Kiera Lindsey lectures in Australian history at the University of South Australia and won the inaugural Greg Dening memorial prize. Her biography The Convict's Daughter (Allen & Unwin) follows the scandalous abduction trial that followed her great-great-great aunt Mary Ann Gill's attempt to elope in 1848.
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My Family and Other Animals
Gerald Durrell
Aged 10 I read this sprawling autobiography of an English boy who moved with his family to Corfu in the 1930s. It recalls his encounters with animals – human, mammal, reptile – as he negotiates life on a Greek island with an eccentric family constantly on the brink of spontaneous combustion.
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
"Chapter 1: I Am Born." My favourite chapter title of all time. Familiar figures and memorable quotes, all now common parlance. Dearest to my heart: Daniel Peggotty and his Devon houseboat, Mr Dick and his fly-away kite, the entrepreneurial optimism of Wilkins Micawber, and she-who-loathes-donkeys, Betsey Trotwood.
The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, Part One: Australia Felix
Henry Handel Richardson
The first of an epic trilogy set in 19th-century Victoria with a colonial woman as its heroine, Fortunes was once declared the great Australian novel, comparable to King Lear in grandeur and vision. Here is greed and gullibility, ambition and self-deceit, treachery and tenderness all unloosed upon the goldfields and Marvellous Melbourne.
The Tree of Man
Patrick White
An opening paragraph that still holds me. The first time I read it, the Australian landscape blurred and then suddenly acquired a sharp, new focus. White's prose is like the stringybarks he describes, "rising out" of "the involved scrub" with "the simplicity of true grandeur". To be read with David Marr's biography of White to hand.
The Road to Botany Bay
Paul Carter
This is a difficult pleasure but worth persisting if you want the all-too-familiar turned upside-down and inside-out. You will sail 18th-century oceans, learn the intricacies of circumnavigation and cartography, trudge beside surveyors and peer over the shoulders of journal writers. In the process, Australia's foundation narratives will be undone, then radically recreated.
