As an avid reader, I’ve been wanting to write a post on books to read before moving to Australia to share with any fellow book-lovers. And I’ve finally got around to it!
If you love reading as much as I do, and are thinking about moving to Australia and wondering how to prepare beyond the checklists, paperwork, and packing, then this post is for you. Sometimes the best way to get ready for a big move is to step into someone else’s story, learn from their journey, or simply understand the culture you’re about to join. Books can do that beautifully.
Whether you’re craving practical advice, real-life migration stories, deep dives into Australian history, or just want to get a feel for Aussie humour and lifestyle, my emigration reading list will help you arrive feeling a little more informed and a lot more grounded.
Here are my recommendations for 10 books to read before moving to Australia – plus a bonus selection of novels set in Australia that I absolutely loved!
10 Books To Read Before Moving To Australia
How To Be Australian – Ashley Kalagian Blunt
Synopsis:
“When Ashley persuades her new husband Steve to leave snowy Canada and join her for a year Down Under, she looks forward to an easy transition. After all, Australia’s just Canada with more sunshine and strange animals, right?
But they soon discover things aren’t so simple. Steve struggles to settle and Ashley fears he will come to regret both the move and the marriage – especially after she loses her wedding rings on Bondi Beach. Baffled, homesick and increasingly anxious (in a land renowned for ‘no worries’), she is preparing to return to Canada when Steve shockingly announces that he wants to stay in Australia.
For the sake of her marriage and her happiness, Ashley must find an Australia she can belong to: she decides to travel the country, learn its history, decode its cultural quirks and connect with as many residents as she can meet. How to Be Australian is a remarkable memoir, at once familiar and faraway, that shines a fresh, funny and fascinating light onto the country we think we know.”
Buy How To Be Australian by Ashley Kalagian Blunt here.
Down Under: Travels from a Sunburned Country – Bill Bryson
Synopsis:
“Bill Bryson’s travels in a sunburned country- Australia will never look the same again.
It is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents and still Australia teems with life – a large portion of it quite deadly. In fact, Australia has more things that can kill you in a very nasty way than anywhere else.
Ignoring such dangers – and yet curiously obsessed by them – Bill Bryson journeyed to Australia and promptly fell in love with the country. And who can blame him? The people are cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted and unfailingly obliging- their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water; the food is excellent; the beer is cold and the sun nearly always shines. Life doesn’t get much better than this…”
Buy Down Under: Travels from a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson here.
Your D.I.Y. Move Guide to Australia – Robyn Vogels & Hendrika Jooste
Synopsis:
“Are you planning to move to Australia? You are not alone, Your D.I.Y. Move Guide, talks you through all the essential information, practical tips, and valuable advice you will need to move and live in Australia. Research, Planning, Documentation, Packing, Moving; Truth be told, this is just the beginning of the long roller-coaster journey you have embarked on. The real ride, however, starts after you arrive in Australia. Thorough preparation with realistic expectation and the right advice can save you a ton of stress and anxiety.”
Buy Your D.I.Y. Move Guide To Australia here.
Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds – David Pollock, Ruth Van Reken & Michael Pollock
Synopsis:
“Third Culture Kids speaks to the challenges and rewards of a multicultural childhood; the joy of discovery and heartbreaking loss, its effect on maturing and personal identity, and the difficulty in transitioning home.
Authors Pollock and Van Reken pioneered the TCK profile, which brought to light the emotional and psychological realities that come with the TCK journey, often resulting in feelings of rootlessness and grief but also an increased confidence and ability to interact with many cultures. Through interviews and personal writings, this new, expanded edition explores the challenges and benefits that TCKs encounter, and also widens the net to discuss the experiences of CCKs, cross-cultural kids, who are immigrants, international adoptees or the children of biracial or bicultural parents.
Highlighting dramatic changes brought about by instant communication and ever-evolving mobility patterns, Third Culture Kids reveals the hidden diversity in our world and challenges traditional notions of identity and “home” – and shows us how the TCK experience is becoming increasingly common and valuable.”
Buy Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds here.
The Permanent Resident – Roanna Gonsalves
Synopsis:
“A woman who can’t swim wades into a suburban pool. An Indian family sits down to an Australian Christmas dinner. A single mother’s offer to coach her son’s soccer team leads to an unexpected encounter. A recent migrant considers taking the fall for a second generation ‘friend’. A wife refuses to let her husband look at her phone. An international student gets off a train at night.
Roanna Gonsalves’ short stories unearth the aspirations, ambivalence and guilt laced through the lives of 21st century immigrants, steering through clashes of cultures, trials of faith, and squalls of racism. Sometimes heart-wrenching, sometimes playful, they cut to the truth of what it means to be a modern outsider.”
Buy The Permanent Resident here.
Growing Up African in Australia – Edited by Maxine Beneba Clarke
Synopsis:
“Learning to kick a football in a suburban schoolyard. Finding your feet as a young black dancer. Discovering your grandfather’s poetry. Meeting Nelson Mandela at your local church. Facing racism from those who should protect you. Dreading a visit to the hairdresser. House-hopping across the suburbs. Being too black. Not being black enough. Singing to find your soul, and then losing yourself again.
Welcome to African Australia.
Compiled by award-winning author Maxine Beneba Clarke, with curatorial assistance from writers Ahmed Yussuf and Magan Magan, this anthology brings together voices from the regions of Africa and the African diaspora, including the Caribbean and the Americas. Told with passion, power and poise, these are the stories of African-diaspora Australians.
Part of the bestselling Growing Up series, contributors include Faustina Agolley, Santilla Chingaipe, Carly Findlay, Khalid Warsame, Nyadol Nyuon, Tariro Mavondo and many, many more.”
Buy Growing Up African in Australia here.
Tracks – Robyn Davidson
Synopsis:
“’I experienced that sinking feeling you get when you know you have conned yourself into doing something difficult and there’s no going back.’ So begins Robyn Davidson’s perilous journey across 1,700 miles of hostile Australian desert to the sea with only four camels and a dog for company.
Enduring sweltering heat, fending off poisonous snakes and lecherous men, chasing her camels when they get skittish and nursing them when they are injured, Davidson emerges as an extraordinarily courageous heroine driven by a love of Australia’s landscape, an empathy for its indigenous people, and a willingness to cast away the trappings of her former identity. Tracks is the compelling, candid story of her odyssey of discovery and transformation.”
The Land Before Avocado – Richard Glover
Synopsis:
“’It was simpler time’. We had more fun back then’. ‘Everyone could afford a house’.
There’s plenty of nostalgia right now for the Australia of the past, but what was it really like?
In The Land Before Avocado, Richard Glover takes a journey to an almost unrecognisable Australia. It’s a vivid portrait of a quite peculiar land: a place that is scary and weird, dangerous and incomprehensible, and, now and then, surprisingly appealing.
It’s the Australia of his childhood. The Australia of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Let’s break the news now: they didn’t have avocado. It’s a place of funny clothing and food that was appalling, but amusingly so. It is also the land of staggeringly awful attitudes – often enshrined in law – towards anybody who didn’t fit in.
The Land Before Avocado will make you laugh and cry, feel angry and inspired. And leave you wondering how bizarre things were, not so long ago. Most of all, it will make you realise how far we’ve come – and how much further we can go.”
Buy The Land Before Avocado here.
Didgeridoos and Didgeridon’ts: A Brit’s Guide to Moving Your Life Down Under – Vicky Gray
Synopsis:
“Didgeridoos and Didgeridon’ts is a collection of short, personal experiences Vicky Gray and her family encountered during the first year of their new life down under. In addition to entertaining diary entries, inspirational stories from other expats, top tips and vital resources, the book is crammed full of well-researched information on everything you need to know to survive and thrive during your first year in Australia.”
Buy Didgeridoos and Didgeridon’ts: A Brit’s Guide to Moving Your Life Down Under here.
Growing Up In Country Australia – Edited by Rock Morton
Synopsis:
“Growing Up in Country Australia is a fresh, modern look at country Australia. There are stories of joy, adventure, nostalgia, connection to nature and freedom, but also more grim tales – of drought, fires, mouse plagues and isolation. From the politics of the country school bus to the class divides between locals, from shooting foxes with Dad to giving up meat as an adult, from working on the family farm to selling up and moving to the city, the picture painted is diverse and unexpected. This is country Australia as you’ve never seen it before.
Including nearly forty stories by established and emerging authors from a wide range of backgrounds – including First Nations and new migrants – Growing Up in Country Australia is a unique and revealing snapshot of rural life.
Contributors include Holden Sheppard, Laura Jean McKay, Annabel Crabb, Sami Shah, Lech Blaine, Tony Armstrong, Bridie Jabour, Jes Layton, Lily Chan, Jay Carmichael and many others.”
Buy Growing Up In Country Australia here.
BONUS – Novels Set In Australia That I Loved
Cloudstreet – Tim Winton
“After two separate catastrophes, two very different families leave the country for the bright lights of Perth. The Lambs are industrious, united and – until God seems to turn his back on their boy Fish – religious. The Pickleses are gamblers, boozers, fractious, and unlikely landlords. Chance, hardship and the war force them to swallow their dignity and share a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet. Over the next twenty years they struggle and strive, laugh and curse, come apart and pull together under the same roof, and try as they can to make their lives.”
The Light Between Oceans – M.L. Stedman
“1926. Tom Sherbourne is a young lighthouse keeper on a remote island off Western Australia. The only inhabitants of Janus Rock, he and his wife Isabel live a quiet life, cocooned from the rest of the world. Then one April morning a boat washes ashore carrying a dead man and a crying infant – and the path of the couple’s lives hits an unthinkable crossroads. Only years later do they discover the devastating consequences of the decision they made that day – as the baby’s real story unfolds…”
Buy The Light Between Oceans here.
Boy Swallows Universe – Trent Dalton
“Brisbane, 1983: A lost father, a mute brother, a mum in jail, a heroin dealer for a stepfather and a notorious crim for a babysitter. It’s not as if Eli’s life isn’t complicated enough already. He’s just trying to follow his heart, learning what it takes to be a good man, but life just keeps throwing obstacles in the way – not least of which is Tytus Broz, legendary Brisbane drug dealer. But Eli’s life is about to get a whole lot more serious. He’s about to fall in love. And, oh yeah, he has to break into Boggo Road Gaol on Christmas Day, to save his mum. A story of brotherhood, true love and the most unlikely of friendships.”
Buy Boy Swallows Universe here.
The Dressmaker – Rosalie Ham
“Tilly Dunnage has come home to care for her mad old mother. She left the small Victorian town of Dungatar years before, and became an accomplished couturier in Paris. Now she earns her living making exquisite frocks for the people who drove her away when she was ten. Through the long Dungatar nights, she sits at her sewing machine, planning revenge. The Dressmaker is a modern Australian classic, much loved for its bittersweet humour. Set in the 1950s, its subjects include haute couture, love and hate, and a cast of engagingly eccentric characters.”
Homecoming – Kate Morton
“Adelaide Hills, Christmas Eve, 1959: At the end of a scorching hot day, beside a creek in the grounds of a grand country house, a local man makes a terrible discovery. Police are called, and the small town of Tambilla becomes embroiled in one of the most baffling murder investigations in the history of South Australia. Many years later and thousands of miles away, Jess is a journalist in search of a story. Having lived and worked in London for nearly two decades, she now finds herself unemployed and struggling to make ends meet. A phone call summons her back to Sydney, where her beloved grandmother, Nora, who raised Jess when her mother could not, has suffered a fall and is seriously ill in hospital.
At Nora’s house, Jess discovers a true-crime book chronicling a long-buried police case: the Turner Family Tragedy of 1959. It is only when Jess skims through its pages that she finds a shocking connection between her own family and this notorious event – a murder mystery that has never been satisfactorily resolved. An epic story that spans generations, Homecoming asks what we would do for those we love, how we protect the lies we tell, and what it means to come home. Above all, it is an intricate and spellbinding novel from one of the finest writers working today.”
Jasper Jones – Craig Silvey
“Late on a hot summer night in the tail end of 1965, Charlie Bucktin, a precocious and bookish boy of thirteen, is startled by an urgent knock on the window of his sleep-out. His visitor is Jasper Jones, an outcast in the regional mining town of Corrigan. Rebellious, mixed-race and solitary, Jasper is a distant figure of danger and intrigue for Charlie. So when Jasper begs for his help, Charlie eagerly steals into the night by his side, terribly afraid but desperate to impress.
Jasper takes him through town and to his secret glade in the bush, and it’s here that Charlie bears witness to Jasper’s horrible discovery. With his secret like a brick in his belly, Charlie is pushed and pulled by a town closing in on itself in fear and suspicion as he locks horns with his tempestuous mother, falls nervously in love and battles to keep a lid on his zealous best friend, Jeffrey Lu. And in vainly attempting to restore the parts that have been shaken loose, Charlie learns to discern the truth from the myth, and why white lies creep like a curse. In the simmering summer where everything changes, Charlie learns why the truth of things is so hard to know, and even harder to hold in his heart.”
Suitcase of Dreams – Tania Blanchard
“After enduring the horror and chaos of postwar Germany, Lotte Drescher and her family arrive in Australia full of hope for a new life. It’s a land of opportunity, where Lotte and husband Erich hope to give their children the future they have always dreamed of. After years of struggling to find their feet as ‘New Australians’, Erich turns his skill as a wood carver into a successful business and Lotte makes a career out of her lifelong passion, photography. The sacrifices they have made finally seem worth it until Erich’s role in the trade union movement threatens to have him branded a communist and endanger their family. As the shadow of the Vietnam War looms, the unexpected arrival of her former fiancé Heinrich forces Lotte to a turning point. Her decision will change her life forever – and to finally understand the true meaning of home.”
No book can fully prepare you for the emotional highs, surprises, and everyday challenges of building a new life in Australia, but they can definitely make the transition feel less daunting.
I hope this list of books to read before moving to Australia offers insight, comfort, and a sense of connection before your plane even takes off.
Happy reading!
Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission at no cost to you, if you click a link and make a purchase.
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