Before European settlers arrived in Australia late in the 18th century, the sole human inhabitants of the continent were the aborigines. These people had no written language. Their songs, myths, legends, and stories were part of an oral tradition handed down over centuries. Much of this tradition served to explain the origin of the land and of the people in the dreamtime, or the dreaming, a mythological period in which the natural world, its laws, and the human race were created. The land itself was the focal point of aboriginal narratives, because it was the source of the people's livelihood. The stories also told of journeys across the land, of specific events tied to special places. The stories traced the origins of each tribal organization back to a revered ancestor.

The first century.

The first English immigrants arrived in 1788. For several decades the bulk of the settlers were convicts shipped to Australia by British authorities. The writings that emerged from these early immigrants and their descendants had two main emphases: the distinctive qualities of the land itself and the lives the former convicts made in their new home. One of the first reports sent back to Europe was A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay (1789), by sea captain Watkin Tench. He followed that with A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson in 1793. Physician John White published Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales in 1789.

The transition from factual—if sometimes exaggerated—narratives to more literary forms happened in 1819, the year the first volume of poetry appeared. It was Barron Field's First Fruits of Australian Poetry. Another work of 1819 was The Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux. Vaux was a convict writer. His autobiography, while not fictionalized, was an attempt to justify himself and to portray himself more a victim than as felon. Another convict writer, Henry Savery, took the next step by publishing a thinly veiled autobiography as a novel. Quintus Servinton (1831) was the author's attempt to justify the events of his life and to defend his character to a reading audience. Memoirs similar to those of Savery's included Charles Rowcroft's Tales of the Colonies (1843) and Alexander Harris' Settlers and Convicts (1847).

Rowcroft and Harris also wrote novels. Rowcroft published The Bushranger of Van Diemen's Land in 1846 and Harris The Emigrant Family in 1849. These were novels of the land as well as convict stories. They were about life in a more settled Australia, including the violence and uncertainty that faced the inhabitants. Other novels in a similar vein included James Tucker's Ralph Rashleigh (1844), The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859) by Henry Kingsley, Catherine Helen Spence's Clara Morison (1854), Caroline Leakey's The Broad Arrow (1859), John Lang's The Forger's Wife (1855), Marcus Clarke's His Natural Life (1874), and Rosa Praed's Policy and Passion (1881).

The most successful writer of the late colonial era was Thomas Alexander Browne, who wrote under the pen name Rolf Boldrewood. His Robbery Under Arms was a classic adventure story about life in the bush and the goldfields. Serialized in a magazine in 1883, it came out as a book in 1888. Among his 17 other fiction works were A Colonial Reformer (1890) and The Miner's Right (1890).

In addition to the fiction and poetry of the first century were numerous journals by explorers of the outback, Australia's inland frontier. Those written by such intrepid adventurers as Charles Stuart, Edward John Eyre, and Thomas Livingstone Mitchell had a good deal of literary merit.

From 1888 to 1945.

The year 1888 was the centennial of the first settlement. The anniversary was a literary watershed. Novels of convicts and exploration gave way to a spirit of nationalism that would lead, in 1901, to the end of colonial status. A “Young Australia” attitude was growing among Australians—a conviction that theirs was a new country with a bright future. This notion was reflected in the literature of the time. The focal point of the new trend was The Bulletin, a weekly publication with the slogan “Australia for the Australians.” The fiction medium of the time was as often the short story as the novel.

Among the best-known writers before World War I were Henry Lawson, Barbara Baynton, William Astley, Joseph Furphy, Henry Handel Richardson (the pen name of Ethel Florence Lindesay Robertson), William Gosse Hay, Louis Stone, Miles Franklin, and Norman Lindsay. Their writings often centered on life in the bush, with all of its difficulties—not unlike frontier tales in the United States. Lawson, for instance, published Short Stories in Prose and Verse (1894), with such tales as "The Drover's Wife" and "The Bush Undertaker." Baynton's Bush Studies (1902) is a collection of stories on the difficulties of rural living. Astley drew on the convict system for his Tales of the Early Days (1894), Tales of the Isle of Death (1898), and other works. His Half-Crown Bob and Tales of the Riverine were bush narratives. Furphy celebrated rural life in his sprawling novel Such is Life (1903), in which he explored the unspoken code of behavior of the bush dwellers.

Richardson was an expatriate writer. She spent much of her life in Europe. Yet she was perhaps the best Australian novelist of the era. Her Maurice Guest (1908) was set in Leipzig, Germany, but her three-volume The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917–29) is a saga of an immigrant family's fortunes in Australia. W.G. Hay's main work was The Escape of the Notorious Sir William Heans, a peculiar combination of romantic melodrama with historical events.

Louis Stone was both dramatist and novelist, though there was little demand for theater in Australia then. His literary reputation rests mostly on the novel Jonah (1911), a story set in Sydney instead of the rural setting preferred by most writers. Miles Franklin is best remembered for My Brilliant Career (1901). Franklin was an early feminist whose works spanned several decades. Among her good later books was All That Swagger (1936). Norman Lindsay's career also covered many decades. His short story "Lone Hand" came out in 1907 and his last novel, Rooms and Houses, in 1968.

The two leading writers of the period between the world wars were Vance Palmer and Katharine Susannah Prichard. Palmer was a very influential writer whose first collection of stories, The World of Men, came out in 1915. His first novel, Cronulla (1924), was set in the outback of Queensland. His last work was a trilogy published from 1948 to 1959—Golconda, Seedtime, and The Big Fellow, about the mining industry and the men who developed it.

Prichard was born in Fiji, but she settled in Western Australia after her marriage. She was a feminist and a Marxist. Her novel Coondaroo (1929), on white mistreatment of the aborigines, aroused a great deal of opposition. Like Palmer, she wrote a trilogy about the mining industry: The Roaring Nineties (1946), Golden Miles (1948), and Winged Seeds (1950). Her least political novel was Intimate Strangers (1937).

Since 1945.

Three writers who made a worldwide reputation after World War II were Patrick White, Morris West, and Colleen McCullough. White won the Nobel prize for literature in 1973. He is considered the major Australian writer of the late 20th century. His first novel was Happy Valley (1939), a story of rural New South Wales. Altogether he published 12 large novels. His best-known work was Voss (1957), about an expedition to inland Australia.

Morris West is known outside Australia mainly for his religious novels: The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963), The Clowns of God (1981), and Lazarus (1990), which form a trilogy. Colleen McCullough was born in New Zealand but settled in Australia. Her novel The Thorn Birds (1977) became a worldwide best-seller and was made into a television miniseries. It is the story of one family over three generations and its relationship to a priest, Father de Bricassart. Her later novels included A Creed for the Third Millennium (1985), The First Man in Rome (1990), and The Grass Crown (1990).

Significant writers of the immediate postwar decades included Martin Boyd, Christina Stead, and Randolph Stow. Boyd's novels were primarily family histories: Lucinda Brayford (1946) and the tetralogy consisting of The Cardboard Crown (1952), A Difficult Young Man (1955), Outbreak of Love (1957), and When Blackbirds Sing (1962). Stead first won recognition with The Man Who Loved Children in 1940. Her later books included For Love Alone (1945) and The People with the Dogs (1952). Stow's first success was To the Islands (1958), followed by The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965), Visitants (1979), The Suburbs of Hell (1984), and others.

By the 1960s Australian fiction was as far-ranging in its subject matter as any literature in the world. Thomas Keneally was one of the era's most productive authors. His most highly regarded book is probably Schindler's Ark (1982), based on a true story of the Holocaust that was made into the Academy award–winning film Schindler's List in 1993. His other novels included The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), which was also made into a film, Passenger (1979), and A Family Madness (1985). Some of the other major novelists of the 1980s and after were Jon Cleary, Frank Hardy, Thea Astley, David Malouf, David Ireland, Christopher J. Koch, Frank Moorhouse, Gerald Murnane, Glenda Adams, Nicholas Hasluck, and Amanda Lohrey.