Showing results by narrator "Peter Hosking" in All Categories

When a movie about an Australian war hero takes Alby Murdoch to Vietnam, he discovers that some old soldiers never die and that it's not just the cameras doing the shooting. A job as stills photographer and some top-notch nosh were two good reasons for Alby Murdock to be in Saigon. The third was that he had to clear out of Sydney and the spy game for a while. But when Alby snaps a photo of the wrong passing cyclo, suddenly more action is taking place off camera than on.

Why were we never told? Why didn't we know? Historian Henry Reynolds has found himself being asked these questions by many people, over many years, in all parts of Australia. The acclaimed Why Weren't We Told? is a frank account of his personal journey towards the realisation that he, like generations of Australians, grew up with a distorted and idealised version of the past.

It's September 1957, two days before the VFL grand final, and Detective Sergeant Charlie Berlin, former bomber pilot and ex-POW, finally has some time off. But there's no rest for Charlie, a decent but damaged man still troubled by his wartime experiences. A recently widowed friend asks a favour and he's dropped into something a hell of a lot bigger than he bargained for when he discovers a Melbourne funeral parlour has been burying bodies with parts missing.

In 1936, Daryl Tonkin and his brother, Harry, leave home in search of adventure. They find themselves in West Gippsland, Victoria, and set up a timber mill at Jackson's Track - a dreamtime place, a place that was paradise. A bushman dedicated to his work, Daryl discovers happiness there - and unexpectedly falls in love. But Daryl is white and Euphie is black, and neither of them is prepared for the conflict their forbidden love ignites. This spellbinding memoir recaptures a community and a way of life now vanished from sight.

An Inspector Bonaparte Mystery. An extraordinary case for Detective-Inspector Napolean Bonaparte opens when a police car is bombed from the air on a lonely outback road by a mysterious pilot who plans to conquer a nation. The trail through the Land of Burning Water tests Bonys endurance to the limit and takes the detective as close to death as he has ever been.

Myra Thomas, accused of murdering her philandering husband, is found not guilty by a sympathetic jury. But while travelling from Adelaide to Perth on the Transcontinental Railway express, she mysteriously disappears during the overnight journey across the vast, featureless desert. Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte takes the case and sets off to search for her over the flat wasteland of the Nullabor Plain.

This is the 22nd instalment in Mr. Upfield’s detective series featuring the Australian Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte. Deep in Australia's outback, a woman has been murdered, her daughter vanished. Yorky, one of the locals and a crazy wanderer, is known to have been in the area, and his footprints have been identified near the body. When he too disappears, even the Aboriginal trackers are baffled. Bony's approach changes everything....

The incomparable Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte is back - and now he must solve one of his most baffling cases. When Bony sets out to investigate two bizarre murders at Wirragatta Station, deep in the Australian Outback, all the odds are against him. The crimes were committed a year before, the scent is now cold, and any surviving clues have been confused by a bumbling policeman. As Bony gets closer to the trail, the mysterious murderer sets out to stop him. Can Bony stop the killer first?

Among the 28,000 inhabitants of Broken Hill there stalks a killer. Already two elderly bachelors have died horribly from cyanide poisoning. Now, two months later, Detective Inspector Napolean Bonaparte faces a cold trail - no motive, no clues. So Bony waits for what he believes to be inevitable - a third killing.

Tucked away in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales is Cork Valley, inhabited by hard-drinking Irishmen. Here an Excise Officer looking for illicit whiskey 'stills' has been murdered, and it's Bony's job to find the killer. Disguised as a horse thief, the Aboriginal detective hitchhikes into the valley to meet a lawless lot....

By a lonely roadside in the south-west corner of Western Australia, old-timer Karl Mueller is roused from his drink-sodden sleep by approaching footsteps and the sound of whistling. What he sees on waking (or he thinks he sees) is enough to make him stiffen with fear, and more than enought to worry the police into calling for Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte.

Full of unforgettable characters and humour, this is the original edition of On Our Selection as it was first written. These are Steele Rudd's immensely popular stories about the selection on the Darling Downs in Queensland where Dad, Mother, Dave, and the rest of the family nearly starve, and eventually prosper. Rudd meant them as a tribute to small selectors like his own family.

A cat ... a ping-pong ball ... a drunken gardener ... With these slight clues to go on Detective-Inspector Bonaparte investigates the mysterious death of famous author, Mervyn Blake, who dies an agonizing death late one night in his writing room. But how did he die? No one knows. No one that is until Bony's acute observation of human nature uncovers the murderer - and the method used to kill Blake.

This experienced author describes the personality of the first Czech president within the context of 20th-century history. He artfully combines historical occurrences with personal accounts, describing the nature of a totalitarian society and the unwavering pursuit of truth by individuals. Young listeners will acquire a lucid understanding of figures like Masaryk and Hitler, the aftermath of the Munich Betrayal, and the milieu in which Václav Havel came of age.

This is the story of Kiril Lakota, a cardinal who reluctantly steps out from behind the Iron Curtain to lead the Catholic Church and to grapple with the many issues facing the contemporary world. The pope is dead, and the corridors of the Vatican hum with intrigue as cardinals gather to elect his successor. The result is a surprise: the new pope is the youngest of them all - a bearded Ukrainian. The Shoes of the Fisherman is the moving story of Kiril I, recently released from 17 years in Siberian labour camps and haunted by his past.

The aborigines, who knew how many eagles flew over their inland desert, must have known who put the dead white man into Lucifer's Couch. But no one in Hall's Creek, white or black, reported seeing the stranger - and there were no tracks around the meteor crater. Was the murder done by whites or blacks or by both in collusion? Bony listened to the ancient tribal legends and found truth nobody wanted to believe.

A thrilling mystery and one of the incomparable Inspector Bonaparte's toughest cases. Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte travels to Victoria, where two young women have disappeared while hiking in the Grampians. Not long after the search for the girls is called off, a local detective is found shot dead. Bony visits the hotel the women were last seen at, and meets the hotel's unsavoury proprietor. The resulting encounter propels Bony into an investigation which almost costs him his life.

Cliff Hardy is stunned to get a phone call from his ex-wife Cynthia. It has been over 20 years since she last shouted she never wanted to see him again and she was never a woman to change her mind. But that surprise is nothing to the bombshell Cynthia is about to drop. Dying of cancer, she's desperate to get in contact with the daughter she gave up for adoption - and the daughter in question, she confesses, is also Cliff's! A shocked but sceptical Cliff agrees to search for their missing daughter. But this is never going to be a straightforward investigation....

Homicide detective Harry Belltree wouldn’t usually be looking too hard at an elderly couple’s suicide pact. Especially now, when his brother-in-law, Greg, has just been stabbed to death. But it seems Greg and the old couple had ties to the same man, a bent moneylender with friends in high places - and low. Harry can’t get officially involved in Greg’s murder, but he suspects a link with two other mysterious deaths: his parents'.

Mr. Jelly's Business is one of the finest of Arthur Upfield's many distinguished stories about the career of Detective Inspector Napoleon ("Bony") Bonaparte. It takes Bony to the West Australian town of Burracoppin to investigate the disappearance of George Loftus, whose car was found wrecked near the longest fence in the world, the 1,500 mile Rabbit Fence. He meets Loftus's wife, who is anything but grief-stricken at her husband's disappearance; Loftus's hired man, singularly reticent about his own past history; and many of Burracoppin's numerous gossips.