“Visitors … could be forgiven for wondering why we are so pre-occupied with questions of identity – speech made by Prime Minister Paul Keating at the 1990 Australian Book Publishers Awards.
Australian culture has never been particularly well looked after in its home country. Decades of poor funding and even worse management has led to Australian’s creative traditions being devoured by American and European traditions. Few ordinary Australians could name an Australian painter or writer, possibly they could name a film or an actor. It’s a special kind of tradition that began almost as far back as the 1950’s and was described then as ‘the Cultural Cringe’ (Phillips).
Our uniquely Australian perspective is like a stubborn plant occasionally treated with liquid fertilizer, more often than not it’s casually sprayed with weed killer. It has not exactly thrived but managed to find a couple of patches of dirt in which its roots can grow and a few flowers can perhaps not bloom but at least reach maturity.
Melbourne in particular, is a UNESCO City of Literature but has been let down on the state and federal level by politicians who see the Arts as simply another financial wing of the Australian economy: a profitable export.
What I thought I might do is give you a list of some superb examples of Australian writing that you may be missing out on. I really do think that Australian culture is ill defined in its native country and internationally as well. If I can get you to do anything after reading this it is to read something Australian.
Acute Misfortune, Erik Jensen (2014)
If you can be bothered to read reviews, Acute Misfortune has been described extensively if a little bit dismissively as being ‘novella sized’ and having a ‘gimlet eye’. As if the book was too small and stuffed with bitter scrutiny to really be worth five stars. It is small and laser focused but it is also capable of being a biting study of Australian identity to the attentive and sensitive reader.
Acute Misfortune is the true story of Erik Jensen’s four-year friendship with the Australian painter Adam Cullen set shortly before Cullen’s death in 2012. It doesn’t hold back. It uses real names and tells the story as honestly as it can. It analyses why Cullen felt so pressured to behave the way he did. Drugs, violence, guns and paintings. Substance abuse and shocking behaviour became crutches holding up Cullen’s life and artistic career.
Personally I blame former Prime Minister John Howard for all of this. I blame John Howard for a great deal actually. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s Paul Keating (John Howard’s predecessor) was determined to create a modern, aspirational Australia identity. A nation more in connection to Asia than America or the UK. A thousand, unique blossoms bloom in the garden kind of thing. Howard fundamentally disagreed with this idea. He argued that Australian identity was decisively western, conservative and collective. It was Australia Day, the idea of a fair go, the British Commonwealth and a general distrust of those who aspire to rise above their station. It was what sat in your gut ,and that your first instinct is your best one.
I see the struggle of Adam Cullen’s life through that clash in Australian ideology. Cullen’s toxic masculinity was a facade, demonstrated to him by the country he inhabited. His rejection of the multifaceted, sophisticated life and his whole-hearted embrace of petty, uncomplicated Australiana is as much the fault of John Howard as it is the artistic landscape of the time. A time of high economic growth and stifled political debate both of which benefited those establishment figures who already possessed both wealth and prestige. What Howard argued was that the ‘Lucky Country’ became instead the ‘Frightened Country’. Scared of immigrants, change and in some cases the reality of the wider world (Marr).
Acute Misfortune is a fantastic and essential read for those people willing to look beyond just the beautifully constructed words on the page. For me, the book reads as a state of the nation in the early 2010’s. Still struggling to emerge from the shadow of Little Johnny Howard and the ignorance of our own cultural output he instilled in generations following his leadership of our large island nation.
Dark Emu, in my opinion, is probably one of the most interesting books on Australian history you could read today. The intention behind Pascoe’s work is to provide an alternative perspective to Aboriginal history and challenge preconceived ideas of first settlers as primitive and technologically backward.
I’ll be honest with you, Pascoe’s work is by no means utterly faultless; there is arguably a cherry picking of sources and a focus on non-Aboriginal sources. But you have to understand how fascinating both the intention and the effect of Dark Emu had on Melbourne and Australia as a whole.
Pascoe argues that in pre-contact times, Australian Aboriginal people weren’t just hunter gatherers; they were agriculturalists who changed their landscape to benefit their communities. Examples of this include aquaculture in rivers, more permanent kinds of settlements, and the spreading of seeds. He also contends that this evidence of pre-colonial Aboriginal societies was often deliberately erased by early colonisers. For some in Australia, the idea of our enormous continent being anything other than a sunburnt wasteland drove people literally insane with rage.
If you read most reviews of Dark Emu, the perception of it is considered mixed. Reviewers talk about the book’s popularity or use gentle, academic phrases like ‘sparked debate’ and ‘generated controversy’. This language does not go far enough to convey the tangible effect of the book’s release. People were sincerely upset by this book: media personalities called the whole thing a sham and a waste of paper. The book tore open holes in the minds of many Australians. Some individuals could find no academic way of absolutely discrediting Pascoe, so they critiqued his standing as an Aboriginal person instead.
People who I personally thought of as uninterested in Aboriginal rights, or just non-readers on the whole, were outraged by Dark Emu at the dinner table. For some, it confirmed their greatest fears, that Australians had invaded and destroyed a society that already existed here long before we rocked up and started telling ourselves this was all grass and kangaroos.
Pascoe doesn’t fall into the quagmire of elaborate language, he writes simply for what is ostensibly an academic book. A big reason why I recommend Dark Emu is that it is designed to be easy to read and digest.
More so than any other piece of fiction or nonfiction published in the last decade, Dark Emu has brought a discussion of Australia’s colonial history into the mainstream, and we are all the better for it.
This House of Grief, Helen Garner (2014)
Helen Garner’s work is the chicken parmigiana of the Australian literary landscape. Her work is fundamental much in the same way the chicken parma is to the traditional pub landscape. Just as every pub must have a chicken parma special during the week, so too must every Melbourne bookshop have at least a couple Garners out the back. Much like the parma, she is a reliable seat-filler.
This true crime book is a heart breaking story of a father, Robert Farquharson destroying his family, by murdering his three sons, because he is a broken man. Garner contends that perhaps all men are capable of reaching their breaking point and committing such an act. To do something totally unforgivable. I think Garner hints in this book at the idea of Australian identity being a fragmented thing. An artificial construct designed to shield most people from the harsh realities of living in Australia. More than 95% of Australians are non-indigenous, with no real understanding of why we are here and our short-lived traditions are designed to shield us from that fact rather than help us embrace and overcome it. It helps to come to this land pre-broken, with some kind of family chip on your shoulder. We fight for, purchase and build upon broken, colonised land that was never ours to begin with. It makes sense as to why people and communities who live here can end up perhaps even just a little bit broken. Garner uses the story of Robert Farquharson as a kind of warning, we can all, in different ways, be pushed to a breaking point.
Garner’s insight and perspective is razor focused. She provides a fascinating examination of Robert Farquharson’s female relatives, and the effect of the children’s deaths on Cindy Gambino and her family. Garner offers a unique perspective on the world around her by drawing attention to her role as author and witness rather than trying to blend invisibly in the background.
Her familiarity with Australian life is why she has had such tremendous success. 1 in every 100 Melburnians claims to have actually met Helen Garner. At swimming pools, super markets, university lunches, book shops and out the front of flinders street station. She is a kind of special literary ghost. I suspect 1 in every 1000 actually has met her.
I saw her speak most recently in 2025 about her most recent book The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder, to a packed house at the Melbourne Town Hall. Her words have the ability to transfix and unify, and just as everyone has their favorite pub parma, everyone has their favorite Garner work. This House of Grief is both mine and my mothers.
They are not real authors, the book is a clever work of fiction.
Now that I’ve got the headline out of the way. My comments and thoughts. Their Brilliant Careers tells the story of 16 fictional yet highly realized Australian authors, comprising 16 individual but interconnected short stories.
O’Neill was most obviously inspired by Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño, who in turn was inspired by Jorge Luis Borges. However O’Neill does so much more than simply mimic Bolaño or Borges. He gives each of his chosen subjects a unique Australian flair: some cling to the city, others flee to the regions or the suburbs. There is a restlessness about these characters that the author captures perfectly with a clean and crisp prose. There is a stylised exactness about this collection that makes it one of my favourites. Of the individual authors my favourites would probably be Francis X McVeigh, Vivian Darkbloom and Helen Harkaway. There is a precision and emotion in each of these characters that touches me deeply and personally. I feel like given the right (or wrong) mix of choices I could end up just like them.
The first time I read the book the individual stories were entertaining, but I didn’t fully appreciate the specifically Australian position of the work. It is a warm and comforting read the second time around. It’s a literary Kath and Kim. A humorous and gently affirming experience that enhances your perspective on what Australian culture can be.
Their Brilliant Careers works so well because O’Neill is commenting on an absence. There is no tangible literary landscape in the capital cities or the regions of this country. There are no libraries, cafes or restaurants or small towns famous for its cultural inhabitants. There are small clubs, reading circles and communities scattered like warts on a beautiful face. These blemishes are networking events rather than actual meaningful places of conversation and discussion. Culture is not something ingrained into our society. It has latched on like a parasite. The art, music, theatre, literature and creativity on our continent clings desperately to a hulking beast with Australia branded across its backside.
I enjoy Their Brilliant Careers because of the cultural absence it identified in Australia. There are no real literary cults set up around our writers or journalists in the way they are in America (see Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison or Truman Capote for more details). Their Brilliant Careers uses imaginative prose and compact storytelling to explore a kind of literary what if in Australian culture.
The Henson Case, David Marr (2008)
This non-fiction selection is a hard find, but that, to me, is part of the experience of enjoying a really good book. It’s light and easy to read. The book explores the cultural fallout surrounding the 2008 raiding of a Sydney gallery.
The ‘case’ was a simple one. Bill Henson had been a professional, practising photographer since the mid-1970s. He had cultivated institutional as well as social support for his work and had several major exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney. Marr recounts the photographer’s exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney, and the public media furore that emerged from its invitation. The author takes a certain delight in naming and shaming those who first brewed this storm of scandal.
The uproar around Bill Henson’s photos rose to such a level of outrage that the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, described the photos by Henson as “absolutely revolting”. This, for Marr, was the final betrayal. A failure of leadership from a politician who had promised change, who had advocated for the arts when it was convenient, but chose to deliver populist scorn instead. This is the main thrust of Marr’s argument: if we live in the free democracy promised to us, we should have the right to express ourselves, and to do so without being immediately strung up for crossing unspoken social taboos. Marr takes a refreshingly moderate approach in his criticism and acknowledges that his work is not for everyone. His position is that of strict anti-censorship.
I think this book reminds its readers of modern events and foreshadows the cultural quagmire some feel themselves sinking into. First and foremost for me, it would be the removal and reinstatement of Khaled Sabsabi as Australia’s representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Sabsabi was controversially dumped only to then be quietly reinstated as Australia’s representative. His ‘crime’ was depicting Palestinian political figures in his paintings (Jefferson). The fact that Sabsabi, a professional artist has to justify his political perspective and how it relates to his work is an insult to any artist, but particularly to an Australian creative landscape who applauds the socially-aware work of Kaylene Whiskey because it appears harmlessly inoffensive (Silcox).
Interestingly, the title, The Henson Case, also hints at the resolution. Because there was no ‘Henson Trial’ or ‘Oxley9 Trial’. No charges were ever issued against anybody for these images. Something happened, some vein was pressed too tightly in the hearts of ordinary Australians.
If Helen Garner is to be a chicken parma, I would argue David Marr is to be a Vodka Soda with Lime. His writing is fundamental. On the surface, you imagine it to be something cheap and simple. Beneath that, you have something that kicks the back of your throat (or the mind, in Marr’s case) when you really need it to. He is one of the few Australian authors I can think of who will argue with you as a reader and actively try to work you over to his side. He writes convincingly of how individual cases of censorship like this one can cause lasting damage to the Australian cultural landscape.
These are all really excellent books and well worth a read. Even if you only read one you will be doing yourself a tremendous favour. If these reviews do anything they should inspire you to support and visit Melbourne. It’s a literary landscape desperate for your attention. It’s in my opinion the greatest city in the world and beyond reproach. I would know because I have never lived anywhere else.
My hope is that, in the future, we see a recognition of Australia as a really unique and special place deserving of cultural attention. We live in what can feel like the perfect beginner’s level to life. Artists like Kaylene Whiskey, Brett Whiteley and Adam Cullen. Writers like Helen Garner, David Marr and Henry Lawson. These are established individuals who I feel have long gone unrecognized for their skill and talent because of their identity. If I want you to do anything I would encourage you to read and embrace something Australian, before it vanishes in a puff of poorly-funded air.
Citations
Jefferson, Dee. After a turbulent year, Australia’s Khaled Sabsabi will present two works at the Venice Biennale. Sydney, The Guardian, 2026. The Guardian Newspaper
Marr, David. His Master’s Voice: The Corruption of Public Debate Under Howard. Quarterly Essay 26 ed., Melbourne, Black Inc., 2007. Accessed 17/5/2026.
Phillips, A. A. The Cultural Cringe. 4th ed., Brisbane, Meanjin, 1950, https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-cultural-cringe-by-a-a-phillips/. Accessed 16/4/2026.
Silcox, Beejay. The joyful world of Kaylene Whiskey: the Indigenous artist pulling Dolly Parton and Wonder Woman into the outback. Melbourne, The Guardian Newspaper, 2025
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