A soft five stars. What a find - in a small country town at a charity book stall for a mere $5! Geoffrey Dutton's book is a journey through 100 great books of Australia's first 200 years under white rule, avoiding poetry, plays, and for the most part short stories - but including anything prose-based, including history and journals.

It's a delicate five stars because a) the book is inevitably dated after 35 years, and b) no-one is going to agree with all of the options. Unfortunately, those 35 years mean an awful lot when it comes to multicultural and gender representative literature. At the same time, Dutton was always of the "new school of thought" and he proactively notes that about a third of the books included deal directly with Australia's Indigenous population or their history.

Nevertheless, with those caveats aside, this is sublime. Each book is given a generous discussion as well as a short excerpt and a biography of the author. Dutton reaches back to the very first settlers, examining the more moral men and women who - unfortunately - were not always heard by those in power during our country's complicated past. He restricts himself to one book per author which, although it means some tough decisions with authors like Thea Astley and Patrick White, allows him to run through a wide spectrum. Importantly, this is a luxurious read, happy to delve into all sorts of areas of the public consciousness, and it reminds me how, even as someone with a university education in literature, my knowledge of my own country's literature is average at best. A worthy find. ( )

The front blurb on the dust jacket says it all.
You can make intitial contact with someone who does not speak your language with signs or smiles, but to communicate you need words. So it is with a nationa; to understand it you have to read its books. ... In one volume are distilled those classic books that reflect the image of Australia, books that have shaped the image of Australia. ( )