The ABR FAN (Favourite Australian Novel) Poll

Mark Gomes

Good books demand rereading, and the best speak differently through time. Like memory, literature works selectively as ‘an imaginative expression of a culture’ – as Jack Hibberd put it in The Weekend Australian, 10–11 October 2009 – and books can fall in and out of favour spectacularly with readers. New work revives the concerns of old or purposefully sidesteps it; changing mores favour or disdain novels’ allegorical lessons; the perfectly pitched becomes mannered; and the peripheral becomes essential reading.

While surveys of Australia’s favourite book in general, and favourite Australian book in particular, have been conducted this decade, no readers’ poll of the nation’s favourite Australian novel has. In 2003 the Australian Society of Authors determined their members’ forty favourite Australian books, but included in between novels at number one (Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet) and number forty (Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory) were poetry collections (Kenneth Slessor, Judith Wright), non-fiction (David Marr’s Patrick White: A Life) and children’s books (May Gibbs’s Snugglepot and Cuddlepie).

Earlier searches for Australia’s favourite books undertaken by Dymocks and the ABC, in 2004 and 2003 respectively, featured only a handful of Australian novels between them. Of Dymocks readers’ ‘Best 101 Books Ever Written’, only Matthew Reilly’s Ice Station, Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi, Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career, Bryce Courteney’s The Power of One and April Fool’s Day, and Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, Dirt Music and The Riders made the grade. The ABC’s public search for our favourite 100 books turned up only Li Cunxin’s Mao’s Last Dancer. Both polls were topped by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Obviously, these surveys do not speak for the readership of Australian Book Review, bear no meaningful results in regards to our most enduring novelists, are too heavily influenced by extra-literary factors (i.e. film adaptation) and are out of date. As such, this spring Australian Book Review invites voting in the first ABR FAN (Favourite Australian Novel) Poll. Cast a vote for your single favourite Australian novel of all time to help us define the country’s most beloved novel ever published.

Three lucky voters will receive one of the following prizes: the complete set of 99 Popular Penguins (valued at nearly $1000); The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Deluxe Leather Bound Edition (valued at $410); a three-year complimentary subscription to ABR (30 issues valued at $290). To cast your vote email

poll@australianbookreview.com.au with the author and title of your favourite Australian novel and your contact details, or mail or fax the entry form to ABR.