Thea Astley

First published in 1999, Drylands was Thea Astley's fourth and final Miles Franklin winner. In the dying town of Drylands, Janet Deakin sells papers to lonely locals. At night, in her flat above the newsagency, she attempts to write a novel for a world in which no one reads - 'full of people, she envisaged, glaring at a screen that...

I told them to go into the scrub and disperse the tribe. Disperse? That is a strange word. What do you mean by dispersing? Firing at them. Two decades after a massacre of local Aboriginal people, the former residents of a Queensland town have reunited to celebrate the progress and prosperity of their community. Tom Dorahy, returning to his hometown,...

A woman becomes obsessed with the story of a long-dead colonial pioneer, and her research becomes a way of coming to terms with her own past. Researching in the archives, Belle discovers the long-dead Gaden Lockyer, a colonial pioneer in Jericho Flats, and soon becomes obsessed. Belle's quest for Lockyer is her way of coming to terms with the past—her...

There are distant shouts, rifle shots, the pounding of feet across the bridge, the sound of running. A woman’s scream carves the night then bubbles away. In 1930, the superintendent of a mission on a Queensland island, driven mad by his wife’s death, goes on a murderous rampage. Fearing for their lives, the other whites arm a young Indigenous man...

Wresting his family from the easy living of 19th-century Sydney, Cornelius Laffey takes them to northern Queensland where thousands of hopefuls are digging for gold in the mud. They confront the horror of Aboriginal dispossession, and Cornelius is sacked for reporting the slaughter. It's Raining in Mango: Popular Penguins is an unforgettable tale of the other side of Australia's heritage....