Best Australian Literature: Essential Novels from Australia

Australian literature developed in dialogue with a land of extraordinary and inhospitable beauty, a colonial history of dispossession and violence, and a cultural identity caught between European inheritance and a landscape that defied European categories. Its greatest novels — from Patrick White’s dense, symbolically charged fiction to Peter Carey’s exuberant, technically inventive historical adventures — engage with what it means to inhabit this particular place, to have arrived as colonists or been subjected to colonization, and to forge an identity from a history that has not yet been fully reckoned with. What follows are the Australian novels that have made the most powerful claim on world literature.

Voss — Patrick White (1957)

The greatest Australian novel — and the work that led to White’s Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973. Johann Ulrich Voss, a German explorer, undertakes a doomed expedition to cross the Australian continent in 1845; the novel follows his progress through the desert and, simultaneously, the relationship that develops between him and Laura Trevelyan, a young woman he has left behind in Sydney, who follows the journey through a series of hallucinatory visions.

The novel is about hubris, mysticism, and the encounter between European ambition and a landscape that refuses to be conquered. White’s prose is dense and demanding — he does not make himself easy — but Voss is the most sustained and most profound attempt to render the Australian interior as a spiritual landscape. The Nobel Committee cited White for introducing ‘a new continent into literature’; Voss is where that achievement is most fully realised.

Oscar and Lucinda — Peter Carey (1988)

Carey’s first Booker Prize winner — and the novel that announced Australian fiction’s presence on the world stage. Oscar Hopkins, a young English clergyman with a compulsive gambling habit, and Lucinda Leplastrier, an heiress who has bought a glassworks in New South Wales, meet on a ship to Australia and share a passion for betting. Their mad project — to transport a glass church across the outback to a remote mission — becomes the novel’s central image: a fragile, beautiful, and ultimately doomed attempt to impose civilisation on a hostile landscape.

Carey’s prose is brilliant and his structural intelligence is exceptional; the novel combines epic sweep with close psychological observation. His most ambitious and most beautiful novel.

True History of the Kelly Gang — Peter Carey (2000)

Carey’s second Booker Prize winner — narrated by Ned Kelly, Australia’s most famous outlaw, in a voice that is ungrammatical, uncompromising, and entirely Carey’s own invention. Kelly writes to the daughter he will never know, explaining who he was and why he became what he became: the poverty of his Irish immigrant family, the harassment by colonial police, the code of mateship and resistance, and the desperate final stand at Glenrowan.

The novel is simultaneously an Australian legend, a postcolonial critique, and a profound meditation on class, violence, and the stories we tell about ourselves. Carey renders Kelly’s voice with extraordinary ear; the result is the most compelling historical novel in Australian fiction.

Riders in the Chariot — Patrick White (1961)

White’s most complex and most compassionate novel — following four visionary outsiders in an Australian suburb of the 1950s: Himmelfarb, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany; Mrs Godbold, a laundryman’s wife; Alf Dubbo, an Aboriginal painter; and Miss Hare, an eccentric spinster. All four have been granted visions; all four are rejected and persecuted by the suburban community around them.

The novel is a meditation on mystical experience and suburban conformity, on the cruelty of communities to those who are different, and on the relationship between suffering and transcendence. More accessible than Voss but no less ambitious; White’s most humane work.

The Tree of Man — Patrick White (1955)

White’s most directly epic novel — following Stan and Amy Parker as they clear a farm from the bush outside Sydney in the early twentieth century, raise their children, survive drought and flood, and grow old. The novel spans decades, following the rhythms of rural life with a patience and a gravity that give it the weight of scripture.

Against Stan’s inarticulate, physical engagement with the land, White sets Amy’s desires for something beyond the farm, and a surrounding society building itself from raw material into something recognisable as civilisation. The most accessible of White’s major novels and the best starting point for new readers.

Jack Maggs — Peter Carey (1997)

Carey’s reimagining of Great Expectations — told from the perspective of the transported convict who returns to England to seek the young gentleman whose education he has secretly funded. Jack Maggs, back in London illegally after transportation to Australia, seeks out the young man who owes him everything; a mesmerist novelist named Tobias Oates uses him as material for his fiction.

The novel inverts Dickens — the centre of the original story becomes the margin, and what was marginal becomes central — to ask what England’s relationship to its transported criminals actually looked like from the other side of the arrangement. A brilliant, playful, and politically serious novel.

Reading Australian Literature

Australian literature is marked by a particular set of preoccupations: the encounter between European inheritance and an alien landscape, the violence of the colonial project, the question of what it means to be Australian in a land whose original inhabitants have not been reconciled, and a recurring interest in outlaws, eccentrics, and visionaries — figures who exist at the edges of social acceptance and see things that the centre cannot. Begin with Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang for the most immediate and the most purely exhilarating; read Voss for the most profound; approach Riders in the Chariot for White at his most humane.