AustLit

' Handsome, proud, reprehensible, misunderstood. Dominic Langton is the dark heart of A Difficult Young Man. His brother Guy can scarcely understand where he fits into the pattern of things or what he might do next. Martin Boyd’s much loved novel is an elegant, witty and compelling family tale about the contradictions of growing up.' (Publication summary)

'On hot days we jumped fully clothed into our bottomless beer glasses and pushed off from shore without a backward look. Heading for the deep, where it was calm and cool.

'Meat Man is a regular at the Southern Cross pub in Sydney. With his tribe he sits and drinks and watches as life spirals around him. David Ireland’s novel tells his stories, about the pub, its patrons and their women, about the brutal, tender and unexpected places his glass canoe takes him.' (Publication summary)

'We have lived round the corner from the world, with not even a signpost to betray our whereabouts. and if the treasure we have accumulated makes no show upon our bank statements, neither is it subject to income tax.'

Lantana, bushy and massive, is Australia's most uncontrollable tropical weed. Inland from the Pacific coast, where the pineapple plantations grow, sprawls the lantana in all its luxuriance. Here, too, putting up constant fight against the weed, is the small farming community of Lantana Lane. Though they stoutly declare that farming means drudgery, misery, penury, monotony, bankruptcy and calamity - that it is, in short, a mug's game - they are all firmly and happily wedded to the land, and therefore, naturally, to the lantana. From Aunt Isabelle, part-pioneer, part-Parisienne, to Nelson the one-eyed kookaburra bird, each of the Lane's inhabitants makes their own inimitable contribution to this engaging and witty portrait of community life.

Source: Allen & Unwin https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/fiction/Lantana-Lane-Eleanor-Dark-9781743313367 

Letters to Live Poets (1969) is a series of confessional poems arranged as a livre compose. It is a major work of Australian poetry having had a profound influence since it was first published.

(Source: Sydney University Press)

'This endearing 19th-century family saga follows the lives, loves and losses of one pioneering family and two escaped convicts as they open up the land in Victoria, Australia. This classic Australian story, which won the Hodder & Stoughton All Empire Literature Prize for Australasia, commands an important place in the canon of Australian literature' (Monsoon Books edition).

'Bronco Jones, part-Aboriginal owner of Emu Station in the north of Western Australia, struggles against the machinations of a businessman and an anthropologist in this satirical portrait of anthropological exploitation of Aboriginal sacred sites.

'Seven Emus Station lies in the wild, red sandstone country back of the north-west port of Dampier. It is the prized property of Bronco Jones, his wife Possum and their bright, honey-coloured brood.

'The wealth of the property lures Appleby Gaunt, 'The Baron' who sweeps Bronco into a series of ruinous financial deals.

'Goborrow, a second-rate anthropologist, seizes the predicament as a means to boost his own credibility, with disastrous results for himself and 'The Baron'.

'An experimental novella, Seven Emus deals with issues of identity, ancestral fidelity and the misguided appropriation of cultural artefacts.'  (Publication summary)

'Cross-cutting between England and Western Australia, which is described here as "a vast and unknown country, almost mysterious in its solitude and unlikeness to any other part of the earth," O'Reilly's novel mixes romance, transportation, and discussion of penal policy, with Moondyne Joe himself, a prisoner who escapes to the Australian bush, re-emerging subsequently as "Comptroller-General of Convicts in Australia," in which role he propounds a system of reform based upon "the radical principles of humanity".

'The novel's plot develops through a romance between an English Catholic with an Irish name, Will Sheridan, and his childhood sweetheart Alice Walmsley, who is wrongly convicted of murdering her own child and held in London's Millbank Prison, after being transported to Australia.'

Source: Giles, Paul. Antipodean America: Australasia and the Constitution of U.S. Literature. USA: Oxford University Press, 2014.

'By setting, by date of publication, and the residence of the author, Quintus Servinton is rightly regarded as Australia's first novel. Printed in Hobart Town in three volumes, in 1830-1, and expressly intended for dispatch to England (where it was re-issued in London in 1832), only a few copies were reserved for sale in Tasmania. Of these, only three are known to survive, and the book has long been inaccessible to any but the most persistent of readers.'

'It presents an invaluable and fascinating picture - first of English provincial life and of contemporary business dealing, and then of convict life as experienced by an educated convict, a contrast and complement to the Ralph Rashleigh picture of the convict of humble birth and little or no education crushed by brutality and manual labour.'

'In his introduction, Cecil Hadgraft traces the author's own chequered career - an amazing sequence of misfortunes and miscalculations both before and after his twenty-four hour reprieve from the gallows, and particularly significant for the assessment and appreciation of a novel known to be largely autobiographical.' (Source: Online)