David Malouf, Johnno, 1975 David Malouf (1934 - ) published Johnno 50 years ago when he was 40 and you can still argue it is the finest thing he ever wrote. This is not to decry the ravishing cadences of An Imaginary Life—his story of the [...]

Thomas Keneally, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, 1972 Here is Thomas Keneally writing in 2013 about the background to his most notable book which appeared in 1972: At the time I started to write the book, Australians had passed, by a huge majority, a referendum that enabled [...]

Mrs Aeneas Gunn, 1908 Of  the classic accounts of the pioneer experience Mrs Aeneas Gunn’s We of the Never-Never is the first and in some ways the most inward of all of them. Jeannie Gunn was born in 1870, the year Bismarck unified Germany, and she [...]

Patrick White, 1957 Patrick White is far and away the greatest writer Australia has ever produced in any medium and not to take stock of this would be a very sad thing indeed. It’s only a couple of generations ago when the penny dropped that White, [...]

Tim Winton, 1991 There is a strong case for seeing Cloudstreet (1991) as the greatest novel of its period, perhaps indeed since the death of Patrick White. When the famously astute and none-too-easily pleased English novelist Philip Hensher was asked what contemporary novel he would like [...]

Peter Carey, 1988 The Oxford critic John Bayley, the sometime husband of Iris Murdoch, says somewhere, that there are the great novels we remember and the greater ones we forget. Normally this is taken to refer to the vast mimetic grandeur of Tolstoy or, a bit [...]

David Ireland, 1976 David Ireland’s Miles Franklin winning novel The Glass Canoe (1976) occupies a unique space in the IPA’s Australian Canon. It depicts an Australian way of life that has now all but vanished: It is a Shakespearean vision of white, male, working class, post-WWII Australia. [...]

Helen Garner, 1977 Helen Garner’s debut novel Monkey Grip follows the bohemian life of Nora, a single mother living in share houses in Fitzroy in the 1970s who has a habit of investing way too much hope and love in rather feckless men – in particular the [...]

Peter Temple, 1996 Gambling, horses, murder, footy, dodgy pollies, dodgy coppers, dodgy property developers, wired journos, drunk lawyers, junkies and priests. Peter Temple’s Bad Debts, the first novel in his Jack Irish series, has it all. Riveting, gritty, and quintessentially Australian crime fiction, it won the [...]