Search results for ""Author Tom Gilling""

The marines on the First Fleet refused to sail without it. Convicts risked their necks to get hold of it. Rum built a hospital and sparked a revolution, made fortunes and ruined lives. In a society with few luxuries, liquor was power. It played a crucial role, not just in the lives of individuals like James Squire - the London chicken thief who became Australia's first brewer - but in the transformation of a starving penal outpost into a prosperous trading port.Drawing on a wealth of contemporary sources, Grog offers an intoxicating look at the first decades of European settlement and explores the origins of Australia's fraught love affair with the hard stuff.

Read more less

They were thrown into a hopeless fight against an overwhelming enemy. Later, hundreds died as prisoners of war on the Thai-Burma Railway and in the freezing coal mines of Taiwan and Japan. Through it all, wrote Weary Dunlop, they showed 'fortitude beyond anything I could have believed possible'. Until now, the story of the 2000 diggers marooned on Java in February 1942 has been a footnote to the fall of Singapore and the bloody campaign in New Guinea. Led by an Adelaide lawyer, Brigadier Arthur Blackburn VC, and fighting with scrounged weapons, two Australian battalions - plus an assortment of cooks, laundrymen and deserters from Singapore - held up the might of the Imperial Japanese Army until ordered by their Dutch allies to surrender.Drawing on personal diaries, official records and interviews with two of the last living survivors, this book tells the extraordinary story of the 'lads from Java', who laid down their weapons, but refused to give in. '[Gilling] has made superb use of an Australian Army History Research Grant to afford us a greater understanding of what the lost Australian warriors on Java experienced as a consequence of failed imperial wartime policy.' -The Australian'An engaging account . . . Gilling makes good use of diaries, memoirs and interviews with survivors.' -Good Reading

Read more less

From Tom Gilling—The New York Times Notable author of The Adventures of Miles and Isabel—comes a skillful, compulsively readable modern thriller about re-inventing one’s identity.It was just a harmless lie—to say he was driving Danny Grogan’s car when it was caught speeding down the Sydney streets on New Year’s Eve—and Danny’s father, a billionaire real estate tycoon, has promised to make it worth his while. But when former reporter Nick Carmody stands up in court to profess his guilt, it suddenly becomes clear that he doesn’t understand what he’s admitting to—until it’s too late.Nick’s “good deed” hurls him into a world of secrets, drugs, corruption, and murder. To save his life, he has no choice but to disappear and become someone else. What he doesn’t realize is that a new identity can be even more dangerous than the one left behind. As his new life in Melbourne veers out of control, Nick has to question whether chance alone is responsible, or whether more sinister forces are at work.A darkly comic page-turner, Seven Mile Beach is a haunting modern fable from a seductive novelist who never fails to thrill and surprise.

Read more less

'The way I look at it is this...When you're behind the line and get yourself into trouble, you've got to get your bloody self out irrespective of anybody else. That's why I like it.'Scottish-born but a Queenslander to the bone, Jock McLaren was a true Australian hero. As a prisoner he escaped twice, first from Changi and later from the infamous Sandakan POW camp in Borneo. After paddling a dugout canoe across open sea, he fought for two years with American-led Filipino guerrillas, his exploits so audacious the Japanese put a price on his head.At the helm of his 26-foot whaleboat, the Bastard, McLaren sailed brazenly into enemy-held harbours, wreaking havoc with his mortar and machine guns before heading back out to sea. In early 1945 he joined Australia's secretive Z Special Unit, parachuting into Borneo to carry out reconnaissance and organise anti-Japanese resistance ahead of Allied landings. He cheated death on numerous occasions and saved his own life by removing his appendix without anaesthetic, using 'two large dessert spoons' and a razor blade.Drawing on Allied and Japanese wartime documents, Bastard Behind the Lines brings the story of a courageous digger vividly to life and throws light on a rarely explored aspect of Australia's Pacific war.

Read more less

'Donald Mackay was not just an innocent victim tragically struck down by a criminal act. He was a casualty of the actual fight against organised crime ... killed on active service, as it were ... His name should never be forgotten, his passing must not be allowed to be in vain.'The assassination of Donald Mackay was meant to solve a problem for the mafia. Instead it roused the law-abiding citizens of Griffith to fight against the powerful criminal elements who had made their town synonymous with drugs and murder.Drawing on the personal diaries and memories of Terry Jones - who, as the editor of the local newspaper, knew everyone and heard everything - The Griffith Wars reveals startling new evidence about one of Australia's most notorious unsolved murders. It also powerfully recounts the struggle for the soul of a country town still battling to shake off its criminal past.

Read more less