100 books like Australian Geographic Outback Queensland

Australians love a road-trip – the longer, the better. This book, by one of Australia’s top driving holiday experts, is jam-packed with information and advice to make yours as easy as possible. Driving is definitely the best way to see our vast continent, and the route maps and distance lists are hugely useful. It’s a great resource on where to stay – everything from swank hotels to camping spots – and what to do. Want to know the best time of year to visit a certain place? That’s covered too.

Melanie is passionate about the great outdoors and has hiked all over Australia. Her book (a second edition is due out in early 2022) covers an incredible 66 walks and her love of the landscape shines through. Some of the walks are well known, such as Tasmania’s Overland Track, while others are lesser-known. Designed for all abilities and time constraints, there’s really something for everyone, whether you want to walk in tropical rainforests or rocky ancient escarpments. It makes me want to pull on my hiking boots and go!

Far from an ordinary guidebook, Loving Country, A Guide to Sacred Australia gets to the heart of this ancient continent through the eyes and stories of Australia’s First Nations people. Beautifully designed and illustrated with photographs, the book opens up an Australia that many visitors never – sadly – see. Exploring Australia’s Indigenous culture is one of the best ways to understand this country, and there are many ways of doing that, if you seek them out. After consultation with Indigenous communities and elders, the authors have chosen just 18 places to feature, telling the stories of the Dreaming, explaining traditional cultural practices, and outlining tours that will open a new world to those who care to dive deep into the culture.

The Great Barrier Reef is known as one of the world’s greatest natural wonders -and is a major drawcard for visitors to Australia. This book, written by renowned Australian marine biologist Len Zell is not a guide in the usual sense of the word but contains all you’ll ever need to know about what Australians call simply “the Reef” and more. Produced in partnership with the BBC’s The Great Barrier Reef television series, the book takes you on a journey along 2,300km of Australia’s north-eastern coastline. Not one to shy away from reality, Zell also looks at the environmental challenges facing the Great Barrier Reef and what the future may hold. There are practical hints and tips too – but if you just want to buy it for the fabulous photography throughout, that’s fine too!

Set in a world that is at once familiar, yet without grounding in time or space, Daniels’ fable of an anonymous girl who escapes to reclaim her life after many years in the belly of a great snake, is fanciful and spellbinding.

It is a story that guides the reader through dark themes such as loss, grief, abuse, denial, and isolation; capturing the very essence of detachment that is the uneven road to recovery from great trauma. Daniels’ prose is beautiful and eerie, and her protagonist’s journey from victim to survivor is nothing short of sublime. 

Cultural history is now a book business-standard. That wasn’t always the case. For me myself, I had to read Otto Freidrich’s City of Nets (1987) and Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming (1992) before I could properly formulate my 1996 book Stranded. Stalwart rock journalist Andrew Stafford’s debut book from 2004, Pig City, is a cultural history of the Brisbane music scene ‘from the Saints to Savage Garden’, which makes it a regional history too. What makes it gripping, next Stafford’s deft handling of the material, is the story itself, which is not just that of an erstwhile backwater finally coming of age, but up against and overcoming the oppressive jackboots of Queensland state premier, ‘hillbilly dictator’ Joh Bjelke-Peterson. Happily, that era is now long past, and BrisVegas is today a great music town; but wouldn’t have become so without the long struggle so vividly portrayed here.

Teenagers will love The Outback Riders series by Leanne Owens. An Australian author, Leanne is an English/History teacher who also writes freelance for horse magazines. Her experience with horses growing up in the outback is combined with stories about teenagers in her very popular Outback Riders series. She has also written the Dimity Horse Mysteries for readers who like mysteries, crime, romance, and horses. 

The Whispering is set in the far northern Queensland tropical rainforest, a thick, densely-foliaged environment that is in turn pulsing with humidity and whispering with the strong winds of an approaching cyclone.

There are enough natural features (boulders, creeks, thorny vines) to make this a dangerous place on its own, but throw a deadly character or two in there, and it gets beyond creepy. Lando harnesses the edginess incredibly well, and readers know from the get go that the place is like a weapon only leashed by a safety catch. Always just one click away from lethal.

I love this novel by Jessica Anderson for its subtle psychological insights and its powerful evocation of an Australian colony in its early days. Set in the 1830s, The Commandant tells the story of a young Irish woman arriving in Australia to visit her sister, whose husband runs the Moreton Bay penal settlement, where he is much-hated by the convicts for his fanatical implementation of punishments. Becoming the object of a convict’s obsession, Frances feels responsible for that convict’s brutal lashing and is changed by the experience. The Indigenous people are shadowy figures in the background, for Anderson’s focus is on the brutality of the penal regime and how it affects a young woman’s innocence. 

I first met Suddendorf – one of the three co-authors of this book – in Australia back in 2016.

He is a German professor living in Queensland (with an accent untroubled by antipodean influence), and is best known for studying the skill of “mental time travel”. From him I learnt that this is one of the foundational abilities of humanity, which may well have steered our entire evolution.

We can project our minds across the past, present, and future at will - unlike pretty much any other animal. Therefore it’s crucial as a skill if we want to take the long view, and we shouldn’t take it for granted. However, as Suddendorf and colleagues write in this terrific book, it’s also a “Promethean” talent, and is far from perfect.

If we want to take a longer view, understanding our cognitive faculties is key – this book serves as a… show more.