You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
It is August 1945 and World War 2 is over. Japan has surrendered. As the Western world rejoices, deep in the jungles of British North Borneo the small number of remaining Australian and British prisoners of war are massacred. Of the 2434 prisoners incarcerated by the Japanese at the Sandakan POW camp, only six, all escapees have survived. The POW's sent from Singapore in 1942-43 to work on airfield construction, enduredfrequent beatings, and were subjected to other, more diabolical punishment. Sustained only by an inadequate and ever diminishing rice ration and with little medical attention, many died of malnutrition, maltreatment and disease. In 1945, in response to order from the Japanese ...
In February 1942, when Australian Bill Reynolds escaped from beleagured Singapore in a battered Japanese fishing boat, he had no idea that his nondescript vessel would be the catalyst for Operation Jaywick, one of the most daring missions undertaken behind enemy lines in World War II. Using Reynold's boat, now renamed Krait, a small band of intrepid men attacked enemy shipping in Singapore Harbour - an action that would have far reaching and tragic repercussions on the people of Singapore. The following year, members of the same team embarked upon a second and far more ambitious raid, Operation Rimau. Although this mission was partially successful, every member of the party was killed. In te...
On September 11, 1944, the British submarine "Porpoise" slipped quietly from Fremantle Harbour, bound for Indonesia. It was carrying the 23 Australian and British members of Operation Rimau who, under the leadership of the remarkable Lieutenant-Colonel Ivan Lyon of the Gordon Highlanders, intended to repeat the successful Jaywick raid of 1943 by blowing up 60 ships in Japanese-occupied Singapore Harbour, 19 days later, the preliminary part of the operation successfully completed, the submarine commander bade farewell to the raiders at Pedjantan Island, promising to return to pick them up in 38 days' time. A handful of Chinese and Malays and the conquering Japanese were the only people ever t...
There is no greater gift than friendship. For the first time in fifty years, Lynette Howe’s financial struggles are behind her. Her wildly prosperous online boutique is now someone else’s headache. It wasn’t hard to bid farewell to the fast-paced lifestyle of New York City, but designing her new life in the quiet town she left decades ago isn’t working. Men used to find her intriguing—mysterious, even—when her role as a stylish CEO demanded most of her time. Women’s desire to emulate her only helped fuel her success. But now? Now she spends her days poking around the small town of Ruby Shores, talking to a cat. She isn’t the only one struggling. Her mother, Donna, remains by ...
After the fall of Singapore in 1942, the conquering Japanese Army transferred some 2500 British and Australian prisoners to a jungle camp at Sandakan, on the east coast of North Borneo. There they were beaten, broken, worked to death, thrown into bamboo cages on the slightest pretext and subjected to tortures so ingenious and hideous that the victims were driven to the brink of madness. But it was only to be the beginning of the nightmare. In late 1944 when Allied aircraft began bombing the coastal towns of Sandakan and Jesselton, the Japanese resolved to abandon the prison camp and move the prisoners 250 miles inland to Ranau. The journey there became known as the Sandakan Death marches. Of the thousand plus prisoners who set out on the epic marches, only six survived. This is both their story and the story of the fallen.
Five unforgettable journeys. One incredible price. Celebrate the power of lifelong friendship in this heartwarming complete series. From the sunny shores of Minnesota to tropical beaches and back again, The Kaleidoscope Girls series is a heartwarming midlife women’s fiction journey about five childhood friends as they face life’s biggest challenges with laughter, resilience, and unbreakable bonds. They met at summer camp as young girls and promised to stay connected forever. Now, decades later, Jackie, Kit, Annie, Lynette, and Renee are leaning on each other like never before. Empty nests. Career upheaval. Family rifts. Shocking secrets. Together these women will navigate it all. If you ...
''In the Mouth of the Tiger'' is an epic story of adventure, love, mystery and intrigue set in Malaya, in the colourful and turbulent years before and after World War 2. Nona Orlov, a young Russian refugee abandoned in colonial Penang, falls in love with an Englishman who offers escape from her tawdry hand-to-mouth existence and catapults her into a world of mansions, expensive cars, well-bred horses and luxurious yachts. But Denis Elesmere-Elliott is much more than the urbane, wealthy man-about-town that he appears, and Nona is plunged into a dark world of treachery, violence and sudden death. As the mysteries multiply, Nona realises that, if she is to survive, her courage must match those ...
It has taken the Probert brothers all their lifetime to find their father, and to discover just how rare an Australian he was. Theirs is a powerful, poignant and very Australian story.'
War is traditionally considered a male experience. By extension, the genre of war literature is a male-dominated field, and the tale of the battlefield remains the privileged (and only canonised) war story. In Australia, although women have written extensively about their wartime experiences, their voices have been distinctively silenced. Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend calls for a re-definition of war literature to include the numerous voices of women writers, and further recommends a re-reading of Australian national literatures, with women’s war writing foregrounded, to break the hold of a male-dominated literary tradition and pass on a vital, but unexplored, women’s tradition. Sh...
This book examines the relationship between memory, history and the competing narratives of identity, place, and gender in Australian society. Focusing particularly on popular culture, wars, and such specific events as the Bubonic Plague of 1900 and the measles epidemic of the 1950s, these essays open up Australia's past in radically different ways and demonstrate the centrality of memory to the writing of history.