This Miles Franklin award-winning novel is set in the fictional coastal town of Desperance in north-western Queensland. It traces the tensions between local Indigenous communities and the huge challenge they face when a multinational company tries to set up a mine on sacred land. The epic and surreal storytelling made it a classic of Australian literature.

I recently read that Alexis Wright, a Waanji native of the Carpenteria highlands of tropical Northern Australia, had great trouble getting this book accepted for publication. We meantime were always divided between European and other sensibilities, and the colonial duality was one of the main planks of D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Kangaroo’. Wright’s work closes the circle, and Australia as its own mystery is dealt to us here. The main characters of ‘Carpenteria’, Normal Phantom, a gruff and more worldly father of Will Phantom, who is under the influence of an Aboriginal wise man, Mozzie Fishman, take us into Aboriginal Australia in its own right. It is a novel in which the Aboriginal world of shape-shifting and visits from phantasms, what is called “magic realism” in America, is visited on us as a generous revelation. We now know that her native earth brims with fables and mysteries too many to hint at.

Set in the bustle of the gold-mining boom Dr Richard Mahony and his wife Mary journey from wealth to poverty as the restless medic searches for purpose and contentment in his life. Mary cannot understand her husband’s increasing dissatisfaction with their life. This profound work is considered by many to be symbolic of the growing pains of Australia as an emerging nation.

Author Ethel Florence Richardson used the pen name Henry Handel in order to garner male literary authority and published the original parts of this tri-part novel between WWI and the depression. It is a fine-wrought and comprehensive fiction of a pilgrim male and his Australian experience, from the unforgettable environment of the gold fields to an undistinguished Australian death. In an environment of shacks with dirt floors, bark roofs and perilous mining shafts, Dr Mahony, medical graduate of Edinburgh, courts an adolescent girl named Polly Turnham, a servant at the Beamish Hotel. These days, the book is credited with warning about the onset of dementia. As scenes from colonial life the story of the Mahony marriage and all its contradictions and crises continue, details are announced without false grandeur, and yet they keep the reader fixated as bush-rangers and goldfield cave-ins cannot. A splendid book in any culture.

It’s August 1943 and Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is in a brutal Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway. As he struggles to save the men under his command he is haunted by his passionate love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier and then he receives a letter that will change his life.

Richard Flanagan won a justifiable Booker for this masterpiece in 2014. I was of a generation that saw the men come back from Japanese imprisonment and try to adjust themselves to an Australian marriage and Australia itself. This is the tale of Dorrigo Evans who finds himself increasingly praised in later life for supposed daring he does not believe in. He is a physician too, like Mahony and he tries to assert himself as a banal figure as his fellow prisoners try to enlarge him. A glorious conundrum novel by a splendid writer.