Knowra Australian literature Australian literature Australian literature comprises literary works written in Australia or by Australians, shaped by the continent’s histories, cultures, languages, and landscapes.
The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn : A novel by Henry Kingsley, published in 1859, about migration, settlement, and life in colonial Australia. Its colonial pastoral helped establish the novel as a form for imagining Australian settlement.
Aboriginal Australian literature : Literature by Aboriginal Australian writers, grounded in diverse Indigenous histories, cultures, and languages. It brings Indigenous authorship and continuity into accounts often centered on colonial print.
Miles Franklin : An Australian novelist whose works include My Brilliant Career and who established a major literary prize. Her debut novel made female ambition central to a genre dominated by bush masculinity.
Australian nationalism : Political and cultural movements that promote Australian national identity and self-determination. Literary claims about a distinct national voice often emerged alongside nationalist politics.
Miles Franklin Literary Award : An annual Australian literary prize awarded to a novel of the highest literary merit that presents Australian life. The award has helped define which novels institutions recognize as distinctly Australian.
The Fortunes of Richard Mahony : A trilogy by Henry Handel Richardson following an Irish-born doctor and his family in nineteenth-century Australia. Its long view of migration and colonial society complicates celebratory accounts of national progress.
Dreamtime : A common English term for Indigenous Australian ancestral narratives, laws, and accounts of the formation of the world. These living traditions long predate print literature and resist treatment as mere folklore.
Katharine Susannah Prichard : An Australian novelist and short-story writer whose work often examined class, labor, and social change. Her fiction broadened national writing beyond pastoral settings and individual bush heroes.
Bush legend : A national myth portraying the Australian bushman as resourceful, egalitarian, and stoic. Writers have celebrated, revised, and challenged this influential image of national character.
Stolen Generations : Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children forcibly removed from their families by Australian governments and institutions. Writing about these removals has made personal testimony central to national historical reckoning.
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