Henry Lawson
Henry Lawson (1867–1922) was born in a tent in Grenfell, on the New South Wales goldfields, and had a tough childhood, moving around with his family while his father pursued gold, and helping his mother run the family selection in his father’s absence. Shy and partially deaf, Lawson had only three years of formal education and yet, encouraged by his mother, with whom he moved to Sydney following the end of his parents’ marriage, he began writing poetry and short stories. With his keen, sensitive eye and dry, honest tone, Lawson wrote of the hardships of life in the Australian bush, the plight of the poor in the city, the fight for a republic, the strength and bravery of women, the mateship and larrikinism of men, all ‘for the sake of the truth’. Telling it like it was.

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➤ Selected Stories

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➤ Joe Wilson And His Mates

Ebooks available through Project Gutenberg
➤ In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses (1896)
➤ While the Billy Boils  (1896) - short stories
➤ Over the Sliprails (1900) - short stories
➤ On the Track (1900) - short stories
➤ Verses Popular and Humorous (1900)
➤ Joe Wilson and His Mates (1901) - short stories
➤ The Rising of the Court and Other Sketches in Prose and Verse (1910)
➤ Children of the Bush (1902) - short stories, prose, poetry

A. B. (Banjo) Paterson
The man who wrote Australia’s most popular song, “Waltzing Matilda”,  grew up on a station near Orange, NSW in the 1860s with racehorses and polo clubs, watching equestrian and stockman competitions, living the Australian bush experience he immortalized in print. But he was no raw-boned bushie; Paterson was a child of privilege and education, with access to the pleasure and leisure classes of the squattocracy and later Sydney society. Paterson— poet, solicitor, journalist, war correspondent and soldier—wrote what he knew.  Though he lived in Sydney for most of his adult life, Paterson retained a lifelong love of the bush, and his genius was to establish the bushman in the national consciousness as a romantic and archetypal figure.

Ebooks available through Project Gutenberg
➤ The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses (1895)
➤ The Old Bush Songs  (1905)
➤ An Outback Marriage: A Story of Australian Life (1906) - novel
➤ Three Elephant Power, and Other Stories (1917) - short stories
➤ Saltbush Bill (1917) - poetry
➤ Rio Grande's Last Race, and Other Verses (1902)

My Brilliant Career
Author Miles Franklin's 1901 debut novel remains an insightful exploration of class, gender and youthful frustration. Trapped on her parents' outback farm, Sybylla simultaneously loves bush life and hates the physical burdens it imposes. She longs for a more refined lifestyle - to read, to think, to sing - but most of all to do great things. After being whisked away to live on her grandmother's gracious property and falling under the eye of the rich and handsome Harry Beecham, Sybylla soon she finds herself choosing between everything a conventional life offers and her own plans for a 'brilliant career'. Franklin shines an intense light not only into the deep recesses of a bright young mind but on the dark corners of inequality caused by "the rope of class distinction" and as an author is most searingly brilliant when depicting those who poignantly fail to achieve brilliance.

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➤ My Brilliant Career
➤ Other Miles Franklin works

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➤ My Brilliant Career
➤ Some Everyday Folk and Dawn

The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead's 1940 novel, The Man Who Loved Children,  is an unforgettable portrait of a magnificently dysfunctional family. In a country crippled by the Great Depression, Sam and Henny Pollit have too much—too much contempt for one another, too many children, too much strain under endless obligation. Flush with ego and chilling charisma, Sam torments and manipulates his children in an esoteric world of his own imagining. Henny looks on desperately, all too aware of the madness at the root of her husband’s behavior. And Louie, the damaged, precocious adolescent girl at the center of their clashes, is the “ugly duckling” whose struggle will transfix contemporary readers.

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Voss
In 1973, Australian writer Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature." Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is White's best-known book, a sweeping novel about a secret passion between the explorer Voss and the young orphan Laura. As Voss is tested by hardship, mutiny, and betrayal during his crossing of the brutal Australian desert, Laura awaits his return in Sydney, where she endures their months of separation as if her life were a dream and Voss the only reality. Marrying a sensitive rendering of hidden love with a stark adventure narrative, Voss is a novel of extraordinary power and virtuosity from a twentieth-century master.

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Monkey Grip
Helen Garner’s gritty, lyrical first novel divided the critics on its publication in 1977. Today, Monkey Grip is regarded as a masterpiece—the novel that shines a light on a time and a place and a way of living never before presented in Australian literature: communal households, music, friendships, children, love, drugs, and sex.

When Nora falls in love with Javo, she is caught in the web of his addiction; and as he moves between loving her and leaving, between his need for her and promises broken, Nora’s life becomes an intense dance of loving and trying to let go.

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➤ Regular print

Oscar & Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang
Australian author Peter Carey has won the Miles Franklin Award three times and is frequently named as Australia's next contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. As a writer, he has been bold and brave before - from his fabulous short fiction in the '70s through to his remodeling of Australian history.

Carey's third novel,  Oscar and Lucinda, is about a man and a woman who meet onboard a ship bound for Australia, fall in love and don't live happily ever after. Oscar is a compulsive gambler; he'll bet on anything, even his own happiness. Lucinda has inherited a glass factory; she too likes to deal the cards. Both of them, fractured by childhood, are doomed to break into pieces.

In his 400-page epic, True History of the Kelly Gang, Carey creates a marvelous imaginative reconstruction of Australian bushranger, outlaw, gang leader, and convicted police murderer, Ned Kelly’s life story. Based partly on historical documents and on the remarkable writing found in Kelly’s Jerilderie letter, the novel closely follows the known facts of a figure now widely regarded as both a heroic opponent of England’s unjust colonial rule and an early precursor to Australian nationalism. 

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➤ Oscar & Lucinda
➤ True History of the Kelly Gang
➤ Other Peter Carey books 

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➤ View all Carey books available

Pouch! by David Ezra Stein
The delightful tale of a curious baby kangaroo, David Ezra Stein's gentle story will amuse and comfort readers. When you're new to the world, every hop brings another surprise Joey wants to go exploring, but everything he discovers is almost too exciting. Bees, rabbits, birds . . . other creatures can be scary But Mama is never far away, and who knows? Joey might even make a friend.

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➤ Picture book 
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The Biggest Frog in Australia, by Susan L. Roth
Once, in the Dreamtime, the biggest frog in Australia woke up thirsty. So thirsty that he drinks up all the water from the oceans, lakes, rivers, billabongs, puddles, and even from the clouds. When he is done, the earth is parched, and the other animals are thirsty. Wise old Wombat suggests that the animals try to make the biggest frog laugh, so the water will spill out of his mouth. But the frog barely hears Kookaburra's best jokes, and yawns at Kangaroo's acrobatics. Koala waddles ridiculously, but still no luck. What will make the frog laugh and bring life back to Australia? Find out in this colorful retelling of a classic Australian folktale.

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Possum Magic, by Mem Fox. 
"Possum Magic" is a rare children's book that a parent can still enjoy on the thousandth reading. Grandma Poss uses her best bush magic to make Hush invisible. But when Hush longs to be able to see herself again, the two possums must make their way across Australia to find the magic food that will make Hush visible once more.

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➤ Picture book 
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