An essential late novel from one of the foremost novelists of the twentieth century, now a part of the Text Classics series

An Australian town is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary. But one man is intent on reminding the town of its brutal past.

William Buckley, soldier and escaped convict, is the legendary wild white man of colonial Australia. In 1803 he escaped from the official settlement in Victoria. For 32 years he lived with local Aborigines before giving himself up...

When the suave French convict Gaston Vandeloup escapes to the goldfields of Ballarat, he is destined to meet the remarkable Madame Midas, who has made her fortune in Ballarat's fabulous mines. But her wealth makes her prey to...

Scarcely out of print since the early 1870s, For the Term of His Natural Life has provided successive generations with a vivid account of a brutal phase of colonial life.

Randolph Stow's most surreal and allegorical novel, a bleak but comic staging of human frailty and the need for belief.

Set in the desolate outback landscape of Australia's north-west, the novel tracks the last days of a worn-out Anglican missionary. Fleeing his mission after an agonising confrontation, he immerses himself in the wilderness,...

Hailed as Australia's Huckleberry Finn, this classic captures a time and place with a beautiful balance of realism and nostalgia.

Thirteen men and women travel the world on a package tour but wherever they go nothing is as it seems. Challenged by the unexpected, by differences and subtleties, Bail's tourists are in turn repelled and attracted-and all are...

Janet Frame's previously unpublished novel draws on her own experiences in Menton, France as a Katherine Mansfield Fellow. It is a wonderful social satire, a send-up of the cult of the dead author, and-in the best tradition of...

My heart pumped hard and fast, fed by the jitter of adrenaline coursing through my veins. This was getting beyond a joke...Don't you just hate it when somebody tries to kill you and you don't know who or why?

A portrait of the artist as a troubled young woman, this is an autobiographical classic from an Australian literary treasure.

The original blockbuster crime novel, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide.

He would relive for a long time everything she said to him in the room at the mission. He would recall the way her voice had grown thicker and thicker, and how her head had begun to hang to one side from the exhaustion of her...

Originally published in 1958, The Long Prospect was described as ranking second only to Patrick White's Voss in postwar Australian literature.

What exactly is the message of Robert Rose? One year after his death, twenty-six years after just another of our crashes, knowing the effect it had on his family and friends, and thousands of others who hardly knew him, I want...

Between the publication of The Home Girls , in 1982, and her death, Olga Masters was acclaimed as one of Australia's finest writers. Her short stories, distinguished by their acute observation of human behaviour, drew comparison...

First released in 1962, this groundbreaking adventure novel was among the first true 'young adult' literature ever published in Australia.

Introduced by Favel Parrett 'Mother's stomach bellied out like a sail. Young, she was unable to say no to anyone who asked her to make love. Her reasons for her behaviour were all her own; never, after she'd had me did she allow...

A children's classic about a boy with a disability, published in the US in 1968 as A Racecourse For Andy.

Originally published in 1939, Happy Valley is set in a small country town in the Snowy Mountains. Based on Patrick White's own experiences in the early 1930s as a jackaroo at Bolaro, near Adaminaby in south-eastern New South...