Destination: Australia

Travel Literature

Considering Australia's enormity and its social extremes - from cityscapes to isolation, yuppies to nomads - it's perhaps surprising that relatively little in the way of travel literature has appeared on this continental subject. That said, some inspiring, thought-provoking and just plain entertaining books have been written about this country.

Robyn Davidson's Tracks (1980) details her crazily self-indulgent but ultimately courageous trek across 2700km of the outback from Alice Springs to the West Australian coast, equipped with several wild camels and a burgeoning personal honesty.

Speaking of lunacy, read Keep Australia On Your Left (2000) by Eric Stiller for an enthralling though often overwritten account of an attempt by two men to circumnavigate Australia's daunting girth in a kayak.

Another raw experience is captured in Songlines (1998), by Bruce Chatwin, in which the solipsistic author writes engagingly about the nature of nomadic life and the memories and myths sung across the landscape of Aboriginal culture.

In Tasmania (2004) by Nicholas Shakespeare is a mixture of erudite history and the contemporary musings of the author, who moves to Tasmania's east coast and discovers a personal ancestry entwined with early explorations of the island.

A different kind of journey is described in Tony Horwitz's entertaining One for the Road (1999), a high-speed account of life on and along the highway during a round-Oz hitchhiking trip.

In Christmas Island, Indian Ocean (2003), journalist Julietta Jameson relates how a mind's-eye fascination with this remote Australian territory during the Tampa refugee crisis evolved into a three-month exploration of the island's natural and multicultural history.

For comfortably predictable reading, pick up a copy of Bill Bryson's Down Under (2001), in which the mass-market humorist takes his usual well-rehearsed pot-shots at a large target.

Cold Beer and Crocodiles (2001) by Roff Smith is filled with empathetic sketches of the diverse Australian characters he meets during a nine-month cycling trip around the continent.

OK, Terry Pratchett's The Last Continent (2000) is actually a fantasy novel, but in a twisted kind of way it qualifies as a travel book with its imaginative, mischievous and often hilarious reinvention of Australia as a land called Fourex (a pun on XXXX beer).