ABC Radio National’s predictable, uninspired listeners’ poll of Australia’s top 100 books reveals that we are, at least for these readers, a nation that does not take itself seriously.

That can be a virtue. Serious countries are prone to revolution: China, Russia, England, America, France. They also produce more thoughtful readers and better books.

Consider the ABC list: Banjo Paterson aside, there is no poetry, no physics, no theology, no serious history, no philosophy.

Patrick White – the country’s only Nobel laureate in literature – does not make an appearance until No. 67. Judith Wright, who should have been awarded the Nobel, and Gerald Murnane, who The New York Times thinks still might be, don’t appear at all.

There are some great works on the list, but mostly it features sentimental, nostalgic, workaday fiction; suburban melodrama; outback noir; or hard-won triumphant memoir.

Each to their own. As a distraction, most of these books are probably fine.

The problem is that these titles don’t deeply probe Australia’s soul or psyche, our very being. Reading The Secret River and Dark Emu does not cut it.

So, here are three books that will never appear on an ABC popularity list. Astonishing, mind-bending books.

Tony Swain, Paul Carter and David Mowaljarlai are not Geraldine Brooks, David Malouf or Tim Winton, but they are as important. In my opinion, more so.

Read their books and you will discover a country you do not recognise. These writers reveal an Australia stranger, more mystical, more poetic and more beautiful than we know.

Swain, Carter and Mowaljarlai make us think again.

Forget the popular myths about ancient Australia. Forget the “Dreamtime” or “Dreaming”, a timeless “everywhen”. These labels were cooked up by European anthropologists.

Modern Australian history, too, is more than fleets, convicts, bushrangers and frontier wars. That’s what happened, but there is another, mysterious story of old, worn tracks that open us to a land that does not need us, where we give name to a nation and each other.

To these writers, calling ourselves “Australian” has little or nothing to do with ancestry, culture or time.

Australia is a place for strangers.

That is the title of Swain’s book – A Place for Strangers: Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being. This book taught me about myself.

I have Indigenous ancestry on both sides of my family. I was raised among Aboriginal people with an understanding of our “culture”. Tony Swain knows more about me than I do.

Whatever culture is, it is not “pure”; it is not “uninterrupted”; it is not “continuous”. It is, more accurately and more fascinatingly, continuing.

Swain lifts Aboriginal people out of “prehistory” and puts us in dialogue with Plato, T. S. Eliot and Martin Heidegger. He explores Aboriginal cosmology and upends timeworn ethnographic assumptions about the First Peoples of this land.

Swain says, as much as we can discern, Aboriginal lore prioritised space over time. There is no history.

He writes: “The Aboriginal interpretation of chakra to their life-world has been cast in terms of space rather than history.”

Swain invites us to consider a Dreamplace rather than Dreamtime. Time, he writes, is rhythmic rather than timeless or circular.

Swain would rather dispense with time entirely. There is no counting. There is no linearity. There is no creation, as such, but a re-creation.

Aboriginal existence, he says, is measured by events, not time.

Simply, he says, “events occur”.

This is problematic for a Western ontology constructed around time. Europeans would always misinterpret Aboriginal people.

Swain rejects 19th and 20th century anthropologists who interpreted Aboriginal culture as an uninterrupted lava flow from an ancient then to a contemporary now. He argues Aboriginal cultures were influenced by and adapted to contact from Melanesia and South-East Asia.

When Europeans came to stay, change accelerated.

Swain reveals how song and ceremony reflect new expressions of the divine or creation.

Of course, Swain is provocative. He is challenging. Some anthropologists push back. That’s as it should be. Ideas are contested.

Swain woke me from a slumber. I have reconsidered my assumptions about culture. Those of us who identify as Aboriginal are prone to our own myth-making.

Swain does what writers should do: he makes me uncomfortable. In an age when we fetishise and revive “tradition”, he asks what “tradition” is. He asks what it is we are returning to.

Paul Carter does for history what Swain does for ethnography. In his book, The Road to Botany Bay, Carter writes history as unfolding in space not time. This is not about what happened but where it happened, and how we wrote about it.

Carter is interested in how we name things. We give name to space. We name ourselves and we name the “other”. In 1788, he writes, Arthur Phillip “steps out of Myth, into history”.

Phillip brings ledgers, numbers and maps. Yet there is a trace still in the footsteps before Phillip’s, a presence of what exists in the land. There are tracks that newcomers will walk as others before them have walked. There is always a road to Botany Bay.

Carter is not interested in historical revision. He allows us to see this land and ourselves anew. Like Swain, he questions the grounds of our beliefs.

We must, he says, “make cloudy again the line between language and space”.

Like Swain, he is in my top 100. I wish more people had read his work and read it deeply.

Finally, there is David Mowaljarlai, Australia’s great poet and mystic. A Ngarinyin man from Western Australia, his people called him the Keeper of Creation. In Yorro Yorro: Original creation and the renewal of nature, Mowaljarlai takes his friend, the photographer Jutta Malnic, on a pilgrimage to his country.

Mowaljarlai walks in a place of despair, where time is a prisoner. Once he had past and future, Mowaljarlai says; now he is only the present and it is hard to bear.

Mowaljarlai takes Malnic into his dreams. He walks in the stars and he talks to Christ. He sees angels.

“The glory shone,” Mowaljarlai writes. “God showed it to me, the whole power.”

Mowaljarlai says he must speak not only for his people but for all people.

This magic man opens us to an Australia beyond our history or our race. Like Carter and Swain, Mowaljarlai dispenses with time.

These books don’t ask me who I am but where I am. They inspire me to seek a new a way of being in a world too consumed by the things that divide us.

Each of these books returns me to the cosmos, beyond the mere facts of existence and into a metaphysical realm.

These books don’t point to Australia past but to Australia future. They write poetry, not politics. They write place, not identity.

Mowaljarlai laments what he calls “sad identity man”. He writes that the old people knew “everything is written in the country”. Those people are gone, however, lost to time and trapped in history.

There is a spooky hinterland of Australian letters where the writers are too weird for our readers. Swain, Carter and Mowaljarlai disturbed me and set me free. Their work should feature in any serious list of the top 100 Australian books.

The ABC’s list tells us what Australians like; it does not tell us who we might be.