A Book for Booklovers: Read Our Review of Books That Made Us by Carl Reinecke

A well written, engrossing cultural history of Australia told through our fiction.

Australia’s novels lie at the heart of the country. Capturing everyday lives and exceptional dreams, they have held up a mirror to the nation, reflecting the good and the bad. In this companion book to the ABC TV series, Carl Reinecke looks at the history of Australian culture through the books we have read and the stories we have told.

Touching on colonial invasion, the bush myth, world wars, mass migration, the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty and the emergence of a modern multicultural nation, Carl examines how these pivotal events and persuasive ideas have shaped some of Australia’s most influential novels, and how these books, in turn, made us.

Claudia Karvan hosts the upcoming ABC series, Books That Made Us (premieres Tuesday 23 November). In her foreword here, she writes that working on the series “gave me the opportunity to reflect on our famous historic novels and also to understand the bedrock from which our contemporary stories are being forged. I was able to meet some of our most beloved and brilliant writers, and experience the places that inspired their magical stories.”

This companion book grew out of the research for the series. Reinecke writes in the introduction that it complements the series “by unpicking in detail the real-life biographies of a few dozen works and investigating why they were written, how they were received, and what audiences at the time thought of them.”

In a panoramic account of Australian fiction stretching from Marcus Clarke to Melissa Lucashenko, Patrick White to Peter Carey, and Henry Handel Richardson to Michelle de Kretser, this is a new history of key authors and compelling books that have kept us reading and made a difference for over 200 years.

This is a book for lovers of books. Not only books but Australian books. It is by no means a complete list of home-grown titles, or even all the significant ones, but rather a “selected a sample of influential books, almost all novels, to explore.” As Reinecke writes, these books are “stepping stones in the complex, crowded history of Australian literature and culture.”

This is an excellent read that deserves a place on every book lover’s shelf.

Buy a copy of Books That Made Us here.