Mapped
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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