Mapped
Cloudstreet
Tim Winton
Two rural families, the Pickles and the Lambs, wash up together in a big rambling house in working-class inner Perth and share it for twenty years. The map runs from the Lambs' lost country home in the south-west, into the shared house and its shop in the western suburbs, out to the wartime city on Perth Water, and always back to the Swan River, where a boy drowns at the start and is made whole at the end.
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Robbery Under Arms
Rolf Boldrewood
The bushranging and gold-rush country of colonial New South Wales, and the long ride south to Melbourne. Boldrewood (Thomas Alexander Browne) drew the Turon diggings, the cattle runs, and the rugged ranges from a lifetime in the bush. The Marstons' hidden valley, "Terrible Hollow", is invented, but it is set in real country and the Turon, Bathurst, the Weddin Mountains, and Melbourne are all on the map. It brings a whole continent, Australia, into the atlas.
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The Secret River
Kate Grenville
A Thames waterman, transported for theft, lands in the raw penal colony at Sydney Cove and then takes up land sixty kilometres north on the Hawkesbury River. The map runs from The Rocks up to Wisemans Ferry and the reaches of the lower Hawkesbury, called Dyarubbin by the Darug people whose country the settlers were seizing. The frontier violence in the book is drawn from the documented history of these reaches.
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Voss
Patrick White
In the 1840s the obsessive German explorer Voss sets out to cross the Australian continent, sustained by a strange, wordless spiritual bond with Laura Trevelyan, a young woman he leaves behind in Sydney. White's novel holds together two worlds: colonial Sydney, with the Bonner household and the harbour from which the expedition departs, and the vast unmapped interior, drawn from the real inland journeys of explorers like Leichhardt, where the party is broken and Voss meets his death.
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