The Australian titles that I’ve read and loved and that have helped me adjust to life in Australia
As a schoolgirl in South Africa, My Brilliant Career was one of my favourites. I never dreamed I too would one day live in and write about a rural Australian landscape. When I migrated in January 1989, I reread it in the hope it’d help me find my way, along with Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore, Mum Shirl: An Autobiography, with the assistance of Bobbi Sykes and My Brother Jack by George Johnston.
But the books that have really helped me feel at home in Australia are those I’ve read these last years, books about people in their landscapes, books that reflect the diversity of Australian lives.
Tim Winton’s The Turning is a collection of overlapping short stories told in the vernacular of ordinary West Australians and steeped in that big sky and surf landscape. Here people go cray-fishing, have beach bonfires under big skies, drink, beat up their wives and follow AFL obsessively. There is painful violence and corruption and there is intense beauty, each story a window into a profound transformation, a ‘turning’.
I’ve learned so much about class in Australia from Melissa Lucashenko’s work – ever since I read Steam Pigs decades ago. Her most recent book Too Much Lip gave me insight into the connections between what Lucashenko describes as ‘poor blacks and poor whites in the country, and in the jail class’. Amidst the violence and conflicts, Lucashenko writes of Indigenous Australians’ profound relationship to land – how everything begins and returns to country, and how this connection is the foundation of powerful family unity in the face of the most recent form of dispossession faced by Indigenous Australians: the mining onslaught – something many 
Australians are now experiencing.
Helen Garner’s This House of Grief offered a powerful portrait of the complexity of the criminal justice process and the horrific consequences of family violence. With Garner as guide we are forced to confront the question whether the ordinary Aussie bloke and loving father Farquharson who drove his three young children into a dam is guilty of premeditated and ruthless murder.
I’m white-skinned and Jewish and was born in South Africa so racism has always been my concern. Maxine Beneba Clarke, a woman of the African diaspora, describes growing up black in suburban Australia during the 80s and 90s in her memoir The Hate Race. The ostracism, bullying and casual racism she described deepened my understanding of discrimination and complacency.
Axiomatic, a series of essays, by Maria Tumarkin threads the subjects of her interviews through her enquiry into the capacity of axioms such as ‘time heals all wounds’ to reflect the complexity of life. In Axiomatic we meet a loving grandmother jailed for kidnapping her grandson, and a community lawyer who represents people ‘who live their lives on a highway where they are repeatedly hit by passing trucks’.
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