7 Books Like Dirrayawadha

I studied Shakespeare in community college, for my bachelor's degree in English, and for my master's degree in English. Jodi Picoult managed to make reading about his work entertaining as she offered an alternative explanation for the quality of the writing despite his lack of education. I enjoyed the dual timelines that served as a reflection of the prejudices and issues the woman in each era faced. This is a keeper, and one I'll re-read!

I thoroughly enjoyed A Killer Among Friends, written by Andrea Barton, and the second novel in the captivating Jade Riley Mysteries series. Whilst it can be read as a stand-alone, I was thrilled to continue with Jade’s story following The Godfather Of Dance.
Excellent writing and a compelling and tense mystery, with many conceivable twists. The characters are convincing and well-drawn, and Jade in particular, is complex and feisty, battling her own demons and insecurities. I’d definitely want her on my side if I was in trouble.
Highly recommend if you enjoy rollicking whodunnits.

Anita Heiss is an Australian academic and author of a number of insightful books on what it’s like being Indigenous in Australia. Her novel Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray begins in 1852 with a catastrophic flood that is a metaphor for the disastrous effects of European colonisation. Told mainly through the eyes of a young Wiradjuri woman, the novel is a powerful exploration of the clash of cultures that followed European settlement and appropriation of the land. It is a vivid and moving depiction of the unbalanced power relations between the races as well as between men and women.

Voss is White’s best-known novel, a historical fiction based on the German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt’s failed expedition across Australia.

The novel conveys both the determination and uncertainty of the colonial project in the mid-nineteenth century. In places I was horrified by its grotesque depictions of suffering in the outback, but it is also a beautifully written text that captures the explorer’s yearning to understand the land and Australia’s failure to recognize Indigenous personhood – in both the nineteenth century and when White writes in the 1950s.

I return to the novel’s imagery whenever I think about the outback or frontier in literature and culture.

Although The Territory was published in the 1940s, the book is as vivid as if it came out last year. Neither a novel nor a history, it is an evocative account of Ernestine Hill’s extensive travels around Northern Australia, the Aboriginal and white people she met, the stories she came across, and the joys and hardships she faced. I view it as essential reading for anyone planning to visit the Top End of Australia. I first read it while I was mapping out the plot of my own book, and was blown away by Ernestine Hill’s evocation of The Territory. 

I love this novel for its beautiful imagery, its character development, and its deeply sensitive portrayal of the clash of civilisations that was to prove so devastating to the countryside as well as to its original inhabitants. Salt Creek tells the story of the European settlers’ incursion in the mid-1850s into a remote coastal region of South Australia, and it focuses on one particular family’s struggles with establishing themselves in a land that already belonged to others. 

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.