The first European settlers saw Australia as terra nullius – empty land – on the principle that First Nations peoples didn’t “use” the country in an agricultural sense, a belief that remained uncontested in law until 1992. However, decades of archeological work, the reports of early settlers and oral tradition have established that humans have occupied Australia for over forty thousand years – proof that First Nations shaped, controlled and used their environment as surely as
any farmer, working in harmony with the land rather than against it. Two centuries of European rule devastated traditional First Nations life, but evidence of earlier times lives on in Dreaming stories and artworks as well as in evocative and beautiful rock art sites.
Dot painting.
Copyright (c) 2019 ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock. No use without permission.
While the treatment of First Nations people was shameful, as indeed are the conditions that many endure today, Australia has established a rock-solid parliamentary democracy and has successfully accommodated hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world. Migration has transformed the country, from the arrival of southern Europeans in the 1950s and 1960s to the more recent waves of people from Vietnam, Lebanon and India. Australia also resettles significant numbers of UN-registered refugees, and huge numbers of students come from China, Southeast Asia and India. In 2020, there were 7.6 million migrants living in Australia, with thirty percent of the current population having been born overseas; while there have been some tensions, the ability of all these people to live together is perhaps the country’s best achievement.
Timeline
70,000–40,000 BC
The first humans settle in Australia
22,000 BC
The interior of the country is colonized
1521–24
Possible Portuguese expedition to Australia
1606
The Dutch East India Company first travels the western coast of Cape York Peninsula
1642
Dutch explorer Abel Tasman explores western Tasmania
1768–71
English Lieutenant James Cook’s expedition in HM Endeavour
1770
Cook declares Australia terra nullius
1787
The First Fleet of eleven ships departs from England on a mission to colonize Australia
1788
Convicts clear ground at Sydney Cove
1798
George Bass and Matthew Flinders circumnavigate Tasmania
1803
Matthew Flinders circumnavigates Australia
1808
The Rum Rebellion: the only successful coup in Australia’s history
1813
Matthew Flinders calls New South Wales “Australia”
1829
Australia claimed as a British territory and Perth is founded
1851
Victorian gold rush begins
1854
The Eureka Stockade, a rebellion of miners in Ballarat
1860
The Burke and Wills expedition, using camels to explore the interior
1868
Convict transportation to Western Australia ends
1869
Children of First Nations Islander descent are taken from their families by the state
1882
Australia beats England in the first Ashes series
1894
South Australia becomes the third place in the world to give women the vote
1901
Commonwealth of Australia founded on January 1
1913
Foundation stone for the city of Canberra laid
1915
Australian soldiers land at Gallipoli in Turkey
1932
The Sydney Harbour Bridge opens
1940
Scientists, under Australian Howard Florey, develop penicillin
1942
Fall of Singapore: 16,000 Australians made prisoners of war. Bombing of Darwin by the Japanese
1945
Australia is a founding member of the United Nations
1956
Satirist Barry Humphries launches the career of Edna Everage
1962
Troops sent to Vietnam War
1967
PM Harold Holt vanishes at Cheviot Beach
1971
Neville Bonner becomes the first-ever First Nations MP
1973
The White Australia Policy ends; Sydney Opera House opens
1975
The Great Barrier
Reef Marine Park
is established
1978
First Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras
1985
Freehold of Uluru and Kata Tjuta granted to the Mutitjulu people
1992
The Mabo Decision ends the concept of terra nullius
1996
The Wik Decision holds that First Nations land rights survive the granting of pastoral leases
1999
Australia votes no to becoming a Republic
2000
27th Summer Olympic Games held in Sydney
2003
Australian military deployed in the Iraq War
2008
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologizes to the First Nations people for “past mistreatment”
2009
Massive bushfires sweep Victoria, with 173 fatalities
2010
Julia Gillard becomes the first female prime minister of Australia
2013
Kevin Rudd regains his role as PM, to be swiftly replaced by Tony Abbott
2016
Malcolm Turnbull re-elected prime minister of Australia
2018
Malcolm Turnbull of the Liberal Party resigns and Scott Morrison is elected leader, and therefore prime minister of Australia, in his place
2019–20
Australia experiences the most destructive bushfire season in its history
2022
Morrison is defeated by Labor, Green and independent candidates, and Labor’s Anthony Albanese becomes PM
After the break-up of the supercontinent known as Gondwana into India, Africa, South America, Australasia and Antarctica, Australia moved away from the South Pole, reaching its current geographical location about fifteen million years ago. There was never a land link with the rest of Asia, and thus the country developed its unique fauna – megafauna (see page 680) flourished, along with widespread rainforests, until about fifty thousand years ago. Subsequent ice ages dried out the climate; by six thousand years ago the seas had stabilized at their present levels and Australia’s environment was much as it is today, an arid centre with a relatively fertile eastern seaboard. Humans had been in Australia long before then, of course, most likely taking advantage of low sea levels to cross the Timor Trough into northern Australia, or island-hopping from Indonesia via New Guinea. The earliest human remains found in Australia (in New South Wales) are dated to around 40,000 BC, with scientists estimating that humans could have settled here 70,000 years ago.
The oldest known remains from central Australia are only 22,000 years old, so it’s also plausible that initial colonization occurred around the coast, followed by later exploration of the interior – though it’s just as likely that corrosive rainforests, which covered the centre until about twenty thousand years ago, obliterated all trace of earlier human habitation. When the European settlers arrived, the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) had disappeared from the Australian mainland but still lived in Tasmania, while the dingo, an introduced canine, was prevalent on the mainland but unknown in Tasmania. This indicates that there was a further influx of people and dogs more recently than twelve thousand years ago, after rising sea levels cut off Tasmania. The earliest inhabitants used crude stone implements, gradually replaced by more refined, lighter tools, boomerangs, and used core stones to flake “blanks”, which were then fashioned into spearheads, knives and scrapers. Trade networks for rock, ochre (a red clay used for ceremonial purposes) and other products – shells and even wood for canoes – eventually stretched from New Guinea to the heart of the continent, following river systems away from the coast. Rock art, preserved in an ancient engraved tradition, and other more recent painted styles, seem to indicate that cultural practices also travelled along these trade routes.
It’s probable that the disappearance of the megafauna was accelerated by First Nation peoples’ hunting, but the most dramatic change wrought by the First Nations was the controlled use of fire to clear forest. Burning promoted new growth and encouraged game, indirectly expanding grassland and favouring certain plants that evolved fire-reliant seeds and growth patterns. But while the First Nations peoples modified the environment for their own ends, their belief that land, wildlife and people were an interdependent whole maintained a balance between the population and natural resources. Communities were organized and related according to complex kinship systems, reflected in the three hundred different languages known to exist at that time. Dreaming, an Aboriginal belief that creative forces shaped the landscape, provided verbal maps of territory and linked natural features to the actions of ancestors, who often had both human and animal forms.
The first Europeans
Prior to the sixteenth century, the only regular visitors to Australia were the Malays, who established seasonal camps while fishing the northern coasts for trepang, a sea slug, to sell to the Chinese. In Europe, the globe had been carved up between Spain and Portugal in 1494 under the auspices of Pope Alexander VI at the Treaty of Tordesillas, and all maritime nations subsequently kept their nautical charts secret, to protect their discoveries. It’s possible, therefore, that the inquisitive Portuguese knew of Terra Australis, the Great Southern Land, soon after founding their colony in East Timor in 1516.
But while the precise date of “discovery” is contentious, it is clear that various nations were making forays into the area: the Dutch in 1606 and 1623, who were appalled by the harsh climate and inhabitants of Outback Queensland, and the Spanish in 1606, who were looking for both plunder and pagans to convert to Catholicism. The latter, guided by Luis Vaes de Torres, blithely navigated the strait between New Guinea and Cape York as if they knew it was there. As Torres hailed from Portugal, it is indeed likely that he knew where he was; there’s evidence that the Portuguese had mapped a large portion of Australia’s northern coastline as early as 1536.
Later in the seventeenth century, the Dutch navigators Dirk Hartog, Van Diemen and Abel Tasman added to maps of the east and north coasts, but eventually discarded “New Holland” as a barren, worthless country. William Dampier, a buccaneer who wrote popular accounts of his visit to Western Australia, first stirred British interest in 1697. However, it wasn’t until the British captured the Spanish port of Manila, in the Philippines, in 1762, that detailed maps of Australia’s coast fell into their hands; it took them six more years to assemble an expedition to the continent. Sailing in 1768 on the Endeavour, Captain James Cook headed to Tahiti, then proceeded to map New Zealand’s coastline before sailing west in 1770 to search for the Great Southern Land.
The British sighted the continent in April 1770 and sailed north from Cape Everard to Botany Bay, where Cook commented on First Nations peoples’ initial indifference to seeing the Endeavour. When a party of forty sailors attempted to land, however, two First Nations defended their land and attacked them with spears; the British drove them off with musket fire. Continuing on up the Queensland coast, the British passed Moreton Bay and Fraser Island before entering the treacherous passages of the Great Barrier Reef where, on June 11, the Endeavour ran aground off Cape Tribulation. Cook managed to beach the ship safely at the mouth of the Endeavour River (present-day Cooktown), where the expedition set up camp while the ship was repaired.
Contact between First Nations peoples and settlers during the following six weeks was tinged with a mistrust that never quite erupted into serious confrontation, and Cook took the opportunity to make notes in which he observed that European and First Nations values were mutually incomprehensible. The expedition was intrigued by some of Australia’s wildlife, but otherwise unimpressed with the country, and was glad to sail onwards on August 5. With imposing skill, Cook successfully managed to navigate the rest of the reef, finally claiming possession of the country – which he named New South Wales – for King George III on August 21, at Possession Island in the Torres Strait.
The expedition’s reports didn’t arouse much enthusiasm in London, however, and the disdainful attitude towards the Great Southern Land matched the opinion voiced by the Dutch more than a century before. However, after the loss of its American colonies following the American War of Independence in 1783, Britain was deprived of a handy location to offload convicted criminals. Sir Joseph Banks, botanist on the Endeavour, advocated Botany Bay as an ideal location for a penal colony that could soon become self-sufficient. The government agreed, and in May 1787 the First Fleet, packed with around 730 convicts (570 men and 160 women), set sail for Australia on eleven ships, under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip. Reaching Botany Bay in January 1788, Phillip deemed it unsuitable for his purposes and instead founded the settlement at Sydney Cove, on Port Jackson’s fine natural harbour.
The early years at Sydney were not promising. The colonists suffered erratic weather and starvation, First Nations hostility, soil that was too hard to plough, and timber so tough it dented their axes. In 1790, supplies ran so low that a third of the population had to be transferred to a new colony on Norfolk Island, 1500km northeast. Even so, in the same year, Britain dispatched a second fleet with a thousand more convicts – about a quarter of whom died en route. To ease the situation, Phillip granted packages of farmland to marines and former convicts before he returned to Britain in 1792. The first free settlers arrived the following year, and Britain’s preoccupation with the French Revolutionary Wars meant a reduction in the number of convicts being transported to the colony, thus allowing a period of consolidation.
Meanwhile, John Macarthur manipulated the temporary governor into allowing his New South Wales Corps, which had replaced the marines as the governor’s strong arm, to exercise considerable power in the colony. This was temporarily curtailed in 1800 by Philip King, who also slowed an illicit rum trade, encouraged new settlements and speeded production by allowing convicts to work for wages. Macarthur was forced out of the corps into the wool industry, importing Australia’s first sheep from South Africa. He continued to stir up trouble though, which culminated in the Rum Rebellion of 1808, when merchant and pastoral factions, supported by the military, ousted Governor William Bligh. Britain finally took notice of the colony’s anarchic state and appointed the firm-handed Colonel Lachlan Macquarie, backed by the 73rd Regiment, as Bligh’s replacement in 1810. Macquarie settled the various disputes and brought eleven years of disciplined progress to the colony.
Labelled the “Father of Australia”, for his vision of a country that could rise above its convict origins, Macquarie implemented enlightened policies towards former convicts or emancipists, enrolling them in public offices. He also attempted to educate, rather than exterminate, First Nations peoples and was the driving force behind New South Wales becoming a productive, self-sufficient colony. But he offended the landowner squatters, who were concerned that emancipists were being granted too many favours, and also those who regarded the colony solely as a place of punishment. In fact, conditions had improved so much that by 1819 New South Wales had become the major destination for voluntary emigrants from Britain.
In 1821, Macquarie was replaced as governor, and his successor, Sir Thomas Brisbane, was instructed to segregate, not integrate, convicts. To this end, when New South Wales officially graduated from being a penal settlement to a new British colony in 1823, convicts were used to colonize newly explored regions – Western Australia, Tasmania and Queensland – as far away from Sydney’s free settlers as possible.
Explorers
Matthew Flinders had already circumnavigated the mainland in 1803 (and suggested the name “Australia”, from the Latin Australis, meaning “southern”) in his leaky vessel, the Investigator, and with the colony firmly established, expeditions began pushing inland from Sydney. In 1823, John Oxley, the Surveyor General, having previously explored newly discovered pastoral land west of the Blue Mountains, chose the Brisbane River in Queensland as the site of a new penal colony, thus opening up the fertile Darling Downs to future settlement. Meanwhile, townships were being founded elsewhere around the coast, eventually leading to the creation of separate colonies to add to that of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), settled in 1803 to ward off French exploration. Albany and Fremantle on the west coast were established in 1826 and 1829 respectively, followed by the Yarra River (Melbourne, Victoria) in 1835, and Adelaide (South Australia) in 1836.
But it was the possibilities of the interior – which some maintained concealed a vast inland sea – that captured the imagination of the government and squatters. Setting out from Adelaide in 1844, Charles Sturt was the first to attempt to cross the centre. Forced to camp for six months at a desert waterhole, where the heat melted the lead in his pencils and unthreaded screws from equipment, he managed to reach the aptly named Sturt’s Stony Desert before scurvy forced him back to Adelaide. At the same time, Ludwig Leichhardt, a Prussian doctor, had more luck in his crossing between the Darling Downs and Port Essington, near Darwin, which he accomplished in fourteen months. Unlike Sturt, Leichhardt found plenty of potential farmland and returned a hero. He vanished in 1848, however, while again attempting to cross the continent. In the same year, the ill-fated Kennedy expedition managed the trek from Tully to Cape York in northern Queensland, but most of the party died, Kennedy included, as a result of poor planning, starvation and “attack” by First Nations peoples. Similarly, Burke and Wills’ successful 1860–61 south-to-north traverse between Melbourne and the Gulf of Carpentaria in Queensland was marred by the death of the expedition leaders upon their return south, owing to bad organization and a series of unfortunate errors (see page 332). Finally, Australia’s centre was located by John McDouall Stuart in 1860, who subsequently managed a safe return journey to Adelaide. Hopes of finding an inland sea were quashed, and the harsh reality of a dry, largely infertile interior began to dawn on developers.
British advances had been repulsed from the very first year of the colony’s foundation; Governor Phillip reporting that “the Natives now attack any straggler they meet unarmed”. Forced off their traditional hunting grounds, which were taken by the settlers for agriculture or grazing, First Nations peoples began stealing crops and spearing cattle. Response from the British was brutal; the relatively liberal Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur ordered a sweep of Tasmania in 1830, to round up all First Nations peoples and herd them into reserves. More direct action, such as the Myall Creek Massacre in 1838 (see page 213), when 28 First Nations peoples were roped together and butchered by graziers, created public outcry, but similar “dispersals” became commonplace wherever First Nations resisted settler intrusion. More insidious methods – such as poisoning waterholes or lacing gifts of flour with arsenic – were also employed by pastoralists angered over stock losses.
The First Nations peoples were not a single, unified society, and the British exploited existing divisions by creating the notorious Native Mounted Police, a First Nations force that aided and abetted the extermination of rival groups. By the 1890s, citing a perversion of Darwinian theory which held that First Nations peoples were less evolved than whites and so doomed to extinction, most states had followed Tasmania’s example of “protectionism”, relocating Aboriginal peoples into reserves that were frequently a long way from their traditional lands.
White Australia, Federation and war
Throughout the country, goldfields became centres of nationalism, peaking in Queensland in the 1880s, where the flames were fanned by the importation of Solomon Islanders to work on sugar plantations. Ostensibly to prevent slavery, but politically driven by recession and growing white unemployment, the government passed the 1901 Immigration Act – also known as the White Australia Policy – which greatly restricted non-European immigration.
Gold
The discovery of gold in Australia in 1851 had a dramatic bearing on Australia’s future. The first major strikes in New South Wales and Victoria brought an immediate flood of hopeful miners from Sydney and Melbourne and, once the news spread overseas, from the USA and Britain. Gold opened up Australia’s interior; as returns petered out in one area, prospectors moved on into uncharted regions to find more.
A new “level society”, based on a “mateship” ethic, evolved on the goldfields. Yet the diggers were all too aware of their poor social and political rights. At the end of 1854, frustrations over mining licences erupted at Eureka (see page 587), where miners built a stockade and ended up being charged by mounted police. The Victorian goldfields also saw racial tensions directed against a new minority, the Chinese, who first arrived during the 1850s. Disheartened by diminishing returns and infuriated by the Chinese ability to find gold in abandoned claims, diggers stormed a Chinese camp at Lambing Flat in 1861. Troops were sent in to stop the riots, but the ringleaders were later acquitted by an all-white jury.
The gold rush came to an end in the 1870s, and many of the towns made rich in the boom are now charming and sedate holiday destinations, capitalizing on a colourful and at times harsh history. Their buildings, some based on Neoclassical temples, others with ornate balconies and multiple storeys, are a significant part of the country’s architectural heritage. One of the most enjoyable to visit is Ballarat, specifically for its step-back-in-time outdoor museum (see page 585) where you can pan for gold and watch it being smelted. The rush may be long gone, but there are still dazzlingly rich pickings to be had: in 2013 a massive nugget was unearthed near Ballarat, weighing 5.5kg and worth more than half a million dollars.
Central government was first mooted in 1842, but new states were not keen to return to the control of New South Wales, lose interstate customs duties, or share the new-found mineral wealth. But by the end of the century, they began to see advantages to federation, not least as a way to control indentured labour and present a united front against French, German and Russian expansion in the Pacific. A decade of wrangling by the states saw the formation of a High Court and a two-tier parliamentary system consisting of a House of Representatives and Senate, presided over by a prime minister. Each state would have its own premier, and Britain would be represented by a governor-general. Approved by Queen Victoria shortly before her death, the Commonwealth of Australia came into being on January 1, 1901.
It’s notable that the Immigration Act was the first piece of legislation to be passed by the new parliament, and reflected the nationalist drive behind federation. Though the intent was to create an Australia largely of European – and preferably British – descent, the policy also sowed the seeds for Australian independence from the “Mother Country”. The first pull away came as early as 1912, when the Commonwealth Bank opened, evidence that Australia was endeavouring to become less financially reliant on Britain. Centred entirely on white interests, the White Australia Policy ensured that First Nations peoples were not given the right to vote in state elections until 1962 and were not included in the national census until 1967. The policy itself was repealed in 1973. The new government did, however, give white women the vote (and the option to stand for Parliament) in 1902, following South Australia’s lead eight years earlier. And in 1907, the Australian Labor Party, which had grown out of the economic recession and union battles with the government during the 1890s, established the concept of a minimum wage.
Defence had also been a positive force behind federation. But even though the war between Japan and Russia in 1904 had highlighted the need to build its own defence force, Australia was largely unprepared for the outbreak of hostilities in Europe a decade later, owning little more than a navy made up of secondhand British ships. There was a patriotic rush to enlist in the army, and an opportunistic occupation of German New Guinea by Australian forces. However, the issue of compulsory conscription, raised by Prime Minister Billy Hughes, was twice defeated in referendums.
From the Australian perspective, the most important stage of the war occurred when Turkey gave its support to Germany in 1915. Winston Churchill formulated a plan to defend British shipping in the Dardanelles by occupying the Gallipoli Peninsula, and diverted Australian infantry bound for Europe. Between April and December 1915, wave after wave of Australian, New Zealand and British troops were mown down below Turkish gun emplacements, as they attempted to take control of the peninsula. By the end of the year, it became clear that Gallipoli was not going to fall, and the survivors were evacuated to fight on the Western Front. The long-term effect of the senseless slaughter was the first serious questioning of Anglo-Australian relations: should Australia have sacrificed so much (8141 soldiers died) to defend a (geographically) distant country’s interests? Conversely, Gallipoli is still treated as a symbol of national identity and pride.
1918–39
After World War I, the Nationalist Party joined forces with the Country Party to assume government under the paternalistic and fiercely anti-socialist guidance of Earle Page and Stanley Bruce. The Country Party was formed as a result of the widening divisions between the growing urban population and farmers, who felt isolated and politically unrepresented. Under the coalition, pastoral industries were subsidized by overseas borrowing, allowing them to compete internationally, and technology began to close the gap between the city and the Outback. Radio and aviation developments saw the birth of Qantas and the Royal Flying Doctor Service in Queensland’s remote west. Development also occurred in the cities: work started on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the new Commonwealth capital, Canberra, was completed.
On the social front, the USA stopped mass immigration in 1921, deflecting a flood of people from depressed Southern Europe to Australia, which the government countered by encouraging British immigrants with assisted passages. As the Great Depression set in during the early 1930s, Australia faced the collapse of its economic and political systems, with all the parties divided. Pressed for a loan, the Bank of England forced a restructuring of the Australian economy. Adding to national embarrassment, politics and sports became blurred during the 1932 “body-line” cricket series: the loan was made virtually conditional on the Australian cricket authorities dropping their allegations that British bowlers were deliberately trying to injure Australian batsmen during the tour.
Meanwhile, worries about communism were succeeded by concern about the rise of fascism, as Mussolini and Hitler took power in Europe and Japanese forces invaded Manchuria – the Tanaka memorial in 1927 actually cited Australia as a target for future conquest by Japan. Australia assisted the immigration of refugees from central Europe, and – after a prolonged union battle – halted iron exports to Japan. When Prime Minister Joseph Lyons died in office, Robert Menzies was elected to the post, in time to side with Britain as hostilities were declared against Hitler in September 1939.
World War II and after
Just as in World War I, Australia cemented its national identity by getting involved on a global scale in World War II, but this time without Britain’s involvement. Menzies’ United Australia Party barely lasted long enough to form diplomatic ties with the USA – in case Germany overran Europe – before internal divisions saw the government crumble, replaced by John Curtin and his Labor Party in 1941.
Curtin, concerned about Australia’s vulnerability after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, made the radical decision of shifting the country’s commitment in the war from defending Britain and Europe to fighting off an invasion of Australia from Asia. After the fall of Singapore in 1942 and the capture of sixteen thousand Australian troops, Curtin succeeded in ordering the immediate recall of Australians fighting in the Middle East. In February, the Japanese unexpectedly bombed Darwin, launched submarine raids against Sydney and Newcastle, and invaded New Guinea. Feeling abandoned and betrayed by Britain, Curtin appealed to the USA, who quickly adopted Australia as a base for coordinating Pacific operations under General Douglas MacArthur. Meanwhile, Australian troops in New Guinea halted Japanese advances along the Kokoda trail at Milne Bay, while the Australian and US navies slowed down the Japanese fleet in the Battle of the Coral Sea – which, thanks to modern cannon, was notable as the first naval engagement in which the two sides never even saw each other.
Australia came out of World War II realizing that, geographically, the country was closer to Asia than Europe, and that it could not count on Britain to help in a crisis. From this point on, Australia began to look to the USA and the Pacific, in addition to Britain, for direction. Another consequence of the war was that immigration was speeded up, fuelled by Australia’s recent vulnerability. The government reintroduced assisted passages from Britain – the “ten-pound-poms” – and also accepted substantial numbers of European refugees.
With international right-wing extremism laid low by the war, the old fear of communism returned. When North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, Australia, led by a revitalized Menzies and his new Liberal Party, was the first country after the USA to commit troops to counter communist forces. Menzies also sent soldiers and pilots to Malaya (as peninsular Malaysia was known at the time), where communist rebels had been fighting the British colonial administration almost since the end of World War II. At home, he opened up central Australia to British atomic bomb tests in the 1950s, because – echoing the beliefs of the first European colonists – “nobody lived there”. A number of First Nations peoples were moved to reserves, but others – along with the British troops involved in the tests – suffered the effects of fallout, and First Nations peoples’ traditional lands were rendered uninhabitable. Wrangles with the British government over compensation, and the clearing of the test sites at Maralinga and Emu Junction, were finally settled in 1993.
Menzies was still in control when the USA became involved in Vietnam, and with conflict in Malaya all but over, Australia volunteered “advisers” to Vietnamese republican forces in 1962. Once fighting became entrenched, the government introduced conscription and – bowing to the wishes of the American president Lyndon B. Johnson – sent a battalion of soldiers into the fray in 1965, events that immediately split the country. Menzies quit politics the following year, succeeded by his protégé Harold Holt, who, rallying under the catchphrase “All the way with LBJ”, willingly increased Australia’s participation in the Vietnamese conflict. But as the war dragged on, world opinion shifted to seeing the matter as a civil struggle, rather than as a fight between democratic and communist ideologies, and in 1970 the government began scaling down its involvement. Roughly 60,000 Australian troops served in Vietnam in total; 521 were killed. Back at home, First Nations peoples were finally granted civil rights in 1967, and Holt mysteriously disappeared while swimming off the coast of Victoria, leaving the Liberals in turmoil and paving the way for a Labor win under Gough Whitlam, well regarded by the left, in 1972.
Whitlam’s three years in office had far-reaching effects: he ended national service and participation in Vietnam, granted independence to Papua New Guinea, recognized the People’s Republic of China, and instituted free health care and higher education systems. The end came in 1975, when a loans scandal involving the government led the conservative majority in the Senate to block supply bills, effectively stopping government expenditure. In an unprecedented move, the governor-general John Kerr (the largely ceremonial representative of the Crown overseeing Australian affairs) dismissed the government – a move that shocked many into questioning the validity of Britain’s hold on Australia – and called an election, which Labor lost. In contrast, the following eight years were uneventful, culminating in the return of Labor in 1983 under the charismatic Bob Hawke, a former trade union leader. Labor’s subsequent thirteen years and four terms in office were brought to a close under the leadership of Hawke’s successor and former treasurer, Paul Keating. Although he was unpopular with some for his perceived arrogance, the Liberal party lost to Keating in the 1993 election. Keating was always a strong advocate of Australia being part of Asia, but news of a secret military agreement with Indonesia created a public backlash, in part resulting in a landslide victory for the Liberal-National coalition, led by John Howard, in 1996.
Into the twenty-first century
Howard’s performance in the early years of office showed that his critics had underestimated his tenacity and political skills, honed by 22 years in federal politics. By 1998, Howard’s political position was so secure that the coalition managed to be re-elected on what some considered a suicidal platform of tax reform through the implementation of a GST, or Goods and Services Tax. When Howard’s prospects of winning the next election were slipping away in mid-2001, he successfully turned the country’s attention to the ongoing issue of refugees, playing on fears of unfettered immigration. The election was a comfortable win for his coalition, and the opposition Labor Party was further diminished.
Defying public opinion, Howard vociferously supported the war in Iraq, and subsequently joined the “coalition of the willing” in the military attack on the country. In contrast to the government’s rhetorical support, Australia’s physical contribution to the war was actually quite small – two thousand troops, plus some warships and aircraft.
During the 1980s there were some advances under Labor in the area of First Nations rights. An ineffectual inquiry into First Nations deaths in custody was overshadowed in June 1992 when the High Court handed down the landmark Mabo Decision, legally overturning the concept of terra nullius. Eddie Mabo’s claim that he could inherit land – previously designated by the government as “Crown Land” – on Murray Island (Mer) in the Torres Strait, was granted, and the Merriam were acknowledged as traditional landowners. Sadly, the remarkable and charismatic campaigner Eddie Mabo died before the ruling was given, having waited for years for the outcome. However, his legacy was the passing of the Native Title Act of 1993. Next came the Wik Decision in December 1996, which stated that native title and pastoral leases could coexist over the same area.
While Mabo and Wik had an effect – such as the handing back of the Silver Plains property on Queensland’s Cape York to its traditional owners in 2000 – not all similar land claims are likely to succeed. A Native Title Tribunal was established to consider each case, but given former resettlement policies, claimants have an uphill struggle to prove constant association with the land. Nonetheless, a growing acknowledgement that First Nations peoples were in fact the land’s original inhabitants, and the perception that they will eventually be re-enfranchised, has seen mining companies, farmers and, notably – and ironically, given its past record – the Queensland government, ignoring political and legal wrangles and making private land-use agreements with, or handovers to, local communities.
In horrific contrast to this tendency was the 2020 destruction by Rio Tinto of the Juukan Gorge cave, in order to expand an iron ore mine. The cave, which showed signs of continual occupation for the last 46,000 years, was of immense sacred and archeological significance; a 4000-year-old belt made of braided hair was one of the many treasures found there. After the destruction, facing shareholder unease, Rio Tinto’s chief executive stepped down. A Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura spokesperson commented, “Our people are deeply troubled and saddened by the destruction of these rock shelters and are grieving the loss of connection to our ancestors as well as our land.”
In federal elections in October 2004, the Liberals scored a resounding victory and Howard was elected prime minister for the fourth time. By December 2004, he had become Australia’s second-longest serving prime minister, surpassed only by Menzies’ eighteen years in office. Underpinned by an ongoing resources boom, the Australian economy appeared in very good shape; China’s and India’s ravenous demands for Australian minerals and metal ore boosted the price of its commodity exports. However, Australia had been running a trade deficit for almost five years and improvements were hampered by increased consumer spending on imports and by the worst drought on record. In April 2007, the Howard government announced there was a water crisis, and proposed the establishment of a national water management scheme.
The return of the Labor Party
After years of constant leadership struggles, the Australian Labor Party entered into the election year energized and revitalized under the leadership of Queenslander Kevin Rudd. A former diplomat, bureaucrat and business consultant, Rudd had a reputation for being a consummate negotiator and a shrewd politician. Next to Howard, Rudd appeared youthful, handled every challenge thrown at him by the Liberal Party with aplomb, and won with a massive swing to Labor.
Rudd ratified the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and then formally apologized to the Australian First Nations peoples in February 2008, a campaign promise fulfilled in a poignant ceremony. He withdrew Australian combat troops from Iraq, with a stinging rebuke of the former government’s actions in sending troops “without a full and proper assessment.”
But Rudd’s popularity began to falter: he was widely thought to have made a range of promises, on everything from the environment to health care, which he wasn’t capable of realizing. His behaviour, working impossible hours and expecting those around him to follow suit, caused several resignations and raised more doubts about his leadership. In June 2010, after behind-the-scenes manoeuvring, deputy prime minister Julia Gillard announced that she wished to contest the leadership: Rudd resigned and Gillard took over in a caretaker role.
The first female prime minister of Australia
Julia Gillard refused to move into the prime minister’s residence in Canberra until she had been officially elected: the election was held in August 2010, but the result was too close to call – Labor and the Liberals won 72 seats each. After two weeks of power-brokering, two independent MPs decided to back Labor, and Gillard officially became Australia’s first female prime minister.
Straight-talking Gillard won approval for her empathetic reaction to the appalling floods that hit Queensland in late 2010 and early 2011. A skilful parliamentarian and persuasive public speaker, she brought in an emissions trading scheme and mining tax, and strengthened paid parental leave. Australia under Gillard appeared to be thriving. But while the country bucked the global economic downturn which began in 2008, largely due to the strong trading relationship with China (and due to mining in particular), Gillard never calmed the squabbles within her party. Rudd continued to oppose Gillard from the sidelines, while the Murdoch press launched personal attacks on the prime minister. And many of the Labor Party faithful were sorely disappointed when she failed to support single-sex marriage and reduced financial support for single parents.
With tensions continuing, in June 2013 Gillard took the gamble of calling a leadership ballot. She lost, Rudd was reinstated as leader and Gillard left party politics after a relatively short term of office.
Destabilization
The power-wrangling within the Labor Party proved very damaging. In September 2013, the Liberal Party’s Tony Abbott defeated Rudd in the general election, despite the lack of deeply felt support for his anti-immigration policies and his untenable status as a climate-change sceptic. Deeply unpopular, his approval rating dropped consistently and on September 14, 2015, the centre-right Malcolm Turnbull, once chairman of the Australian Republican Movement, pushed for a leadership vote and defeated Abbott. In the national election of July 2016, Turnbull narrowly defeated the Labor Party once again to form a Liberal-led coalition government.
Things were not to get any more stable. Also wildly unpopular – failing to appease the right or appeal to the left – Turnbull trailed Labor in nearly 40 consecutive opinion polls and in August 2018 the Liberal Party, with significant pushing from Tony Abbott, forced his departure.
Scott Morrison – a staunch Pentecostal Christian and one-time managing director of Tourism Australia – took office. Morrison faced criticism for his support of tougher immigration laws, particularly for asylum seekers arriving by boat, and for voting against gay marriage. But perhaps the iconic moment of his one-term administration was the image of the climate-change denier holidaying in Hawaii as the country burned in the terrible bushfires of 2019.
The downfall of Scomo and the return of Labor
Morrison’s populist charm wore very thin when he returned from holiday and approached an exhausted firefighter, who refused to shake hands with him. Morrison was also widely criticized for a half-hearted response to reports of serious sexual misconduct in the parliament building in Canberra. What’s more, the slow rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine caused anguish in a country that had suffered long and stringent lockdowns.
But it was climate change denial and his refusal to set net-zero targets that took down “Scomo” in the end. In 2022, Anthony Albanese brought a resurgent Labor party to power, assisted by Green and independent candidates – known as the Teals – who campaigned in formerly staunch Liberal seats on a platform of taking action on climate change. The dedicated grassroots action of the Greens and Teals precipitated a collapse in Liberal support. Morrison resigned as the party’s leader, and Anthony Albanese, the country’s first Italian-Australian prime minister, who was raised by a disabled single mother, came triumphantly but graciously to power. In his acceptance speech, Albanese committed to implementing the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full, giving hope to First Nations peoples that a reforming agenda will come to pass. He also prioritized setting net-zero targets, in a country that is increasingly and tragically prone to fire and flood.
Australia’s First Nations peoples
While white Australians historically grouped the country’s First Nations peoples under the term “Aborigines”, in recent years, there has been wider recognition that there are many separate cultures that are as diverse but interrelated as those of Europe. Today, these cultures include, for example, urbanized Koorie communities in Sydney and Melbourne, seminomadic groups such as the Pintupi living in the western deserts, and the Yolngu peoples of eastern Arnhem Land, an area never colonized by settlers. If there is any thread linking these groups, it is the island continent they inhabit and, particularly in the north, the appalling state of health, education and opportunities they experience along with high levels of incarceration.
What’s in a name?
When it comes to showing respect to First Nations peoples, the answer is: a lot. The terms used in the early days of colonized Australia to describe First Nations were racist and brutal. In more recent years, these were replaced, at least in formal language, by the catch-all “Indigenous people”, a term that failed to accurately convey the great linguistic and cultural diversity of First Nations, and which echoed the exoticizing language used to describe the nation’s plants and animals.
For a time, the acceptable terminology was “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders”, to acknowledge the ethnic and cultural differences between Aboriginal people and the islanders, who are mainly of Melanesian origin. But while this is acceptable, in some cases, it is too simplistic: it does not acknowledge the extraordinary diversity within these two groups. A huge range of nations, cultures and languages exist across mainland Australia and throughout the Torres Strait.
Most importantly, respectful language use depends on what different communities find appropriate. First Nations is a self-chosen description, which emphasizes the fact that you are referring to the oldest culture on earth, and that the Nations are not scattered groups, but cohesive and distinct cultures. For these reasons, and out of respect to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, we try to use the names of specific communities throughout this Guide, or where this is not possible, we use First Nations or Aboriginal people as a nod to the diversity within these peoples.
From 1788, the estimated 750,000 First Nations peoples of Australia were gradually dispossessed of their lands and livelihoods by the British colonists who failed to recognize them as legitimate inhabitants. Australia was annexed to the British Empire on the basis that it was terra nullius, or uninhabited wasteland. (This legal fiction persisted until the High Court judged in the landmark Mabo and Wik rulings; see page 676.) Upon deciding that the country was unoccupied, successive waves of new settlers hastened to make it so. Violent conflicts between First Nations and recently arrived Australians resulted in the decimation of First Nations groups. The most widely known of these conflicts was the unofficial war waged against Tasmania’s peoples, which resulted in the near-destruction of First Nations Tasmanians (see page 641). Historians estimate that twenty thousand First Nations peoples may have died in these mostly unrecorded battles.
Australia’s geographical isolation meant that the introduction of European diseases was also a powerful agent in decimating the First Nations populations. Whole communities were wiped out by smallpox and malaria epidemics, and the diaries from the First Fleet record the rapid destruction from smallpox of the First Nations camps in the Sydney hinterland within a few years of the establishment of the colony. Those who didn’t die fled the area, unwittingly infecting neighbouring groups as they went.
The interruption of traditional food and water supplies became progressively worse through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the pastoral industry expanded across rural Australia, and vast areas were stripped of vegetation to provide grazing land. Grazing animals drained established water sources, and dug up the flora on the soil surface with their hooves, contributing to erosion and salinity, and so creating dust bowls.
Australia’s First Nations peoples have also been subjected to various forms of incarceration, ranging from prisons to apartheid-style reserves. Much of this systematic imprisonment was instigated between 1890 and 1950 as an official policy of protection, in response to the devastating impact of colonization. Missionaries and other well-meaning people believed that First Nations peoples were a dying race, and that it was a Christian duty to provide for them in their passing. Parliamentary records of the time reveal a harsher mentality. First Nations were often viewed as a weak and degenerate people who exposed white settlers to physical and moral turpitude. Under the pretence of acting for the wellbeing of First Nations peoples and settlers alike, state governments enacted legislation to appoint official Protectors of Aboriginal peoples, established reserves in rural areas, and forcibly moved communities to them. In some parts of Australia, these reserves were established on traditional lands, allowing people to continue to live relatively undisturbed. Elsewhere, notably Queensland, people were removed from their home areas and forced to relocate in reserves throughout the state. Families were broken up and their ties with the land and spirits shattered. The so-called protectors had autonomy over those in their ward. For example, First Nations peoples required permits to marry or to move from one reserve to another, or were forced into indentured (or simply slave) labour to be paid in flour or tobacco. This treatment persisted in some areas until the late 1960s.
First Nations peoples are still absurdly overrepresented in Australia’s prison population. In 1987, the situation led to a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which reported to the Federal Parliament. It called for wide-ranging changes in police and judicial practice, and substantial changes to social programmes aimed at improving the lot of First Nations peoples in the areas of justice, health, education, economics and empowerment. But despite considerable government lip service paid to the recommendations of the Royal Commission, it has not resulted in any substantial change to incarceration rates.
From the 1920s, First Nations children fathered by European Australians but born to Black mothers were removed and put into state institutions or with white foster parents as part of a policy of assimilation. The practice of “taking the children away” began in Victoria in 1886 and continued until 1969, and still haunts the lives of many First Nations, now known as the Stolen Generation, who have lost contact with their natal families and their culture. Their plight was poignantly depicted in the 2002 film Rabbit-Proof Fence (see page 685). But despite the policy being the subject of a major government enquiry in 1997, and the subsequent media attention following the release of the report, it was only with the election of the Rudd government that there was finally an official apology.
Revitalization
The revitalization of First Nations peoples and their cultures effectively began in 1967, when a constitutional referendum overwhelmingly endorsed the rights of First Nations as voting citizens, and gave the federal government the power to legislate for First Nations. Prior to this referendum, First Nations had the status of wards of each of the states. The referendum ushered in an era of self-determination for First Nations peoples, evidenced by the establishment of the first Ministry for Aboriginal Affairs in the Whitlam Labor government of 1972–75.
After more than a hundred years of agitation, land rights were accorded to First Nations groups in the Northern Territory in 1976 under federal legislation. All the mainland states and territories now have provisions for First Nations land rights. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, successive federal governments set up various representative bodies, including the notorious Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Commission (ATSIC: 1990–2004). This statutory authority gave elected First Nations representatives effective control over many of the federal funding programmes directed at First Nations organizations and communities. Substantial funds were directed towards training for employment and improved health education. The reality was far different: corruption, nepotism and flawed or ill-considered projects conspired to bring about ATSIC’s abolition in 2004 and a return to greater federal government control.
Along with ownership of land and some control over funding came opportunities for economic self-sufficiency and expansion previously unavailable to First Nations groups. In many parts of the country, this allowed First Nations peoples to buy the cattle stations on which they had worked without wages for many years. In central Australia, First Nations enterprises include TV and radio stations, transport companies, small airlines, publishing companies, tourist businesses and joint-venture mining operations.
Cooperative agreements with the Australian Nature Conservation Agency led to ownership and joint management of two of Australia’s most important conservation reserves, Uluru–Kata Tjuta and Kakadu national parks in the Northern Territory. These arrangements recognize that First Nations owners retain an enormous understanding about the ecology of their traditional lands that are vital in the development of land-management plans.
The blowing up of a sacred cave by Rio Tinto in 2020 was a brutal attack on the rights of First Nations peoples. But new prime minister Albanese’s commitment to the Uluru Declaration from the Heart suggests that more harmonious times may lie ahead. Scripted by First Nations peoples, the Declaration aims to restore their own ancient sovereignty of the land through constitutional reforms and a commission for truth-telling and agreement-making.
From the big rock sound of the Warumpi Band, and the heartfelt guitar ballads of Archie Roach, to the cruisey island reggae of Saltwater and the echoes of an ancient culture in the work of Nabarlek (who sing mostly in the Kunwinjku language), there is no way of pigeonholing the music of First Nations peoples.
One hot talent is Yilila, a band whose music – an energetic mix of pulsing didgeridoo, screaming guitar solos and funky bass – is based on the story of Dhumbala or Red Flag, which chronicles their ancestors’ centuries-old relationship with Indonesian traders. Funk-loving singer Baker Boy raps in English and Yolngu, while effervescent, five-piece band King Stingray fuse traditional music with surf rock.
At the other end of the spectrum is the late Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, whose uplifting debut album Gurrumul (2008) won rave reviews and many awards. Geoffrey was born blind and sang angelically in his Native Yolngu tongue with just acoustic guitar and bass behind him.
Australia’s most recognizable instrument is the didgeridoo. Known also as a yidaki, or simply a “didge,” this hollowed-out tree branch, when blown into, produces a resonant hum that can be punctuated by imitations of animal and bird noises. Its sound is uniquely evocative of the Australian landscape.
Barunga Sports & Cultural Festival http://barungafestival.com.au. Biggest of the First Nations music festivals, this showcases up to forty bands, along with team sports, traditional dance, spear-throwing and didge-playing competitions. It’s held in August at Barunga Community, 80km south of Katherine in the NT (campsites with facilities are available).
Milingimbi Gattjirrk Cultural Festival http://facebook.com/GattjirrkFestival. The Milingimbi community’s Gattjirrk Cultural Festival in the Top End is a music and community event and, being harder to get to than Barunga, gets fewer white visitors. Dates for this one are hard to nail down, although it’s always held sometime mid-year, on Milingimbi Island in the Crocodile archipelago. There are flights from Darwin, otherwise you need permission from the Northern Land Council (Darwin Head Office 08 8920 5100, http://nlc.org.au) to drive across Arnhem Land to Ramingining to catch a barge. Traditional music and dance are featured, along with gospel bands and lots of Arnhem Land rock.
Laura Dance Festival http://lauradancefestival.com. The Laura Dance Festival, held every odd-numbered year in far north Queensland, attracts high-profile performers like the Warumpi Band and Christine Anu, plus all the local Murri bands. Held in June, there are usually quite a few backpackers and hippies about, as well as the local Murri community. It’s about three hours’ drive (on sealed roads) north from Cairns to Laura, a small town 60km west of Cooktown.
Yabun Survival Day http://yabun.org.au. If you’re in Sydney over summer, there’s no better place to be on the Australia Day holiday (Jan 26) than at Yabun Survival Day festival at Victoria Park. This festival began more than twenty years ago as a highly political event, deliberately juxtaposed with the Australia Day festivities that mark the arrival of the First Fleet of “white invaders”. It continues as a celebration of the survival of First Nations peoples and cultures in the face of white oppression, and draws many of the biggest names in First Nations music.
Despite forty thousand years of human pressure and manipulation, accelerated in the last two centuries by the effects of introduced species, Australia’s ecology and wildlife remain among the most distinctive on earth. They are also some of the most endangered: in the last two hundred years, more native mammals have become extinct here than on any other continent, and land clearing – particularly in Queensland – kills an estimated 7.5 million birds a year, bringing several species to the edge of extinction.
Australians love to tell stories about the dangers the bush holds for the inexperienced traveller. In reality, fearsome “drop bears” lurking in gums, fallen tree trunks that turn out to be giant snakes, bloodthirsty wild pigs, and other rampaging terrors are mostly confined to hotel bars, the product of suburban paranoia laced with a surprising naivety about the great outdoors. Apart from a couple of avoidable exceptions (see page 61), there’s little to fear from Australia’s wildlife.
And, of course, human activities pose way more threat to Australia’s wildlife than the other way round. In 2019–20, under the rule of climate-change denier and former president Scott Morrison, Australia was ravaged by bushfires. One billion animals are estimated to have died in the fires, with around two billion more – including the iconic and adorable koala – threatened by ensuing habitat loss. The State of the Environment report, published in 2022 in collaboration with First Nations peoples, found nineteen ecosystems on the brink of collapse, with six mass bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef, and the country under severe environmental pressure from mining, fire, flood and invasive species. The conclusion: Australians must “connect to Country” and learn to heal the land.
Australia has a fossil record that makes up in range what it lacks in quantity. Imprints of invertebrates from South Australia’s Ediacaran fauna, dated to over 600 million years ago, are the oldest evidence of animal life in the world. On a larger scale, footprints and remains of several dinosaur species have been uncovered, and opalized marine fossils are unique to the country. Perhaps most intriguing is evidence of the megafauna – giant wildlife that included the 20m-long constricting snake montypythonoides, flightless birds bigger than an ostrich, a rhino-sized wombat, carnivorous kangaroos, and thylacoleo, a marsupial lion – which flourished until about thirty thousand years ago, overlapping with First Nations occupation. Climatic changes were probably responsible for their demise, but humans wiped out the thylacine, a dog-like marsupial with an oversized head, which vanished from the mainland after the introduction of dingoes, but survived in Tasmania until 1936 – the year it received government protection.
Marsupials and monotremes
In the years after the demise of the dinosaurs, Australia split away from the rest of the world and the animals here evolved along different lines to anywhere else. As placental mammals gained the ascendancy in South America, Africa, Europe and Asia, it was the marsupials and monotremes that took over in Australia, alongside the megafauna (see box below). These orders are not exclusive to Australia (they’re also found in New Guinea and South America), but it’s here that they reached their greatest diversity and numbers.
Marsupials are mammals that give birth to a partially formed embryo, which itself then develops in a pouch on the mother; this allows a higher breeding rate in good years. Easiest to find because they actively seek out people, ringtail and brushtail possums are common in suburbs and campsites, and often hard to avoid if they think there’s a chance of getting some food. With a little persistence, you should encounter one of the several species of related glider possum on the edges of forests at dusk. Kangaroos and wallabies are the Australian answer to deer and antelope, and range from tiny, solitary rainforest species to the gregarious 2m-tall red kangaroo of the central plains – watching these creatures bouncing effortlessly across the landscape is
an extraordinary sight. The arboreal, eucalyptus-chewing koalas and tubby, ground-dwelling wombats are smaller, less active and more sensitive to disturbance; this has made them more elusive, and has placed them on the endangered list as their habitat is cleared. Carnivorous marsupials are mostly shrew-sized today (though a lion equivalent probably survived into First Nations times, and fossils of meat-eating kangaroos have been found); two of the largest are spotted native cats or quolls, and Tasmania’s indigenous Tasmanian devil, a terrier-sized scavenger. These creatures are currently suffering severe health problems (see page 638).
Nearly ten percent of Australia’s great outdoors is protected within national parks, many of them – such as Kakadu (NT), a vast area of natural beauty and First Nations rock art dating back tens of thousands of years – significant enough to be listed as World Heritage Sites. Another is the Tasmanian wilderness, at a fifth of the state’s total area one of the largest conservation reserves in Australia; its 80km Overland Track from Cradle Mountain to Lake St Clair is one of the world’s great walks – a challenging five or six days but worth it for the spectacular scenery every step of the way. Other equally spectacular parks include Karajini (WA), astonishing for its wild flowers, gorges and red dust, and the Flinders Ranges (SA), 300km north of Adelaide, renowned for the great kilometre-high natural bowl of Wilpena Pound and as the start of the Heysen Trail, a punishing 1200km walk. There are less visited, but equally rewarding, national parks too, such as Mutawintji, 130km northeast of Broken Hill in New South Wales, with secluded gorges, quiet waterholes and ancient galleries of First Nations rock art to be discovered in the caves and overhangs.
Platypuses and echidnas are the only monotremes, egg-laying mammals that suckle their young through specialized pores. Once considered a stage in the evolution of placental mammals, they’re now recognized as a specialized branch of the family. Neither is particularly rare, but being nocturnal, shy and, in the case of the platypus, aquatic, makes them difficult to find. Ant-eating echidnas resemble a long-nosed, thick-spined hedgehog or small porcupine, and are found countrywide. Platypuses are confined to the eastern ranges and look like a blend of duck and otter, having a grey, rubbery bill, webbed feet, short fur, and a poison spur on males, a combination that seemed too implausible to nineteenth-century biologists, who initially denounced stuffed specimens as a hoax, assembled from pieces of other animals.
Of the introduced mammals, dingoes are descended from dogs, introduced to Australia by First Nations people in the last twelve thousand years – although there is some merit to the claim that they were introduced from Asia around 3500 to 4000 years ago. To keep them away from flocks, graziers built “vermin fences”, which were connected by the Australian government to form a 5400km-long, continuous fence, allegedly the world’s longest. The Dingo Fence stretches from South Australia into northwest Queensland and down to New South Wales. Camels have also become acclimatized to Australia since their introduction in the 1840s; they are doing so well in the central deserts that they are considered a pest. Australia is the only place where dromedaries still occur in the wild, and they are regularly exported to the Middle East. The blight that hoofed mammals – horses, cows, sheep and goats – have perpetrated on Australia’s fragile fauna is horrendous. The damage caused by rabbits is equally pervasive, especially in the semi-desert areas where their cyclic population explosions can strip every shred of plant life from fragile dune systems.
Feral cats, which hunt for sport as well as necessity, are currently one of the greatest threats to indigenous fauna, primarily small marsupials and birds. An introduced amphibian, however, has turned out to be the most insidious and rapacious invader of all: the highly toxic cane toad (see page 682).
Reptiles, birds, bats and marine life
Australian reptiles come in all shapes and sizes. In the tropical parts of the country, the pale lizards you see wriggling across the ceiling on Velcro-like pads are geckos, and you’ll find fatter, sluggish skinks – such as the stumpy, blue-tongued lizard – everywhere. Other widespread species are frill-necked lizards, known for fanning out their necks and running on their hind legs when frightened, and the ubiquitous goanna family, which includes the monstrous perentie, third-largest lizard in the world. In central Australia, look out for the extraordinary thorny devil or moloch, an animal that seems part rock, part rosebush.
Crocodiles are confined to the tropics and come in two types. The shy, inoffensive freshwater crocodile grows to around 3m in length and feeds on fish and frogs. The larger, bulkier, and misleadingly named saltwater or estuarine crocodile can grow to 7m, ranges far inland (often in freshwater), and is the only Australian animal that constitutes an active threat to humans. Highly evolved predators, they should be given a very wide berth (see page 371). Despite their bad press, snakes are generally timid and pose far less of a problem, even though Australia has everything from constricting pythons through to three-quarters of the world’s most venomous species.
With a climate that extends from temperate zones well into the tropics, Australia’s birdlife is prolific and varied. Small penguins and albatrosses live along the south coast, while riflebirds, related to New Guinea’s birds of paradise, and the cassowary, a colourful version of the ostrich, live in the tropical rainforests. The drabber emu prefers drier plains further west. Among the birds of prey, the countrywide wedge-tail eagle and the coastal white-bellied sea eagle are most impressive in their size. Both share their environment with the stately grey brolga, an Australian crane, and the even larger jabiru stork, with its chisel beak and pied plumage. Parrots, arguably the country’s most spectacular birds, come in over forty varieties, and no matter if they’re flocks of green budgerigars, outrageously coloured rainbow lorikeets, or white sulphur-crested cockatoos, they’ll deafen you with their noisy song. Equally raucous are kookaburras, giant kingfishers found near permanent water. The quieter tawny frogmouth, an incredibly camouflaged cousin of the nightjar, has one of the most disgruntled expressions ever seen on a bird.
The most insidious of all Australia’s invasive species has been the cane toad, imported from Latin America in the 1930s in a failed attempt to control cane beetle in the sugar-cane fields of north Queensland. Unfortunately, the toads turned out to be huge pests themselves. With no natural predators to halt their progress, they have waddled down the east coast to the north coast of New South Wales and across the top of the continent to the flood plains of the Top End, including Kakadu National Park. They are a disaster for native fauna – being highly toxic, the amphibians can kill anything that eats them. More positively, crows and magpies have developed the skill of flipping the toads onto their backs to devour the nonpoisonous intestines, great evidence of evolution in action. If the skill extends to other types of meat-eating bird, predation may at last keep the pesky cane toad at bay.
Huge colonies of bats, of orange, ghost and horseshoe varieties, congregate in caves and fill entire trees all over Australia. The fruit bat, or flying fox, is especially common in the tropics, where evenings can be spent watching colonies of the 1m-winged monsters heading out from their daytime roosts on feeding expeditions.
In addition to what you’ll see on the Barrier Reef (covered in the Coastal Queensland chapter), whales, turtles, dolphins, seals and dugongs (sea cows) are part of the country’s marine life, with humpback and southern right whales making a welcome return to the coasts in recent decades after being hunted close
to extinction.
Flora
Australia’s most distinctive and widespread trees are those that developed a dependence on fire. Some, like the seemingly limitless varieties of eucalypt or gum tree, need extreme heat to burst open button-shaped pods and release their seeds, and encourage fires by annually shedding bark and leaves, depositing a thick layer of tinder on the forest floor. Other shrubs with similar habits are banksia, grevillia and bottlebrush, with its distinctive bushy flowers and spiky seedpods, while those prehistoric survivors, palm-like cycads and grass trees, similarly depend on regular conflagrations to promote new growth. For thousands of years, First Nations peoples used controlled burn-offs to make the land more suitable for hunting, thereby possibly enhancing these fire-reliant traits.
Despite the country having extensive arid regions, there is no native equivalent to the cactus, although the dry, spiky spinifex or porcupine grass, the succulent samphire with its curiously jointed stem, and the aptly named saltbush come closest in their ability to survive extreme temperatures. After rain, smaller desert plants rush to bloom and seed, covering the ground in a spectacular blanket of colour, a phenomenon for which Australia’s Outback regions are well known.
On a larger scale, the Outback is dotted with stands of hardy mulgas and wattles, which superficially resemble scrawny eucalypts but have different leaf structures, as well as scattered groups of bloated, spindly branched bottle trees, whose sweet, pulpy and moisture-laden cores can be used as emergency stock feed in drought conditions. The similar but far larger boab, found in the Kimberley and the northern part of the Northern Territory, is thought to be an invader from East Africa. Mallee scrub is unique to the southeastern Outback, where clearing of these tangled, bush-sized eucalypts for grazing has endangered both scrub and those animals that rely on it – the mound-building mallee fowl being the best known.
Mangrove swamps, found along the tropical and subtropical coasts, are tidal zones of thick grey mud and mangrove trees, whose interlocked aerial roots make an effective barrier to exploration. They’ve suffered extensive clearing for development, and it wasn’t until recently that their importance to the estuarine life cycle won them limited government protection. First Nations peoples have always found them a rich source of animal and plant products.
Rainforest once covered much of the continent, but today only a small portion of its former abundance survives. Nevertheless, you’ll find pockets everywhere, from Tasmania’s richly verdant wilderness to the monsoonal examples of northern Queensland and the Top End in the Northern Territory. Trees grow to gigantic heights, as they compete with each other for light, supporting themselves in the poor soil with aerial or buttressed roots. The extraordinary banyan and Moreton Bay fig trees are fine examples of the two types. They support a huge number of plant species, with tangled vines in the lower reaches, and orchids, elkhorns and other epiphytes using larger plants as roosts. Palms and tree ferns, with their giant, delicately curled fronds, are found in more open forest, where there’s regular water.
Some forest types illustrate the extent of Australia’s prehistoric flora. Antarctic beech or Nothafagus, found south of Brisbane as well as in South America, along with native pines and kauri from Queensland, which also occur in New Zealand, are all evidence of the prehistoric supercontinent, Gondwana. Other “living fossils” include primitive marine stromatolites – algae corals – still found around Shark Bay, Western Australia, and in fossilized form in the central deserts.
As long as you don’t eat them or fall onto the pricklier versions, most Australian plants are harmless – though in rainforests you’d want to avoid entanglement with spiky lawyer cane or wait-awhile vine (though it doesn’t look like it, this is a climbing palm). Also watch out for the large, pale-green, heart-shaped leaves of the stinging tree, a scraggly “regrowth” plant found on the margins of cleared tropical rainforest. Even a casual brush delivers an agonizing and prolonged sting; if you’re planning on bushwalking in the tropics, learn to recognize and avoid this plant.
Australia has had a connection to film since federation. It is generally agreed (with deference to a 1900 Salvation Army promo, Stations of the Cross) that The Story of the Kelly Gang, made by Charles Tait in 1906, was the world’s first feature-length film – the story was updated with punk pizzazz in 2019 under director Justin Kurzel. Later, with the many cinematic testaments to the heroic disaster of Gallipoli, Australian silent cinema reached a creative peak. Raymond Longford was Australia’s Spielberg of silents at this time, and his 1919 production of The Sentimental Bloke and its sequel, Ginger Mick, a year later, were popular and notably naturalist dramas about a woman’s taming of her larrikin husband’s proclivities. The themes of distrust of sophistication and the mythic spell of “the bush” began to make its mark on Australian productions – one still evident in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia in 2008.
Oz on the box
Australian TV has finally shrugged off the twee image bestowed by umpteen episodes of Neighbours and Home and Away. First came the sexy, sassy Secret Life of Us (2001–05) set in Melbourne’s St Kilda, then critically acclaimed Love My Way (2004–07), dealing with the emotional entanglements of 30-something Sydneyites. Kath & Kim (2002–2007) neatly satirized the Aussie suburbs, while Underbelly (2007) was a gritty crime series covering real-life gangland killings on the dark side of Melbourne, seemingly a million miles from the wobbly furnishings and emotional blandness of Neighbours. The 2011 TV adaption of The Slap (see page 689) was a pitch-perfect dive into the seamier side of the Melbourne suburbs. Starring Cate Blanchett, Stateless (2020) is based on a true-life tale of strangers imprisoned in a desert immigration centre. And nostalgic fans of 90s teen drama Heartbreak High should look out for its reprise on Netflix (2022).
One of the most interesting Australian TV productions though, was the seven-part series First Australians (2008). Drawing inspiration from individual stories, from Bennelong, taken to England in 1792, to land-rights campaigner Eddie Mabo, it covers the tragic history of relations between Australia’s colonizers and its first people with thoughtfulness and subtlety.
Humour, black comedy and satire
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliott, 1994). A queer romp across the Outback, prying into some musty corners of Australian social life along the way.
Babakiueria (Julian Pringler, 1988). A culture-reversing short-film spoof with First Nations peoples invading Australia and continuing with an anthropological-style study of white Australia. Well worth the search.
The Castle (Rob Sitch, 1997). A family’s struggle to defend their home in the face of a trinity of suburban horrors: toxic-waste dumps, overhead power lines and airport developers.
Death in Brunswick (John Ruane, 1990). A black comedy about the misfortunes of a hapless dishwasher who becomes embroiled in a gangland killing.
Malcolm (Nadia Tass, 1985). A charming, offbeat comedy about a tram driver in Melbourne.
Muriel’s Wedding (P.J. Hogan, 1994). Kleptomaniac frump Muriel wastes away in an Abba-and-confetti dream-world until ex-school chum Rhonda masterminds Muriel’s escape from her awful family and ghastly seaside suburb of “Porpoise Spit”. Great performances.
Adolescent and misfit romance
Babyteeth (Shannon Murphy, 2020). A raw, gentle, touching coming-of-age story with a twist: Milla is terminally ill. Her romance with a homeless addict horrifies Milla’s family, as the two revel in their dreamy infatuation.
Better Than Sex (Jonathan Teplitzky, 2000). In this romantic comedy, Josh has only three days left until he returns to London, so a one-night, after-party fling with Cin shouldn’t hold any complications.
Flirting (John Duigan, 1989). This sequel to The Year My Voice Broke follows a young boy’s adventures in boarding school. Superior coming-of-age film.
Lonely Hearts (Paul Cox, 1981). Following the death of his mother, 50-year-old Peter buys a new toupee and joins a dating agency. A sensitive portrayal of the ensuing, at times awkward, relationship. Other Paul Cox features include Man of Flowers, My First Wife and Cactus.
Looking for Alibrandi (Kate Woods, 2000). Light yet surprisingly layered story of a teenage Sydney girl dealing with suicide, high school, new love and immigrant cultural identity.
Love and Other Catastrophes (Emma-Kate Croghan, 1996). A youthful campus comedy with film-buff in-jokes and an energetic cast, set in and filmed at Melbourne Uni.
Mullet (David Caesar, 2001). A slow-motion plot set in a New South Wales south-coast fishing town where nothing happens until a mysterious prodigal son (Ben Mendelsohn) returns to mixed receptions from his family, former friends and fiancée.
Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann, 1991). Mismatched dancers who, together, dare to defy the prescribed routines of a ballroom dancing competition – all its frozen smiles and gaudy gown glory. A feel-good hit and the first feature from the successful director of Moulin Rouge (2001).
Urban dysfunctionals
Animal Kingdom (David Michôd, 2010). This much-praised and grim family drama about Melbourne’s crime scene aims high, but is undermined by a blank central performance and a derivative script.
The Boys (Rowan Woods, 1998). This tense and powerful drama follows an ex-prisoner who terrorizes his dysfunctional family and coerces his unemployed brothers into a violent crime.
Careful, He Might Hear You (Carl Shultz, 1982). An absorbing tug-of-love drama set in 1930s Sydney with brilliant images by cinematographer John Seale.
Chopper (Andrew Dominik, 2000). Eric Bana brilliantly plays notorious criminal Mark “Chopper” Read, who ruthlessly dominates prison inmates and underworld associates alike. Based on Read’s autobiography.
The Devil’s Playground (Fred Schepisi, 1975). Burgeoning sexuality creates tension between pupils and their tutors in a Catholic seminary. A fine debut film.
Head On (Ana Kokkinos, 1998). Unemployed Ari (Alex Dimitriades) escapes living with his strict Greek parents by spending a hectic 24 hours nightclubbing, drug-taking and exploring his sexuality.
Lantana (Ray Lawrence, 2001). Set in Sydney, this is a sometimes bleak but thought-provoking tale of trust and secrecy in marriage. Coincidences and consequences bind lives of strangers together in ways that are as twisting, tangled and tough as the Australian plant that provides the film’s title. The strong cast includes Geoffrey Rush and Anthony LaPaglia.
The Last Days of Chez Nous (Gillian Armstrong, 1991). A middle-aged woman slowly loses her grip on her marriage and family.
Romper Stomper (Geoffrey Wright, 1991). A bleak account of the violent disintegration of a gang of Melbourne skinheads, notable as Russell Crowe’s big-screen debut.
Sweetie (Jane Campion, 1988). Part black comedy, part bleakly disturbing portrait of a bizarre suburban family.
Ockerdom
The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (Bruce Beresford, 1972). Ultra-ocker comes to England to teach “pommie sheilas about real men”. Ironically, Barry Humphries’ satire got beer-spurting ovations from the very people he despised but set Beresford’s career back a couple of years.
Australia (Baz Luhrmann, 2008). Hoity-toity English-woman Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) comes to Australia to find her pastoralist husband dead. Cue the independent cowboy (Hugh Jackman) and beautifully shot cattle drive. World War II, separation and melodrama follows. Whether you fall for director Baz Luhrmann’s epic or not, everyone fell under the spell of the First Nations character Nullah (newcomer Brandon Walters).
Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman, 1985). The acceptable side of genial ockerdom saw Paul Hogan sell Australian bush mystique to the mainstream and put Kakadu National Park firmly on the tourist agenda. Enjoyable once, but don’t bother with the sequels.
Wake in Fright aka Outback (Ted Kotcheff, 1970). A horrifying gem in its uncut 114min version; a real Deliverance down under. A coast-bound teacher blows his fare in Outback Hicksville and his life slowly degenerates into a brutal, beer-sodden nightmare.
Gritty and defiant women
The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014). A widowed mother confronts the monster that preoccupies her son.
Celia (Ann Turner, 1988). A wonderful allegory that mixes a 1950s rabbit-eradication programme with a communist witch-hunt. Stubborn Celia is determined to keep her bunny.
Dance Me to My Song (Rolf de Heer, 1998). A unique and moving film written by and starring cerebral-palsy-sufferer Heather Rose as she is abused by her carer and falls in love.
The Drover’s Wife (Leah Purcell, 2021). A First Nations and feminist reimagining of Henry Lawson’s 1892 short story, this Blue Mountains-set drama centres around fierce frontierswoman Molly Johnson, brilliantly portrayed by Leah Purcell, who wrote and directed the film.
The Getting of Wisdom (Bruce Beresford, 1977). Spirited Laura rejects the polite sensibilities and snobbery of an Edwardian boarding school.
Holy Smoke (Jane Campion, 1999). An unlikely but enjoyable desert encounter between Kate Winslet, at her bravura best as a member of an Indian cult, and grizzled Harvey Keitel, the “cult-exiter” sent by her family to bring her back to her senses.
My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong, 1978). An early feminist questions and defies the expectations of 1890s Victoria.
Shame (Steve Jodrell, 1988). A woman lawyer on an Outback motorcycle trip breaks down in a small town and becomes embroiled in the town’s secrets.
We of the Never Never (Igor Auzins, 1981). A version of Jeannie Gunn’s autobiographical classic of early twentieth-century station life in the Top End.
Men in rugged circumstances
Comrades (Bill Douglas, 1986). The second half of masterful, magical Comrades sees the Tolpuddle Martyrs exiled to Australia, a land of surreal, sometimes brutal, encounters and epic beauty.
The Dish (Rob Sitch, 2000). Light-hearted take on how Australia saved NASA during the broadcasting of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing from New South Wales’ Parkes Space Observatory, and an aside on how the country’s technological skills are often overlooked. Starring Sam Neill.
Gallipoli (Peter Weir, 1980). A deservedly classic buddy movie in which a young Mel Gibson strikingly evokes the Anzacs’ cheery idealism and the tragedy of their slaughter.
Lion (Garth Davis, 2017). Tear-jerking epic that follows Saroo, a Tasmania-raised, India-born young man in his search for his birth family through, firstly, Google Earth and then the Khandwa district of India.
The Man from Snowy River (George Miller, 1981). Men, horses and the land from A.B. (“Banjo”) Paterson’s seminal and dearly loved poem caught the overseas’ imagination. A modern kangaroo western.
Plains of Heaven (Ian Pringle, 1982). A spookily atmospheric story of two weathermen in a remote meteorological station slowly losing their minds.
Sunday Too Far Away (Ken Hannam, 1973). A simple tale of macho shearers’ rivalries in Outback South Australia, with a charismatic performance by a youthful, bottom-baring Jack Thompson.
The Outback
Cargo (Yolanda Ramke & Ben Howling, 2018). A father infected with zombie virus has two days to find somebody to take care of his infant daughter.
Evil Angels (A Cry in the Dark) (Fred Schepisi, 1987). A dramatic retelling of the Azaria Chamberlain story; Uluru and dingoes will never seem quite the same again. But it’s Meryl Streep’s atrocious Aussie accent and the line “the dingo’s got my baby” that have become classics.
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975). A richly layered tale about the disappearance of a party of schoolgirls and its traumatic aftermath.
The Proposition (John Hillcoat, 2005). Ray Winstone, Guy Pearce and Emily Watson in a Western-inspired tale of bloodshed and revenge, written by Nick Cave.
Red Dog (Kriv Stenders, 2011). True (and beautifully shot) story of the eponymous hound, immortalized by a statue in his hometown. The dog, searching for his master, brings a mining town together.
Satellite Boy (Catriona McKenzie, 2012). Twelve-year-old First Nations Pete lives with his grandfather, Old Jagamarra, in an abandoned outdoor cinema. He walks to the city through epic Kimberley landscapes to try to save his home from developers, rediscovering lost bush skills en route.
Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971). Following their father’s death by suicide during a bush picnic, two children wander through the desert until a First Nations boy, David Gulpilil, guides them back to civilization.
Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005). Three backpackers are stuck in the desert at nightfall, hundreds of kilometres from anywhere, when their car won’t start. It appears help is at hand in the person of truck-driving Mick Taylor, but his aims are to never let them leave alive. Terrifying, and tasteless, considering the inspiration was the real back-packer murders of the 1990s.
First Nations Australia
Bran Nue Day (Rachel Perkins, 2009). An eccentric 1950s-set musical about a young First Nations boy escaping his Catholic school to return home – the weakest element is the music, the strongest the endearing cast.
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (Fred Schepisi, 1977). Set in the 1800s, a First Nations boy is forced onto the wrong side of the law. Based on the novel by Thomas Keneally and powerfully directed.
Charlie’s Country (Rolf de Heer, 2014): A man from a remote community in Arnhemland exposes the painful clash between white law and First Nations peoples.
Dead Heart (Brian Brown, 1996). A long-overdue and regrettably overlooked thriller, set in a First Nations community near Alice Springs. Bravely gets its teeth into some juicy political and social issues.
The Fringe Dwellers (Bruce Beresford, 1985). An aspiring daughter persuades her family to move from the bush into a suburban white neighbourhood, with expected results.
Manganinnie (John Honey, 1980). Set during the time of the “black drives” of 1830s Tasmania, a young First Nations girl gets separated from her family and meets a white girl in similar straits.
Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, 2002). A moving film, with beautiful cinematography, set in 1930s Western Australia and based on a true Stolen Generation story. Three girls, daughters of absent white fathers and Black mothers, are taken from their families according to the policy of the all-powerful Chief Protector of Aborigines to a settlement at Moore River, but manage to escape. The girls – Outback-cast unknowns giving emotive, natural performances – make their way over 2000km home following the fence, pursued by a tracker (David Gulpilil).
Samson and Deliliah (Warwick Thornton, 2009). An alternative, uncompromising romance about a First Nations child in a disadvantaged desert community.
Sapphires (Wayne Blair, 2012). A Sixties-set pic about four young First Nations girls who travel with their band The Sapphires, to sing for US troops in Vietnam.
Sweet Country (Warwick Thornton, 2018). A First Nations farmhand is chased across the NT after he kills a white landowner in self-defence. A moving and memorable exploration of the brutal treatment of First Nations, the loneliness of Outback life and the trauma of war.
Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer, 2005). A goose-egg-hunting expedition in the Arafura Wetlands in Arnhem Land in tribal times: Dayindi (played by Jamie Gulpilil, son of David Gulpilil) fancies one of the wives of his older brothers – a threat to tribal law. To teach him a lesson, the older brother tells him a parable from the mythical past. The story weaves back and forth between the two timelines, with the Dreamtime events in colour, the goose-egg hunting in black and white. This beautifully photographed and humorously narrated film has a timeless appeal that transcends cultures, the result of close cooperation between de Heer, David Gulpilil and the Arnhem Land community of Ramingining. De Heer’s desert film The Mountain is one to watch in 2022.
The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002). Set in 1922, this is something of a fable in an experimental form: “The Fanatic”, a police officer who will stop at nothing, including cold-blooded massacre, leads “The Tracker” (David Gulpilil), “The Follower” (a young, green policeman) and “The Veteran”, all in search of “The Accused”, a First Nations man wanted for a white woman’s murder. Violent massacre scenes are replaced by landscape paintings with a painful soundtrack, while songs (performed by First Nations musician Archie Roach) and narration convey the themes, creating a disturbing impression.
Yolgnu Boy (Stephen Johnson, 2001). In Yolgnu country in Arnhem Land, Lorrpu, Milika and Bortj have always been an inseparable trio. But when adolescence hits, 15-year-old Bortj’s petrol-sniffing rampages land him in jail; as Lorrpu and Milika become tribally initiated, Bortj finds himself outside his own culture and unable to become a man, and friendships and loyalties are tested. When the three embark on a (beautifully shot) 500km overland trek to Darwin, living off the land, distress gives way to joy ... until they hit the city.
Portents of doom
Cane Toads: an Unnatural History (Mark Lewis, 1988). An eccentric, original and amusing documentary about the violent feelings Queensland’s venomous amphibians arouse and the real threat they may pose to Australia’s ecology.
The Last Wave (Peter Weir, 1977). An eerie chiller about a lawyer defending an Aborigine accused of murder – and the powerful, elemental forces his people control.
Mad Max 2 (George Miller, 1981). The best of the trilogy, set in a near future, where loner Max protects an oil-producing community from fuel-starved crazies. Great machinery and stunts.
Tomorrow, When the War Began (Stuart Beattie, 2010). An action picture about teenagers banding together when their fictional town, Wirrawee, is invaded. Features some amazing Blue Mountains’ locations.
Australian writing came into its own in the 1890s, when a strong nationalistic movement produced writers such as Henry Lawson and the balladeer A.B. “Banjo” Paterson, who romanticized the bush and glorified the mateship ethos, while outstanding women writers, such as Miles Franklin and Barbara Baynton, gave a feminine slant to the bush tale and set the trend for strong female authorship. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Australian novelists came to be recognized in the international arena: Patrick White was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1973, Peter Carey won the Booker Prize in 1988 and again in 2001, and Kate Grenville scored the 2001 Orange Prize for Fiction. The other great figure in contemporary Australian writing is Les Murray, whose poems are deep-rooted in rural Australia, but make joyous metaphysical leaps and bounds.
Peter Carey 30 Days in Sydney: a wildly distorted account. Part of Bloomsbury Publishers’ “The Writer and the City” project, where “some of the finest writers of our time reveal the secrets of a city they know best”. Now based in New York, celebrated Australian writer Carey returns to his old stomping ground with the perspective only an expat can have, coupled with the ability of a great writer to vividly portray it.
Bruce Chatwin The Songlines. A semi-fictional account of an exploration into First Nations nomadism and stories that turns out to be one of the more readable expositions of this complex subject, though often pretentious.
Sean Condon Sean and David’s Long Drive. Australia’s humorous answer to Kerouac’s On the Road: Melbourne-based Condon and his friend David are fully fledged city dwellers when they set off on a tour around their own country, to come face to face with the dangers of crocs, tour guides and fellow travellers.
Robyn Davidson Tracks. A compelling account of a young woman’s journey across the desert, accompanied only by four camels and a dog. Davidson manages to break out of the heroic-traveller mould to write with compassion and honesty of the people she meets and the doubts, dangers and loneliness she faces on her way. A classic of its kind.
Tony Horwitz One for the Road. Married to an Australian, Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Horwitz comes to live in Sydney, but pines for adventure and sets off to hitchhike through the Outback. Along the way he encounters colourful characters. A comical, perceptive account.
Howard Jacobson In the Land of Oz. Jacobson focuses his lucidly sarcastic observations on a round-Australia trip in the late 1980s that gets rather close to some home truths for most Australians’ tastes.
Marcia Langton Welcome to Country. Now in its second edition, this guide by renowned anthropologist and geographer Marcia Langton lists First Nations-owned or -operated sites, parks, museums, festivals and galleries across the country. Langton also gives essential background on history, art and dance, culture and etiquette. There’s a youth edition too.
Mark McCrum No Worries. Knowing nothing of the country except the usual clichés, McCrum arrives in 1990s Australia and makes his way around by plane, train, thumb and Greyhound, meeting a surprising cast of characters along the way. As he travels, the stereotypes give way to an insightful picture of Australia.
Ruth Park Ruth Park’s Sydney. Prolific novelist Park’s 1973 guide to the city has been fully revised and expanded. A perfect walking companion, full of personal insights, anecdotes and literary quotations.
Nicholas Shakespeare In Tasmania. During the seven years writing and researching a biography of Bruce Chatwin, British writer Shakespeare spent time in Australia following in his footsteps. Researching his family history, Shakespeare found living Tasmanian relatives. A brilliantly Chatwinesque book, where historical tales are woven with the writer’s own experiences.
Alice Thomson The Singing Line. The great-great-granddaughter of Alice Todd, the woman after whom Alice Springs was named, retraces her ancestor’s journey to central Australia. Nice change from the usual male-centric view of the early pioneers.
Mark Whittaker and Amy Willesee The Road to Mount Buggery: a Journey through the Curiously Named Places of Australia. Australia certainly has some unfortunate, banal and obscure place names, which Mark and Amy seek out on their journey, from Lake Disappointment to Cape Catastrophe. This entertaining, well-informed travelogue gives the fascinating stories behind the names.
Autobiography and biography
Akuch Kuol Anyieth Unknown: A Refugee’s Story. Written by a South Sudanese refugee and spanning life in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya to a new existence in Melbourne, this is an honest examination of family violence, trauma and racism.
Julia Blackburn Daisy Bates in the Desert. For almost thirty years from 1913, Daisy Bates was Kabbarli, “the white-skinned grandmother”, to the First Nations people with whom she lived in the desert. Blackburn’s beautifully written biography interweaves fiction with fact to conjure up the life of one of Australia’s most eccentric and misunderstood women.
Jill Ker Conway The Road from Coorain. Conway’s childhood, on a drought-stricken Outback station during the 1940s, is movingly told, as is her battle to establish herself as a young historian in sexist, provincial 1950s Australia.
Robert Drewe The Shark Net. Accomplished novelist and journalist, Drewe has written a transfixing memoir of his boyhood and youth in Perth, which segues into a literary true-crime story. Against a vividly drawn 1950s middle-class backdrop, Drewe shows how one man’s random killing spree struck fear into the ’burbs of sunny, friendly and seemingly innocent Perth.
Albert Facey A Fortunate Life. A hugely popular autobiography of a battler, tracing his progress from a bush orphanage to Gallipoli, through the Depression, another war and beyond.
Barry Hill Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession. As a child growing up on the Hermannsburg Mission in central Australia, Strehlow learnt the Aranda (Arrente) language. In 1932, the anthropologist began collecting Aranda songs, stories and tjurunga (sacred objects) for his book Songs of Central Australia. Resented by other anthropologists for his unique insight and access, Strehlow’s was a fascinating career that ended in disgrace.
Eddie Mabo and Noel Loos Edward Koiko Mabo: His Life and Struggle for Land Rights. Mabo spent much of his life fighting for the autonomy of Torres Strait Islanders and in the process overthrew the concept of terra nullius, making his name a household word in Australia. Long interviews with the late Black hero form the basis of this book and affectionately reveal the man behind the name.
David Malouf 12 Edmondstone Street. An evocative autobiography-in-snatches of one of Australia’s finest literary novelists, describing, in loving detail, the eponymous house in Brisbane where Malouf was born, life in the Tuscan village where he lives for part of each year, and his first visit to India.
Leah Purcell Black Chicks Talking. In an effort to overcome stereotypes, First Nations actor and writer Purcell gives insight into the lives of contemporary Black women with this collection of lively, lengthy interviews, conducted with nine young females (all under 35).
Hazel Rowley Christina Stead: a Biography. Stead (1902–83) has been acclaimed as Australia’s greatest novelist. After spending years in Paris, London and New York with her American husband, she returned to Australia in her old age.
Society and culture
Richard Baker Land is Life: From Bush to Town – the Story of the Yanyuwa People. The Yanyuwa people inhabited the Gulf of Carpentaria before the Europeans arrived, but most now live in the town of Borroloola. Historian Baker, assigned a “skin” in the Yanyuwa kinship system, gathered the people’s oral history and produced this fascinating story told from the Yanyuwa point of view and time.
Geoffrey Blainey Triumph of the Nomads. A fascinating account portraying First Nations people as masters and not victims of their environment by this controversial conservative historian.
Peter and Gibson Dunbar-Hall Deadly Sounds Deadly Places. Comprehensive guide to contemporary First Nations music in Australia, from Archie Roach to Yothu Yindi.
Monica Furlong Flight of the Kingfisher: a Journey among Kukatja Aborigines. Furlong lived among the First Nations peoples of the Great Sandy Desert; this is her account of Kukatja perceptions and spiritual beliefs.
Roslynn Haynes Seeking the Centre: the Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film. The geographical and metaphorical impact of the desert on Australian culture is explored in this illustrated book, as is the connection First Nations peoples have with the desert.
David Headon North of the Ten Commandments. An anthology of Northern Territory writings from all perspectives and sources.
Donald Horne The Lucky Country. This seminal analysis of Australian society, written in 1976, has yet to be matched and is still often quoted.
Robyn Annear Nothing But Gold: the Diggers of 1852. With an eye for interestingly obscure details and managing to convey a sense of irony without becoming cynical, this is a wonderfully readable account of the gold rushes of the nineteenth century, a period that perhaps did more than any other to shape the country’s national character.
Len Beadell Outback Highways. Extracts from Len Beadell’s half-dozen books, cheerfully recounting his life in the central Australian deserts as a surveyor, and his involvement in the construction of Woomera and the atomic bomb test sites.
John Birmingham Leviathan: the unauthorized biography of Sydney. Birmingham’s tome casts a contemporary eye over the dark side of Sydney’s history, from nauseating accounts of Rocks’ slum life and the 1900 plague outbreak, through the 1970s traumas of Vietnamese boat people (now Sydney residents) to scandals of police corruption.
John Marsden The Rabbits. This illustrated (by Shaun Tan) story about the British arriving in Australia is a great way to introduce both children and adults to the most important event in the continent’s history.
Manning Clark A Short History of Australia. A condensed version of this leading historian’s multi-volume tome, focusing on dreary successions of political administrations, and cynically concluding with the “Age of Ruins”.
Ann Curthoys Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers. History professor Curthoys was one of the busload of young, idealistic, white university students who accompanied First Nations activist Charles Perkins (only 29 himself) on his revolutionary trip through northern New South Wales in 1965 to look at First Nations living conditions and root out and protest against racial discrimination.
David Day Claiming a Continent: a New History of Australia. Award-winning, general and easily readable history, concluding in 2000. The possession, dispossession and ownership of the land – and thus issues of race – are central to Day’s narrative.
Colin Dyer The French Explorers and the Aboriginal Australians. From Bruny d’Entrecasteaux’s (1793) to Nicolas Baudin’s (1802) expeditions, the French explorers and onboard scientists kept detailed journals that provide a wealth of information on First Nations, particularly those of Tasmania who d’Entrecastaux noted “seem to offer the most perfect image of pristine society”.
Bruce Elder Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians Since 1788. A heart-rending account of the horrors inflicted on the continent’s First Nations peoples, covering infamous nineteenth-century massacres as well as more recent mid-twentieth-century scandals of the Stolen Generation children.
Tim Flannery (ed) Watkin Trench 1788. One of the most vivid accounts of early Sydney written by a 20-something captain of the marines, Watkin Trench, who arrived with the First Fleet. Trench’s humanity and youthful curiosity shine through as he brings alive the characters who peopled the early settlement.
Robert Hughes The Fatal Shore. A minutely detailed epic of the origins of transportation and the brutal beginnings of colonial Australia.
Dianne Johnson Lighting the Way: Reconciliation Stories. Twenty-four very personal stories, written in a simple, engaging style, show First Nations and non-First Nations working with each other, from community artworks to political activism. Positive and inspiring.
Mark McKenna Looking for Blackfellas Point: an Australian History of Place. This prize-winning book uncovers the uneasy history of First Nations peoples and European settlers on the far south coast of New South Wales and widens its scope to the enduring meaning of land to both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples.
Alan Moorehead Cooper’s Creek. A historian’s dramatic retelling of the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition that set out in 1860 to make the first south-to-north crossing of the continent. A classic story of exploration.
Sarah Murgatroyd The Dig Tree: the Story of Burke and Wills. Murgatroyd’s recent retelling of the Burke and Wills story is gripping and immaculately researched – she journeyed along the route, and utilized the latest scientific and historical evidence, and the text is complemented by maps, photos and paintings.
Rosemary Neill White Out: How Politics is Killing Black Australia. Outspoken book which asserts that the rhetoric of self-determination and empowerment excuses the wider society from doing anything to reduce the disparity between Black and white Australian populations.
Cassandra Pybus Community of Thieves. Attempting to reconcile past and future, fourth-generation Tasmanian Pybus provides a deeply felt account of the near-annihilation of the island’s Palawa people.
Henry Reynolds The Other Side of the Frontier and
The Law of the Land. A revisionist historian demonstrates that First Nations resistance to colonial invasion was both considerable and organized. The Whispering in Our Hearts is a history of those settlers who, troubled by the treatment of First Nations peoples, spoke out and took political action. Why Weren’t We Told?
is his most personal, an autobiographical journey showing how he, like many generations of Australians, imbibed a distorted, idealized Australian history; it includes a moving story about his friendship with Eddie Mabo.
Portia Robinson The Women of Botany Bay. The result of painstaking research into the records of every female transported from Britain and Ireland between 1787 and 1828, Robinson tells with conviction and passion who these women really were.
Eric Rolls Sojourners and Citizens and Flowers and the Wide Sea. The first and second volumes of farmer-turned-historian Rolls’ fascinatingly detailed history of the Chinese in Australia.
Anne Summers Damned Whores and God’s Police. Stereotypical images of women in Australian society are explored in this ground-breaking reappraisal of Australian history from a feminist point of view.
Ecology and environment
Col Bailey Shadow of the Thylacine. The author goes in search of the Tasmanian tiger, in an attempt to prove that the spectacularly striped and shy animal has survived its presumed extinction. A social history, as well as an ecological quest.
Tim Flannery The Future Eaters. Paleontologist and environmental commentator Flannery poses that, as the first human beings migrated down to Australasia, First Nations peoples, Maoris and other Polynesian peoples changed the region’s flora and fauna in startling ways, and began consuming the resources needed for their own future.
Tim Flannery Chasing Kangaroos: A Continent, a Scientist, and a Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Creature. In another great piece of scientific journalism, Flannery painstakingly traces the history of Australia’s hopping herbivore.
Josephine Flood The Riches of Ancient Australia. An indispensable and lavish guide to Australia’s most famous landforms and sites. The same author’s Archaeology of the Dreamtime provides background on the development of First Nations societies.
Drew Hutton and Libby Connors A History of the Australian Environmental Movement. Written by a husband-and-wife team, Queensland academics and prominent in Green politics, this well-balanced book charts the progress of conservation attempts from 1860 to modern protests.
Peter Latz Bushfires and Bushtucker: Aboriginal Plant Use in Central Australia. Handbook with photos, published by a First Nations-owned press.
Ann Moyal Platypus: the Extraordinary Story of How a Curious Creature Baffled the World. When British and French naturalists were first introduced to the platypus, they were flummoxed: was it bird, reptile or mammal? And did it really lay eggs? Moyal, a science historian, provides a captivating look at the platypus – and Australian nature – through European eyes.
Tim Murray (ed) Archeology of Australia. The last thirty-odd years have seen many ground-breaking discoveries in Australian archeology, with three sites in particular of great significance: Kakadu in the Northern Territory, Lake Mungo in New South Wales, and South West Tasmania. A range of specialists contribute essays on the subject.
Mary White The Greening of Gondwana. Classic work on the evolution of Australia’s flora and geography.
James Woodford The Wollemi Pine: the Incredible Discovery of a Living Fossil from the Age of the Dinosaurs. The award-winning environment writer at the Sydney Morning Herald tells the story of the 1994 discovery in Wollemi wilderness near Sydney. The Secret Life of Wombats begins as a fascinating account of the “wombat boy”, a schoolboy so curious to find out about how wombats lived that he crawled into their burrows. In The Dog Fence: a Journey through the Heart of the Continent, Woodford travels the 5400km length of the fence built to keep livestock safe from dingoes.
Thea Astley The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow. On a First Nations island reserve in 1930, a white woman dies in childbirth, and her husband goes on a shotgun-and-dynamite rampage. The novel traces the effects over the years on eight characters who witnessed the violent events, ultimately exploring the brutality and racism in Australian life.
Murray Bail Eucalyptus. Beautifully written novel with a fairytale-like plot. New South Wales farmer, Holland, has planted nearly every type of eucalyptus tree on his land. When his extraordinarily beautiful daughter Ellen is old enough to marry, he sets up a challenge for her legion of potential suitors, to name each tree.
John Birmingham He Died with a Felafel in His Hand. A collection of squalid and very funny tales emerging from the once-dissolute author’s experience of flat-sharing hell in Brisbane.
Anson Cameron Tin Toys. The First Nations Stolen Generation issue explored through the tale of Hunter Carolyn, an unintentional artist who can change skin colour at will.
Peter Carey The True History of the Kelly Gang. Carey’s masterpiece: the brilliantly imagined tale of outlaw Ned Kelly revels in the antihero’s mythic undertakings and salty language. Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda is the fantastical tale of a fragile nineteenth-century minister and an heiress who meet on the voyage to Australia, and plot to transport a glass church from Sydney to a remote settlement (Gillian Armstrong made a movie version starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett).
Steven Carroll The Time We Have Taken. The last book of a trilogy about a family living in suburban Melbourne from the 1950s through to the 1970s is a celebration of the minutiae of suburban life and won the 2008 Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Robert Drewe The Savage Crows. A writer whose own life is falling apart in a cockroach-ridden Sydney of the 1970s sets out to discover the grim truth behind Tasmania’s “final solution”.
Richard Flanagan Death of a River Guide. Narrator, environmentalist Aljaz Cosini, goes over his life and that of his family and forebears as he lies drowning in the Franklin River. Thoughtful writings about Tasmanian landscape, place, migration and the significance of history are the hallmark of Flanagan’s novels. His nineteenth-century-set Gould’s Book of Fish: a Novel in Twelve Fish delves into Tasmania’s past as the brutal penal settlement of Van Diemen’s Land. Flanagan’s 2014 Booker-winning The Narrow Road to Deep North centres around the building of the Thai Burma railroad during World War II.
Tom Gilling Miles McGinty. Nineteenth-century Sydney comes alive in this riotous, entertaining love story of Miles, who becomes a levitator’s assistant and begins to float on air, and Isabel, who wants to fly.
Peter Goldsworthy Three Dog Night. It takes three dogs to keep a person warm on a desert night, an allusion to the love triangle that emerges when psychiatrist Martin Blackman returns to Adelaide after a decade in London with his new, much-loved wife, and visits his oldest friend, the difficult Felix, a once-brilliant surgeon dying of terminal cancer. Felix is an initiated man who has lived with First Nations peoples in the central Australian desert; when Lucy accompanies him there, Martin must confront his insecurities.
Kate Grenville The Idea of Perfection, set in the tiny, fictional New South Wales town of Karakarook, and about two unlikely characters who fall in love, won the 2001 Orange Prize for Fiction. The Secret River was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006 and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize. This historical novel explores the uneasy terrain of early settler contact with First Nations, telling the story of freed convict William Thornhill taking up land in the Hawkesbury with his family. A Room Made of Leaves (2020) is the imagined memoir of a British army wife turned New South Wales pastoralist.
Chloe Hooper A Child’s Book of True Crime. With a claustrophobic Tasmanian setting, this perverse, chilling novel is narrated by a young primary-school teacher having an affair with the married father of her smartest pupil. His writer-wife’s true-crime book, about a love triangle that disintegrates into murder, leads the anxious teacher into imagining a child’s-classic-Australian-literature-style version, with characters such as Kitty Koala and Wally Wombat.
Douglas Kennedy The Dead Heart. A best-selling comic thriller made into a film; an itinerant American journalist gets abducted by man-eating hillbillies in Outback Australia.
Hannah Kent Devotion. A conscious alternative to queer historical tales which centre on shame, Devotion tells the love-infused tale of Hanne and Thea, who escape the suppression of their Lutheran beliefs in Europe and make the perilous sea trip to Australia. Their destination is Hahndorf in South Australia, where Kent’s own ancestors settled.
Michelle de Kretser The Lost Dog. This contemporary Australian love story and intriguing mystery is a layered work with sparkling writing and wonderful observations. It won the 2008 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards’ book of the year and the prize for best fiction.
Julia Leigh The Hunter. Intriguing, internationally acclaimed first novel about the rediscovery and subsequent hunt of the Tasmanian tiger; a faceless biotech company after thylacine DNA plays the bad guy.
David Malouf The Conversations at Curlow Creek. One of Australia’s most important contemporary writers charts the developing relationship between two Irishmen the night before a hanging; one is the officer appointed to supervise the execution and the other the outlaw facing his death. Remembering Babylon is the moving story of a British cabin boy in the 1840s who, cast ashore, lives for sixteen years among the First Nations peoples of far north Queensland, and finally re-enters the British colonial world.
Andrew McGahan The White Earth. A haunting novel set in 1992 in Queensland’s Darling Downs wheatfields as the Mabo land-rights case fills the news. After the death of his father, 8-year-old William and his unstable mother are invited to live on his ageing uncle’s Kuran station. In order to prove himself worthy of his uncle’s inheritance of the property, William is drawn into his uncle’s dark world and association with the racist White League. Questions of First Nations dispossession and non-Aboriginal belonging reverberate. The polemical tone of Underground (2006), a dystopian novel with a somewhat far-fetched plotline, set in a not-too-distant future in totalitarian Australia, invoked the ire of neo-conservative reviewers.
Alex Miller Journey to the Stone Country. A betrayed wife leaves her middle-class Melbourne existence and returns to tropical North Queensland, setting out on a journey with a childhood First Nations acquaintance into the stone country that is his remote heartland. However, dark secrets from the lives of their grandparents threaten what future they may have together. Lovesong the author’s latest (and highly recommended) novel.
Elliot Perlman Seven Types of Ambiguity. The chain of events, secrets and lies stretching back a decade that lead to Simon Heywood kidnapping his ex-girlfriend’s son are related by seven different narrators. Probing middle-class anxiety in a consumeristic, market-driven society, Perlman’s conscience-driven writing can be moralistic at times, but at its best is clever and insightful, providing an intense social portrait of contemporary Melbourne.
Peter Temple Truth. A dark crime novel, set against the background of Victorian forest fires: the protagonist is flawed and troubled cop Stephen Villani.
Janette Turner Hospital Oyster. Disquieting novel set in the literally off-the-map, opal-mining, one-pub Queensland town of Inner Maroo. Her latest, Orpheus Lost, is also wonderful.
Christos Tsiolkas The Slap. A big brassy bestseller, memorable not so much for its examination of the morality of slapping a child – the novel’s central event – but for a riveting exploration of sex, boredom and bitchiness in the Melbourne suburbs.
Tim Winton Cloudstreet. A wonderful, faintly magical saga about the mixed fortunes of two families who end up sharing a house in postwar Perth. Breath is based in a small coastal community where two young boys learn to surf from an ageing thrill-seeker and learn plenty of life lessons along the way. Winton captures the spirit both of the time (early 1970s) and of surfing and the lure of the ocean – not an easy task.
Danielle Wood The Alphabet of Light and Dark. Set evocatively on Bruny Island, in melancholy Tasmanian-Gothic vein. Like the main character Essie, Wood’s great-great-grandfather was superintendent of the Cape Bruny Lighthouse. Essie returns from Western Australia to the lighthouse after her grandfather’s death to write her family history and becomes immersed in her ancestors’ tragedies.
Barbara Baynton Bush Studies. A collection of nineteenth-century bush stories written from the female perspective.
Rolf Boldrewood Robbery Under Arms. The story of Captain Starlight, a notorious bushranger and rustler around the Queensland borders.
Marcus Clarke For the Term of His Natural Life. Written in 1870 in somewhat overblown prose, this romantic tragedy is based on actual events in Tasmania’s once-notorious prison settlement.
Bryce Courtenay Jessica. Though this is not Courtenay’s best-known work (that would be The Power of One), this heartbreaking story based on a true tale of murder and passion grips from the very beginning.
Miles Franklin My Brilliant Career. Written by one of Australia’s foremost writers, this semi-autobio-graphical novel is about a spirited young girl in early twentieth-century Victoria who refuses to conform.
May Gibbs Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. A timeless children’s favourite: the illustrated adventures of two little creatures who live inside gumnuts.
Xavier Herbert Capricornia. An indignant and allegorical saga of the brutal and haphazard settlement of the land of Capricornia (tropical Northern Territory thinly disguised).
George Johnston My Brother Jack. The first in a disturbing trilogy set in Melbourne suburbia between the wars, which develops into a semi-fictional attempt to dissipate the guilt Johnston felt at being disillusioned with, and finally leaving, his native land.
Thomas Keneally The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. A prize-winning novel that delves deep into the psyche of a First Nations outlaw, tracing his inexorable descent into murder and crime. Sickening, brutal and compelling.
Henry Lawson Ballads, poems and stories from Australia’s best-loved chronicler come in a wide array of collections. A few to seek out are: Henry Lawson Bush Ballads, Henry Lawson Favourites and While the Billy Boils – Poetry.
Norman Lindsay The Magic Pudding. A whimsical tale of some very strange men and their grumpy, flavour-changing and endless pudding; a children’s classic with very adult humour.
Ruth Park The Harp in the South. First published in 1948, this first book in a trilogy is a well-loved tale of inner-Sydney slum life in 1940s Surry Hills.
A.B. (“Banjo”) Paterson Australia’s most famous bush balladeer, author of Waltzing Matilda and The Man from Snowy River, who helped romanticize the bush’s mystique. Some of the many titles published include Banjo Paterson’s Favourites and Man from Snowy River and Other Verses.
Katharine Susannah Pritchard Coonardoo. This wonderful book celebrates Outback life but also reveals the abuse of First Nations women, in particular, by station owners. Pritchard was a founder of the Australian Communist Party.
Henry Handel Richardson The Getting of Wisdom. A gangly country girl’s experience of a snobby boarding school in early twentieth-century Melbourne. Like Miles Franklin (see opposite), Richardson was female and wrote under a pseudonym.
Nevil Shute A Town Like Alice. A wartime romance that tells of a woman’s bravery, endurance and enterprise, both in the Malayan jungle and in the Australian Outback where she strives to create the town of the title.
Christina Stead For Love Alone. Set largely around Sydney Harbour, where the author grew up, this novel, set in the 1930s, follows the obsessive Teresa Hawkins, a poor but artistic girl from a large, unconventional family, who scrounges and saves in order to head for London and love.
Randolph Stow The Merry-go-round in the Sea. An endearing tale of a young boy growing up in rural Western Australia during World War II.
Kylie Tennant Ride on Stranger. First published in 1943, this is a humorous portrait of Sydney between the world wars, seen through the eyes of newcomer Shannon Hicks.
Patrick White Voss. This masterful and densely symbolic novel imagines the early settlement of Australia by colonizers, partly from a First Nations perspective.
Faith Bandler Welour, My Brother. A novel by a well-known Black activist describing a boy’s early life in Queensland, and the tensions of a racially mixed community.
John Muk Muk Burke Bridge of Triangles. Powerful, landscape-driven images in this tale of a mixed-race child growing up unable to associate with either side of his heritage, but refusing to accept the downward spiral into despair and alcoholism adopted by those around him.
Evelyn Crawford Over My Tracks. Told to Chris Walsh, this oral autobiography is the story of a formidable woman, from her 1930s childhood among the red sandhills of Yantabulla, through her Outback struggles as a mother of fourteen children, to her tireless work, late in life, with First Nations students, combating prejudice with education.
Nene Gare The Fringe Dwellers. A story of a First Nations family on the edge of town and society.
Ruby Langford Don’t Take Your Love to Town. An autobiography demonstrating a Black woman’s courage and humour in the face of tragedy and poverty lived out in northern New South Wales and the inner city of Sydney.
Sally Morgan My Place. A widely acclaimed and best-selling account of a Western Australian woman’s discovery of her Black roots.
David Mowaljarlai and Jutta Malnic Yorro Yorro. Starry-eyed photographer Malnic’s musings while recording sacred Wandjina sites in the west Kimberley and, more interestingly, Mowaljarlai’s account of his upbringing and Ngarinyin lore.
Mudrooroo Wildcat Falling. The first novel to be published (in 1965) by a First Nations writer, under the name Colin Johnson, this is the story of a Black teenager coming of age in the 1950s. Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World details the attempted annihilation of the Tasmanian Palawa people. Three of Mudrooroo’s novels – The Kwinkan (1995), The Undying (1998) and Underground (1999) – are part of his magic-realist Master of Ghost Dreaming series.
Oodgeroo Noonuccal My People. A collection of verse by an established campaigning poet (previously known as Kath Walker).
Paddy Roe Gularabulu. Stories from the west Kimberley, both traditional myths and tales of a much more recent origin.
Kim Scott Benang. Infuriated at reading the words of A.O. Neville, Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia in the 1930s, who planned to “breed out” First Nations peoples from Australia, author Scott wrote this powerful tale of Nyoongar history using Neville’s own themes to overturn his elitist arguments.
Archie Weller The Day of the Dog. Weller’s violent first novel, with its searing pace and forceful writing, came out in an angry burst after being released, at 23, from incarceration in Broome jail. The protagonist, in a similar situation, is pressured back into a criminal world by his First Nations peers and by police harassment. Weller’s second novel, Land of the Golden Clouds, is an epic science-fiction fantasy, set 3000 years in the future, which portrays an Australia devastated by a nuclear holocaust and populated by warring tribes.
Alexis Wright Carpentaria. Childhood memories and stories that her Waanyi grandmother told her flowed into Wright’s novel about the Gulf country – in title, subject and scope, reminiscent of Xavier Herbert’s classic Capricornia, but from a First Nations point of view. Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award in 2007.
Specialist and wildlife guides
Jack Absalom Safe Outback Travel. The bible for Outback driving and camping, full of sensible precautions and handy tips for preparation and repair.
John Chapman and Monica Chapman Bushwalking in Australia. The fourth edition of this bushwalking bible has detailed notes for 25 of the best bushwalks Australia-wide, accompanied by colour topographic maps and photographs. The authors also publish several other excellent walking guides, including the indispensable South West Tasmania.
David Clark Big Things. From the Big Banana to the Big Lobster, Clark provides a comprehensive guide to Australia’s kitsch icons.
Catherine de Courcey and John Johnson River Tracks: Exploring Australian Rivers. A practical and up-to-date motoring guide to six river journeys, with lots of insider insight and history.
The Great Barrier Reef A lucid and lavishly illustrated Reader’s Digest rundown on the Reef. Available both in coffee-table format and in a more portable, edited edition.
James Halliday Australian Wine Companion. Released every year, the venerable Halliday provides not only an authoritative guide to the best wines but to the hundreds of wineries themselves, making it a great companion when visiting any of Australia’s wine regions.
David Hampshire Living and Working in Australia: A Survival Handbook. Given that so many people come to Australia and don’t want to leave, this is a handy book with information from everything from that pesky tax file number to negotiating permits and visa applications.
Tim Low Bush Tucker: Australia’s Wild Food Harvest and Wild Food Plants of Australia. Guides to the bountiful supply of bushtucker that was once the mainstay of the First Nations diet; the latter is pocket-sized and contains clear photographs of over 180 plants, describing their uses.
Greg Pritchard Climbing Australia: the Essential Guide. Comprehensive guide for rock-climbers, covering every-thing from the major climbing sites to the best websites.
Peter and Pat Slater Field Guide to Australian Birds. Pocket-sized, and the easiest to use of the many available guides to Australian birds.
Nick Stock The Penguin Good Australian Wine Guide. Released every year in Australia, this is a handy book for a wine buff to buy on the ground, with the best wines and prices detailed.
Tyrone T. Thomas Regional bushwalking guides by local publisher Michelle Anderson Publishing. A series of ten local guides, from 50 Walks in North Queensland to 120 Walks in Tasmania, which make excellent trail companions.
Mark Warren Atlas of Australian Surfing. A comprehensive guide to riding the best of Australia’s waves by this surfing “hall of fame” recipient. Includes plenty of tips, but omits a few “secret spots”.
The colourful variant of Australian English, or Strine, has its origins in the archaic cockney and Irish of the colony’s early convicts as well as the adoption of words from the many First Nations languages. For such a vast country, the accent barely varies to the untutored ear; from Tasmania (“Tassie”) to the northwest you’ll find little variation in the national drawl, with a curious, interrogative ending to sentences fairly common – although Queenslanders are noted for their slow delivery. One of the most consistent tendencies of strine is to abbreviate words and then stick an “-o” or, more commonly, an “-ie” on the end: as in “bring your cozzie to the barbie this arvo”. This informality extends to the frequent use of “bloody”, “bugger” and “bastard”, all used affectionately. There’s also an endearing tendency to genderize inanimate objects as, for example, “she’s buggered, mate” (“your inanimate object is beyond repair”).
The country has its own excellent Macquarie Dictionary, the latest edition of which is the ultimate authority on the current state of Australian English. Also worth consulting are The Dinkum Dictionary: The Origins of Australian Words by Susan Butler, and Word Map by Kel Richards, a dictionary of Australian regionalisms.
Akubra Wide-brimmed felt hat; a brand name.
Anzac Australia and New Zealand Army Corps; every town has a memorial to Anzac casualties from both world wars.
Arvo Afternoon.
Back o’Bourke Outback.
Banana bender Resident of Queensland.
Barbie Barbecue.
Battler Someone who struggles to make a living, as in “little Aussie battler”.
Beaut! or You beauty! Exclamation of delight.
Beg yours? Excuse me, say again?
Beyond the Black Stump Outback; back of beyond.
Billabong Waterhole in dry riverbed.
Billy Cooking pot.
Bitumen Sealed road as opposed to dirt road.
Blowies Blow flies.
Bludger Someone who does not pull their weight, or a scrounger – as in “dole bludger”.
Blue Fight; also a red-haired person.
Blundstones Leather, elastic-sided workmen’s boots, now also a fashion item in some circles. Often shortened to “blundies”.
Bonzer Good; a good thing.
Bottle shop Off-licence or liquor store.
Brumby Feral horse.
Buckley’s No chance; as in “Hasn’t got a Buckley’s”.
Budgie smugglers Men’s tight-fitting Speedos.
Bugs Moreton Bay bug – type of crayfish indigenous to southern Queensland.
Bunyip Evil spirit in First Nations stories.
Burl Give it a go; as in “give it a burl”.
Bush Unsettled country area.
Bushranger Runaway convict; nineteenth-century outlaw.
Bushwhacker Someone lacking in social graces, a hick.
BYO Bring your own. Restaurant which allows you to bring your own alcohol.
Chook Chicken.
Chunder Vomit.
Cocky Small farmer; cow cocky, dairy farmer.
To come the raw prawn To try to deceive or make a fool of someone.
Coo-eee! First Nations long-distance greeting, now widely adopted as a kind of “yoo hoo!”
Corroboree First Nations ceremony.
Cozzies Bathers, swimmers, togs; swimming costume.
Crim Criminal.
Crook Ill or broken.
Crow eater Resident of South Australia.
Cut lunch Sandwiches.
Dag Nerd.
Daggy Unfashionable. Original meaning: faeces stuck on a sheep’s rear end.
Daks or strides Trousers/pants.
Dam A man-made body of water or reservoir; not just the dam itself.
Damper Soda bread cooked in a pot on embers.
Dekko To look at; as in “take a dekko at this”.
Derro Derelict or destitute person.
Didgeridoo First Nations musical instrument made from a termite-hollowed branch.
Digger Old-timer, especially an old soldier.
Dill Idiot.
Dilly bag First Nations carry-all made of bark, or woven or rigged twine.
Dinkum True, genuine, honest.
Disposal store Store that sells used army and navy equipment, plus camping gear.
Dob in To tell on someone; as in “she dobbed him in”.
Donga Sleeping quarters used often in the mining industry.
Drizabone Voluminous waxed cotton raincoat, originally designed for horseriding; a brand name.
Drongo Fool.
Drover Cowboy or station hand.
Dunny Outside pit toilet.
Esky Portable, insulated box to keep food or beer cold.
Fair dinkum or dinky di Honestly, truly.
Fossick To search for gold or gems in abandoned diggings.
Furphy A rumour or false story.
Galah Noisy or garrulous person; after the bird.
Galvo Corrugated iron.
Garbo Garbage or refuse collector.
G’day Hello, hi. Short for “good day”.
Gibber Rock or boulder.
Give away To give up or resign; as in “I used to be a garbo but I gave it away”.
Grog Alcoholic drink, usually beer.
Gub, gubbah First Nations terms for a white person.
Gutless wonder Coward.
Hoon A yob, delinquent. Also someone who drives recklessly.
Humpy Temporary shelter used by First Nations peoples and early settlers.
Jackeroo Male station-hand.
Jilleroo Female station-hand.
Joey Baby kangaroo still in the pouch (also, less familiarly, a baby koala).
Koorie Collective name for First Nations peoples from southeastern Australia.
Larrikin Mischievous youth.
Lay by Practice of putting a deposit on goods until they can be fully paid for.
Like a shag on a rock Out on a limb.
Lollies Sweets or candy.
Manchester Linen goods.
Mate A sworn friend – one you’d do anything for – as essential as beer to the Australian stereotype.
Milk bar Corner shop, and often a small café.
Moleskins Strong cotton trousers worn by bushmen.
Never Never Outback, wilderness.
New Australian Recent immigrants; often a euphemism for Australians of non-British descent.
No worries That’s OK; it doesn’t matter; don’t mention it.
Ocker Uncultivated Australian male.
Op shop Short for “Opportunity Shop”; a charity shop/thrift store.
Outback Remote, unsettled regions of Australia.
Paddock Field.
Panel van Van with no rear windows and front seating only.
Pashing Kissing or snogging, often in the back of a panel van.
Perve To leer or act as a voyeur (short for pervert); as in “What are you perving at?”
Piss Beer.
Pokies One-armed bandits; gambling machines.
Pommie or Pom Person of English descent – not necessarily abusive.
Rapt Very pleased, delighted.
Ratbag An eccentric person; also a term of mild abuse.
Ratshit or shithouse How you feel after a night on the piss.
Rego Vehicle registration document.
Ridji didge The real thing or genuine article.
Ripper! Old-fashioned exclamation of enthusiasm.
Rollies Roll-up cigarettes.
Root Vulgar term for sexual congress.
Rooted To be very tired or to be beyond repair; as in “she’s rooted, mate” – “your [car] is irreparable”.
Ropable Furious to the point of requiring restraint.
Roustabout An unskilled labourer in a shearing shed.
Sandgroper Resident of Western Australia.
She’ll be right or she’ll be apples Everything will work out fine.
Shoot through To pass through or leave hurriedly.
Shout To pay for someone, or to buy a round of drinks; as in “it’s your shout, mate”.
Sickie To take a day off work due to (sometimes alleged) illness; as in “to pull a sickie”.
Singlet Sleeveless cotton vest. The archetypal Australian singlet, in navy, is produced by Bonds.
Skivvy Polo neck.
Slab 24-can carton of beer.
Smoko Tea break.
Snag Sausage.
Speedo Famous Australian brand of swimming costume; speedos (or sluggos) refers to men’s swimming briefs.
Spunk Attractive or sexy person of either gender (but generally a young man); as in “what a spunk!” Can also be used as an adjective: spunky.
Squatter Historical term for early settlers who took up public land as their own.
Station Very large pastoral property or ranch.
Sticky beak Nosy person, or to be nosy; as in “let’s have a sticky beak”.
Stockman Cowboy or station hand.
Stubby Small bottle of beer.
Swag Large bedroll, or one’s belongings.
Tall poppy Someone who excels or is eminent.
“Cutting down tall poppies” is to bring overachievers back to earth – a national pastime.
Thongs Flip-flops or sandals.
Throw a wobbly Lose your temper.
Tinnie Can of beer, or a small aluminium boat.
Ute Short for “utility” vehicle; pick-up truck.
Wacko! Exclamation of enthusiasm.
Walkabout Temporary migration undertaken by First Nations peoples; also has the wider meaning of a journey.
Gone walkabout To go missing.
Warm fuzzies Feeling of contentment.
Waxhead Surfer.
Weatherboard Wooden house.
Whinger Someone who complains – allegedly
common among Poms.
Wowser Killjoy.
Yabber To talk or chat.
Yabbie Freshwater crayfish.
Yakka Work, as in “hard yakka”.
Yobbo Uncouth person.