story of a shipload of "disorderly girls" and the men who transported them, fell for them, and sold them.
This riveting work of rediscovered history tells for the first time the plight of the female convicts aboard the Lady Julian, which set sail from England in 1789 and arrived in Australia's Sydney Cove a year later. The women, most of them petty criminals, were destined for New South Wales to provide its hordes of lonely men with both sexual favors and progeny. But the story of their voyage is even more incredible, and here it is expertly told by a historian with roots in the boatbuilding business and a true love of the sea.
Sian Rees delved into court documents and firsthand accounts to extract the stories of these women's experiences on board a ship that both held them prisoner and offered them refuge from their oppressive existence in London. At the heart of the story is the passionate relationship between Sarah Whitelam, a convict, and the ship's steward, John Nicol, whose personal journals provided much of the material for this book. Along the way, Rees brings the vibrant, bawdy world of London -- and the sights, smells, and sounds of an eighteenth-century ship -- vividly to life. In the tradition of Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea, this is a winning combination of dramatic high seas adventure and untold history. [via]
More editions of The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ship and its Cargo of Female Convicts:
- The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ship and its Cargo of Female Convicts: ISBN 0786886749 (0-7868-8674-9)
  Softcover, Hyperion Press
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For The Term Of His Natural Life
by Marcus Clarke

ISBN 184588082X (1-84588-082-X)
Softcover, Nonsuch Pub

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So far the appearance of the vessel differed in nowise from that of an ordinary transport. But in the waist a curious sight presented itself. It was as though one had built a cattle-pen there. At the foot of the foremast, and at the quarter-deck, a strong barricade, loop-holed and furnished with doors for ingress and egress, ran across the deck from bulwark to bulwark. [via]
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Gould's Book of Fish
by Richard Flanagan

ISBN 0802139590 (0-8021-3959-0)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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Gould's Book of Fish, an extraordinary work of fact-based fiction by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan (Death of a River Guide) is a journey through the fringe madness of Down Under colonialism. Set during the 1830s in a hellish island prison colony off the Tasmanian coast, the novel plucks a real-life thief and prisoner, English forger William Buelow Gould, from the pages of history to act as protagonist-narrator. Through Gould's unique capacity to blend hyperbole, hyperrealism, and self-effacing honesty, the reader acquires a shockingly clear picture of daily torment on the island. Yet more remarkable is Gould's portrait of bizarre ambitions among prison authorities to further principles of art and science amidst so much misery. Key to such plans is Gould's talent as a painter and illustrator. The compound's surgeon, nursing hopes of publishing a definitive guide to the island's fish, leans heavily on Gould's ability to record the taxonomy of various species. Though Gould accommodates his masters, the manuscript, in his hands, becomes testimony to their perverse dreams of civilization and his own quick-witted survival instincts. Throughout, Flanagan never loses the well-imagined voice of Gould's candor or the character's dense descriptive powers, talents that translate into a thrilling text that reads like a blend of Melville and Burgess. --Tom Keogh [via]
More editions of Gould's Book of Fish:
- Gould's Book of Fish: ISBN 0802117112 (0-8021-1711-2)
  Hardcover, Grove Pr
- Gould's Book of Fish: ISBN 0802139590 (0-8021-3959-0)
  Softcover, Grove Pr
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His Natural Life
by Marcus Clarke

ISBN 0140430512 (0-14-043051-2)
Softcover, Penguin USA

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One of the greatest 19th-century Australian novels and the grand epic of the transportation system, this novel charts the misfortune of Richard Divine, falsely accused of murder, through the worst Australian penal settlements, while retaining his humanity and spiritual dignity. So powerful is Clarke's representation of the brutality of transportation that more than a century later historians still struggle to disentangle fact from tragic fiction. [via]
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In a Sunburned Country
by Bill Bryson

ISBN 0767903862 (0-7679-0386-2)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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Bill Bryson follows his Appalachian amble, A Walk in the Woods, with the story of his exploits in Australia, where A-bombs go off unnoticed, prime ministers disappear into the surf, and cheery citizens coexist with the world's deadliest creatures: toxic caterpillars, aggressive seashells, crocodiles, sharks, snakes, and the deadliest of them all, the dreaded box jellyfish. And that's just the beginning, as Bryson treks through sunbaked deserts and up endless coastlines, crisscrossing the "under-discovered" Down Under in search of all things interesting.
Bryson, who could make a pile of dirt compelling--and yes, Australia is mostly dirt--finds no shortage of curiosities. When he isn't dodging Portuguese man-of-wars or considering the virtues of the remarkable platypus, he visits southwest Gippsland, home of the world's largest earthworms (up to 12 feet in length). He discovers that Australia, which began nationhood as a prison, contains the longest straight stretch of railroad track in the world (297 miles), as well as the world's largest monolith (the majestic Uluru) and largest living thing (the Great Barrier Reef). He finds ridiculous place names: "Mullumbimby Ewylamartup, Jiggalong, and the supremely satisfying Tittybong," and manages to catch a cricket game on the radio, which is like
listening to two men sitting in a rowboat on a large, placid lake on a day when the fish aren't biting; it's like having a nap without losing consciousness. It actually helps not to know quite what's going on. In such a rarefied world of contentment and inactivity, comprehension would become a distraction.
"You see," Bryson observes, "Australia is an interesting place. It truly is. And that really is all I'm saying." Of course, Bryson--who is as much a travel writer here as a humorist, naturalist, and historian--says much more, and does so with generous amounts of wit and hilarity. Australia may be "mostly empty and a long way away," but it's a little closer now. --Rob McDonald [via]
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The Last Continent
by Terry Pratchett

ISBN 0061059072 (0-06-105907-2)
Softcover, Harper Prism

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Terry Pratchett's 22nd Discworld novel, The Last Continent, is a lighthearted tour of the fantasy land of Fourecks, a very Australian sort of place, with brief courses in theoretical physics and evolution thrown in for good measure. Pratchett returns to his first Discworld protagonist, the inept and cowardly wizard Rincewind, who habitually runs into trouble as fast as he flees. Rincewind's arrival in Fourecks has distorted the space-time continuum, and he has to sort it out before the whole place dries up and blows away. The situation is complicated because the actual problem is located 30,000 years in the past--just where the Faculty of the Unseen University currently are. Pretty frightening, given "the true wizard's instinct to amble aimlessly into dangerous places," and then "stop and argue ... about exactly what kind of danger it [is]."
If you're baffled by all this, no worries, mate. You needn't have read Pratchett before--not even the five previous Discworld novels starring Rincewind (The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Sourcery, Eric, and Interesting Times)--to enjoy this latest romp. Nor to have visited Australia. When you finish, however, you'll likely want to rush out and do both. --Nona Vero [via]
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Legacy
by Nevil Shute

ISBN 0688019773 (0-688-01977-3)
Hardcover, Harpercollins

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More editions of Legacy:
- Legacy: ISBN 0688019773 (0-688-01977-3)
  Hardcover, Harpercollins
Mutant Message
by Marlo Morgan, Carri Garrison

ISBN 1883473004 (1-883473-00-4)
Softcover, Bookpeople

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More editions of Mutant Message:
- Mutant Message: ISBN 1883473004 (1-883473-00-4)
  Softcover, Bookpeople
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Mutant Message Down Under
by Marlo Morgan, K. T. Travers

ISBN 0060723513 (0-06-072351-3)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Mutant Message Down Under is the fictional account of an American woman's spiritual odyssey through outback Australia. An underground bestseller in its original self-published edition, Marlo Morgan's powerful tale of challenge and endurance has a message for us all. Summoned by a remote tribe of nomadic Aborigines to accompany them on walkabout, the woman makes a four-month-long journey and learns how they thrive in natural harmony with the plants and animals that exist in the rugged lands of Australia's bush. From the first day of her adventure, Morgan is challenged by the physical requirements of the journey -- she faces daily tests of her endurance, challenges that ultimately contribute to her personal transformation. By traveling with this extraordinary community, Morgan becomes a witness to their essential way of being in a world based on the ancient wisdom and philosophy of a culture that is more than 50,000 years old. [via]
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My Brilliant Career
by Miles Franklin

ISBN 1419135961 (1-4191-3596-1)
Softcover, Kessinger Pub Co

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"A few months before I left Australia I got a letter from the bush signed 'Miles Franklin,' saying that the writer had written a novel, but knew nothing of editors and publishers, and asking me to read and advise. Something about the letter, which was written in a strong original hand, attracted me, so I sent for the MS., and one dull afternoon I started to read it. I hadn't read three pages when I saw what you will no doubt see at once--that the story had been written by a girl. And as I went on I saw that the work was Australian--born of the bush. I don't know about the girlishly emotional parts of the book--I leave that to girl readers to judge; but the descriptions of bush life and scenery came startlingly, painfully real to me, and I know that, as far as they are concerned, the book is true to Australia--the truest I ever read. I wrote to Miles Franklin, and she confessed that she was a girl. I saw her before leaving Sydney. She is just a little bush girl, barely twenty-one yet, and has scarcely ever been out of the bush in her life. She has lived her book, and I feel proud of it for the sake of the country I came from, where people toil and bake and suffer and are kind; where every second sun-burnt bushman is a sympathetic humorist, with the sadness of the bush deep in his eyes and a brave grin for the worst of times, and where every third bushman is a poet, with a big heart that keeps his pockets empty." --Henry Lawson, 1901 [via]
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On the Beach
by Nevil Shute

ISBN 1842322761 (1-84232-276-1)
Softcover, House of Stratus Ltd

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Book summary:
"The most shocking fiction I have read in years. What is shocking about it is both the idea and the sheer imaginative brilliance with which Mr. Shute brings it off."
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
They are the last generation, the innocent victims of an accidental war, living out their last days, making do with what they have, hoping for a miracle. As the deadly rain moves ever closer, the world as we know it winds toward an inevitable end.... [via]
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Oscar and Lucinda
by Peter Carey

ISBN 0060915927 (0-06-091592-7)
Softcover, HarperCollins Publishers

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Oscar Hopkins is a high-strung preacher's kid with hydrophobia and noisy knees. Lucinda Leplastrier is a frizzy-haired heiress who impulsively buys a glass factory with the inheritance forced on her by a well-intentioned adviser. In the early parts of this lushly written book, author Peter Carey renders the seminal turning points in his protagonists' childhoods as exquisite 19th-century set pieces. Young Oscar, denied the heavenly fruit of a Christmas pudding by his cruelly stern father, forever renounces his father's religion in favor of the Anglican Church. "Dear God," Oscar prays, "if it be Thy will that Thy people eat pudding, smite him!" Lucinda's childhood trauma involves a beautiful doll bought by her struggling mother with savings from the jam jar; in a misguided attempt to tame the doll's unruly curls, young Lucinda mutilates her treasure beyond repair. Neither of these coming-of-age stories quite explains how the grownup Oscar and Lucinda each develop a guilty passion for gambling. Oscar plays the horses while at school, and Lucinda, now an orphaned heiress, finds comfort in a game of cards with an odd collection of acquaintances. When the two finally meet, on board a ship bound for New South Wales, they are bound by their affinity for risk, their loneliness, and their awkwardly blossoming (but unexpressed) mutual affection. Their final high-stakes folly--transporting a crystal palace of a church across (literally) godforsaken terrain--strains plausibility, and events turn ghastly as Oscar plays out his bid for Lucinda's heart. Yet even the unconvincing plot turns are made up for by Carey's rich prose and the tale's unpredictable outcome. Although love proves to be the ultimate gamble for Oscar and Lucinda, the story never strays too far from the terrible possibility that even the most thunderstruck lovers can remain isolated in parallel lives. [via]
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Picnic at Hanging Rock
by Joan Lindsay

ISBN 0899665608 (0-89966-560-8)
Hardcover, Buccaneer Books

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Book summary:
On St Valentine's day in 1900 a party of schoolgirls went on a picnic to Hanging Rock. Some were never to return. This book was first published in 1967. [via]
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Remembering Babylon
by David Malouf

ISBN 0394280431 (0-394-28043-1)
Softcover, Random House of Canada Ltd

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The award-winning author of The Great World creates a world of eternal divisions in the story of thirteen-year-old Gemmy Fairley, cast ashore and adopted by Australian aborigines during the mid-1840s. 17,500 first printing. $20,000 ad/promo. Tour. [via]
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The Road from Coorain
by Jill Ker Conway

ISBN 0679724362 (0-679-72436-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
In A Memoir that pierces and delights us, Jill Ker Conway tells the story of her astonishing journey into adulthood -- a journey that would ultimately span immense distances and encompass worlds, ideas, and ways of life that seem a century apart.

She was seven before she ever saw another girl child. At eight, still too small to mount her horse unaided, she was galloping miles, alone, across Coorain, her parents' thirty thousand windswept, drought-haunted acres in the Australian outback, doing a "man's job" of helping herd the sheep because World War II had taken away the able-bodied men. She loved (and makes us see and feel) the vast unpeopled landscape, beautiful and hostile, whose uncertain weathers tormented the sheep ranchers with conflicting promises of riches and inescapable disaster. She adored (and makes us know) her large-visioned father and her strong, radiant mother, who had gone willingly with him into a pioneering life of loneliness and bone-breaking toil, who seemed miraculously to succeed in creating a warmly sheltering home in the harsh outback, and who, upon her husband's sudden death when Jill was ten, began to slide -- bereft of the partnership of work and love that had so utterly fulfilled her -- into depression and dependency.

We see Jill, staggered by the loss of her father, catapulted to what seemed another planet -- the suburban Sydney of the 1950s and its crowded, noisy, cliquish school life. Then the heady excitement of the University, but with it a yet more demanding course of lessons -- Jill embracing new ideas, new possibilities, while at the same time trying to be mother to her mother and resenting it, escaping into drink, pulling herself back, striking a balance. We see her slowly gaining strength, coming into her own emotionally and intellectually -and beginning the joyous love affair that gave wings to her newfound self.

Worlds away from Coorain, in America, Jill Conway became a historian and the first woman president of Smith College. Her story of Coorain and the road from Coorain startles by its passion and evocative power, by its understanding of the ways in which a total, deep-rooted commitment to place -- or to a dream -- can at once liberate and imprison. It is a story of childhood as both Eden and anguish, and of growing up as a journey toward the difficult life of the free. [via]
More editions of The Road from Coorain:
- The Road from Coorain: ISBN 0394574567 (0-394-57456-7)
  Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
- The Road from Coorain: ISBN 0679724362 (0-679-72436-2)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
The Road from Coorain: Recollections of a Harsh and Beautiful Journey to Adulthood
by Jill Ker Conway

ISBN 0816152047 (0-8161-5204-7)
Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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- The Road from Coorain: Recollections of a Harsh and Beautiful Journey to Adulthood: ISBN 0816152047 (0-8161-5204-7)
  Hardcover, Thorndike Pr
A Secret Country: The Hidden Australia
by John Pilger

ISBN 0394574621 (0-394-57462-1)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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- A Secret Country: The Hidden Australia: ISBN 0394574621 (0-394-57462-1)
  Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Secret River
by Kate Grenville

ISBN 1841959146 (1-84195-914-6)
Softcover, Canongate Books Ltd

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Book summary:
The Orange Prize-winning author Kate Grenville recalls her family's history in an astounding novel about the pioneers of New South Wales. Already a best seller in Australia, The Secret River is the story of Grenville's ancestors, who wrested a new life from the alien terrain of Australia and its native people. London, 1806. William Thornhill, a Thames bargeman, is deported to the New South Wales colony in what would become Australia. In this new world of convicts and charlatans, Thornhill tries to pull his family into a position of power and comfort. When he rounds a bend in the Hawkesbury River and sees a gentle slope of land, he becomes determined to make the place his own. But, as uninhabited as the island appears, Australia is full of native people, and they do not take kindly to Thornhill's theft of their home.

The Secret River is the tale of Thornhill's deep love for his small corner of the new world, and his slow realization that if he wants to settle there, he must ally himself with the most despicable of the white settlers, and to keep his family safe, he must permit terrifying cruelty to come to innocent people.
[via]
More editions of The Secret River:
- The Secret River: ISBN 1841957976 (1-84195-797-6)
  Hardcover, Canongate Books Ltd
- The Secret River: ISBN 1841959146 (1-84195-914-6)
  Softcover, Canongate Books Ltd
A Short History of Australia
by Manning Clark

ISBN 0451625617 (0-451-62561-7)
Softcover, New Amer Library

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The Songlines
by Bruce Chatwin

ISBN 0140094296 (0-14-009429-6)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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Book summary:
The late Bruce Chatwin carved out a literary career as unique as any writer's in this century: his books included In Patagonia, a fabulist travel narrative, The Viceroy of Ouidah, a mock-historical tale of a Brazilian slave-trader in 19th century Africa, and The Songlines, his beautiful, elegiac, comic account of following the invisible pathways traced by the Australian aborigines. Chatwin was nothing if not erudite, and the vast, eclectic body of literature that underlies this tale of trekking across the outback gives it a resonance found in few other recent travel books. A poignancy, as well, since Chatwin's untimely death made The Songlines one of his last books. [via]
More editions of The Songlines:
- The Songlines: ISBN 0670806056 (0-670-80605-6)
  Hardcover, Penguin Group USA
- The Songlines: ISBN 0140094296 (0-14-009429-6)
  Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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Songlines
by Chatin

ISBN 0224024523 (0-224-02452-3)
Hardcover, Random House of Canada Ltd

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- Songlines: ISBN 0224024523 (0-224-02452-3)
  Hardcover, Random House of Canada Ltd
The Songlines/in Patagonia
by Bruce Chatwin

ISBN 014095130X (0-14-095130-X)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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- The Songlines/in Patagonia: ISBN 014095130X (0-14-095130-X)
  Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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The Thorn Birds
by Colleen McCullough

ISBN 0060837551 (0-06-083755-1)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Book summary:
Product Details Paperback Publisher: Avon Books 1996-03-01 (1996) Language: English [via]
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A Town Like Alice
by Nevil Shute

ISBN 1842323008 (1-84232-300-8)
Softcover, House of Stratus Ltd

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Book summary:
A TOWN LIKE ALICE tells of a young woman who miraculously survived a Japanese "death march" in World War II, and of an Australian soldier, also a prisoner of war, who offered to help her--even at the cost of his life.... [via]
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Tracks
by Robyn Davidson

ISBN 0394721675 (0-394-72167-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
The account of Robyn Davidson's epic journey across 1,700 miles of Australian desert and bush with four camels and a dog. [via]
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Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback
by Robyn Davidson

ISBN 0679762876 (0-679-76287-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
A cult classic with an ever-growing audience, Tracks is the brilliantly written and frequently hilarious account of a young woman's odyssey through the deserts of Australia, with no one but her dog and four camels as companions. Davidson emerges as a heroine who combines extraordinary courage with exquisite sensitivity. One map. [via]
More editions of Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback:
- Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback: ISBN 0679762876 (0-679-76287-6)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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True History of the Kelly Gang
by Peter Carey

ISBN 0375724672 (0-375-72467-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
Out of nineteenth-century Australia rides a hero of his people and a man for all nations, in this masterpiece by the Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs. Exhilarating, hilarious, panoramic, and immediately engrossing, it is also-at a distance of many thousand miles and more than a century-a Great American Novel.This is Ned Kelly's true confession, in his own words and written on the run for an infant daughter he has never seen. To the authorities, this son of dirt-poor Irish immigrants was a born thief and, ultimately, a cold-blooded murderer; to most other Australians, he was a scapegoat and patriot persecuted by "English" landlords and their agents.With his brothers and two friends, Kelly eluded a massive police manhunt for twenty months, living by his wits and strong heart, supplementing his bushwhacking skills with ingenious bank robberies while enjoying the support of most everyone not in uniform. He declined to flee overseas when he could, bound to win his jailed mother's freedom by any means possible, including his own surrender. In the end, however, she served out her sentence in the same Melbourne prison where, in 1880, her son was hanged.Still his country's most powerful legend, Ned Kelly is here chiefly a man in full: devoted son, loving husband, fretful father, and loyal friend, now speaking as if from the grave. With this mythic outlaw and the story of his mighty travails and exploits, and with all the force of a classic Western, Peter Carey has breathed life into a historical figure who transcends all borders and embodies tragedy, perseverance, and freedom. [via]
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