The most recommended books about Indigenous Australians

This amazing book is about Oblivia a girl who survives gang rape living in a swamp with thousands of black swans who is promised to Warren Finch the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia an indigenous man.

In her journey we meet many out there characters told in mythic style in a future Australia devastated by climate change. This book is a potent mix of speculative fiction and magic realism featuring indigenous communities and characters. I admire it for the breadth of its vision and the intimacy of Oblivia and of course the swans.

I love it when a book takes me to an entirely new world. This series fascinates me with it’s deft portrayal of a wholly different culture in one of the most antithetical-to-life climates on earth. 

Arthur Upfield takes us deep into the Australian outback with Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte (Bony), a half white and half aboriginal detective. The two sides of Bony’s heritage are constantly at war and to prevent his black side from winning, he must solve all his cases. Prejudice against the aboriginals is rampant in this world and as readers, we too suffer his stings of rejection.

In this one, Bony must find a missing man who nobody wants found and solve a mystery nobody wants solved. Jeffrey Anderson is a sadist and a brutal drunk. He once stock-whipped an aboriginal man to death.

Now he seems to have fallen off the earth and the aboriginals are the… show more.

This book has changed people’s lives. Published way back in 2004, the first-person narrative tells the story of a woman called by an indigenous Australian tribe to travel with them and learn their ways. It’s a book that speaks to the soul, not the mind, the heart not the head.

Morgan tells of deeper truths that we in our “civilized” world are in such need of hearing, such as the life-giving power of caring and community. I have given this book to many different sorts of people, and it seems to speak to them all, often in ways I could not have predicted.

I was deeply moved reading this book, a treatise about impending species death written by a fellow anthropologist facing her own death. The text freely moves back-and-forth between abstract reflections about life on the edge and observations on the mutual relations between indigenous Australians and flying-foxes (the only flying mammals in existence), now seriously threatened by both global warming and human encroachment.

This is not only a unique near-extinction saga; its language and framing took me straight into some of the biggest issues of our time, of what the author calls deathwork, the living dead, and double death, where death piles up by some domino effect. The book itself, to paraphrase its title, offers a shimmering light into the ethics and politics of species protection and the threat of extinction.

There was one night reading this, when the story affected my breathing, heart rate, and time left on this planet, for the worse, as I galloped through it even though I knew every paragraph could hold up to a few years worth of study, if I hadn’t been so impatient to learn more!

Very crudely, White seems to say that it doesn’t matter what people do, goodness matters and the imaginative and usually obtrusive ways in which he shows good is often quieter than evil, more basic and durable, but sometimes not as strong, seem to me the discipline he tried to train himself in, to get it all down and write the novel in the first place.

That story often feels more painted than written, and when written, written in Australian and not English; people seem to speak when its someone else’s turn… show more.

Crime but with such achingly good prose, I sometimes have to stop and re-read a sentence just to admire the way Temple wrote it. It’s a slow-burn, with a very dark, noir feeling, and the more you learn about the backstory of protagonist, Detective Senior Sergeant Joe Cashin, the more intriguing he becomes. A great plot, and I love the way Temple weaves different threads together to bring about the slick resolution. If you’re unfamiliar with Australian slang, expect a crash course in the first part of this novel. What makes this book one I return to again and again is the way Temple takes the standard formula of crime fiction and bends it to his will. This is not just a great crime, it’s a great novel.  

The book provided instructive reading when I was researching my book. In particular, I was interested in Malouf’s way of approaching the story of colonisation in Australia through an ‘in-between’ character, Gemmy, modelled on a real-life ship’s boy cast ashore in northern Australia in the early nineteenth century. The boy is raised by Aboriginal people. He loses his mother tongue and, when confronted with white settlers, is treated as a ‘savage,' a theme the book explores through a range of points of view. Who are the true savages in the story was a question I was interested to pose in my own book. 

I devoured this book! Written like she’s chatting to her sister or best friend, Ash comes across as friendly and self-deprecating when highlighting the mental and physical strain that years of being on the WTA tour took on her. 

Family is always on her mind, and Ash isn’t afraid to wear her heart on her sleeve when it comes to thanking and acknowledging the many sacrifices her parents and sisters made to enable her to realise her dream of becoming the world's number one female tennis player.

I admire Ash’s focus and determination. "If I win, it’s a bonus. If I lose, the sun still comes up the next day, and it’s all good." This quote particularly resonates with me because it captures her down-to-earth, resilient, and positive nature. She sounds like a thoroughly decent person.

I had the privilege of interviewing Tony Birch at Perth Festival 2020, just before COVID struck with force. I was deeply moved by The White Girl and felt so much for the characters, especially the matriarch, Odette, and her love for her granddaughter. Seeing the world through Odette’s eyes was a powerful way of exposing how prejudice, policing laws and the removal of children impacted Aboriginal communities throughout Australia. Tony spoke beautifully in our interview about the strength of the Aboriginal women in his family and how those experiences inspired the award-winning novel.

Australia, like Canada, the United States, and New Zealand, was settled as a White Man’s land, where the inequities and corruption of the Old World would be replaced by the egalitarianism and democratic commitments of New World progressivism. But there was no place for Indigenous peoples who were deemed backward and primitive. Lake explores the links between American and Australasian reformers at the turn-of-the-twentieth-century and the way they combined racial self-confidence with a commitment to forging an ideal social order. Lake shows that race and reform were mutually supportive as Progressivism became the political logic of settler colonialism.