In a Sunburned Country (also published as Down Under) by Bill Bryson is the obvious starting point. Bryson travels the length of Australia with genuine curiosity and dry wit, and manages to make even the parliamentary debates of nineteenth-century Victoria entertaining. It starts with the true and baffling story of how Australia once lost a prime minister at sea. Funny, informative, and hard to put down before a trip.
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton is Australia's great domestic novel — two working-class Perth families sharing a house across twenty years, from the 1940s to the 1960s. Sprawling, warm, and unsentimental. Winton is the country's most important living novelist, and this is his masterpiece.
Tracks by Robyn Davidson is the account of Davidson's solo walk (with four camels and a dog) from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean in 1977. Still one of the great Australian adventure narratives, and a portrait of the Western desert landscape that sticks with you.
The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes is the definitive history of the convict settlement of Australia. It's a brutal, meticulous, and magnificently written account of transportation and colonisation. Essential background for understanding how the country was made.
My Place by Sally Morgan is a seminal work of Indigenous Australian writing — a woman's account of discovering, against the silence of her family, that she has Aboriginal heritage. First published in 1987, it remains important and readable.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan won the Booker Prize in 2014. Set partly in Tasmania and partly on the Burma-Thailand railway, it follows an Australian surgeon through wartime captivity. Harrowing and beautifully written.
Carpentaria by Alexis Wright is a challenging but rewarding novel set in a fictional Gulf of Carpentaria town, told through an Aboriginal perspective. It won the Miles Franklin Award and represents a different Australia from the coastal cities most visitors see.