Showing results by narrator "David Tredinnick" in All Categories

Producer Jack Quick knows how to frame a story. So says Curtis Wade, the subject of Jack's new true crime docuseries, convicted of a young woman's murder four years prior. In the eyes of Jack's viewers, flimsy evidence and police bias influenced the final verdict...even though, off screen, Jack himself has his doubts. But when the series finale is wildly successful, a retrial sees Curtis walk free. And then another victim turns up dead.

In 1978, Warren Fellows was convicted of heroin trafficking between Thailand and Australia. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in the notorious Bang Kwang prison - better known as the Bangkok Hilton. It was the beginning of 12 years of hell in a place where sewer rats and cockroaches are the only nutritious food, where prison guards laugh as they deliver pulverising blows, and where the worst punishment is the khun deo - solitary confinement, Thai style.

It was the afternoon of 18 August 1966, hot, humid with grey monsoonal skies. D Company, 6RAR were four kilometres east of their Nui Dat base, on patrol in a rubber plantation not far from the abandoned village of Long Tan. A day after their base had suffered a mortar strike, they were looking for Viet Cong soldiers. Then—just when they were least expecting—they found them. Under withering fire, some Diggers perished, some were grievously wounded, the rest fought on, as they remained under sustained attack. For hours these men fought for their lives against the enemy onslaught.

From the age of 12, Scott Ryder knew he wanted to join the army, and he signed up as soon as he could. After serving as a paratrooper and in East Timor with 3 RAR, he wanted more. He trained all summer and took the grueling selection course for the commandos, earning the prized green beret on his second attempt. Forged in Fire takes us inside the secretive world of the commandos. Ryder shares battlefield stories from his tours to Afghanistan, where his regiment saw some of the heaviest fighting Australian forces have experienced since the Vietnam War.

Somewhere deep beneath the wild seas of the southern Indian Ocean, perhaps in the eerie underwater canyons of Broken Ridge along the Seventh Arc satellite band, lies the answer to the world's greatest aviation mystery. Why, on the night of 8 March 2014, did Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 suddenly U-turn, zig-zag up the Straits of Malacca, then vanish with 239 souls on board? Was it an elaborate murder-suicide by a rogue pilot? A terrible accident such as onboard fire, rapid decompression or systems failure? A terrorist hijacking gone wrong? Or something else entirely?

Edward Dickens, the 10th child of England’s most famous author Charles Dickens, has consistently let his parents down. Unable to apply himself at school and adrift in life, the teenaged boy is sent to Australia in the hopes that he can make something of himself - or at least fail out of the public eye. He soon finds himself in the remote Outback. Determined to prove to his parents and more importantly, himself, that he can succeed in this vast and unfamiliar wilderness, Edward works hard at his new life amidst various livestock, bushrangers, shifty stock agents, and frontier battles.

When the Japanese invade in 1942, the Australian men and women stationed at the New Guinea port of Rabaul flee into the jungle. Written off by their government as ‘hostages to fortune', the little-known garrison on Australia's tropic frontier has been left with no modern equipment, no lifeline to the outside, and no means of escape. Most are captured and killed in the sinking of the prison ship Montevideo Maru, which remains Australia's worst sea disaster. But the surviving soldiers and nurses carry on.

Neale Daniher sat down to pen a letter to the grandchildren he'll never get to know. And then he kept on writing. In 2013, the AFL legend was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease - a cruel and incurable condition. He had a choice. He could spend his remaining time focused on himself, or he could seize the opportunity to make a better future for others. Neale is no stranger to challenge. When All is Said & Done is a book of stories and wisdom from a man who has always held his beliefs to the Bunsen burner of life.

Michael Clarke is an international cricket legend and one of the most talked about Australians of the 21st century. He was the greatest batsman of his generation and, as captain, possessed the sharpest tactical mind in the game. Bursting onto the scene in 2004 with a Test century on debut, Michael Clarke was Australian cricket's golden boy. And the batting prodigy they nicknamed Pup certainly fulfilled his destiny in a stellar 11-year international career of 115 Tests, 8,643 runs and 28 centuries.

This is a story about living your truth, embracing who you are and living the life you were meant to live. Whether you're gay or straight, a Christian or a non believer, you'll find relevance in Anthony's tale.

Bob Irwin's extraordinary life as a wildlife pioneer, father to wildlife warrior Steve and founder of Australia Zoo, told in his own words. Bob Irwin grew up in the Dandenong Ranges, where his passion for wildlife was born. A near-death experience while working as a plumber made Bob realise he needed to follow his dreams, so he and his wife, Lyn, moved their young family to Queensland, where they opened a wildlife park on the Sunshine Coast. The Irwin children grew up in around the Beerwah Reptile and Wildlife Park....

Welcome to Volume 9 of Seniors' Stories displaying the thoughts, emotions, lifestyles, pleasures, disappointments, elation, sadness, and every emotion we have been willing to share of the exciting age group known in Australia as our Seniors.

It's 1967, the summer of love, and in swinging Melbourne Detective Sergeant Charlie Berlin has been hauled out of exile in the Fraud Squad to investigate the disappearance of a teenage girl, the daughter of a powerful and politically connected property developer. As Berlin's inquiries uncover more missing girls he gets an uneasy feeling he may be dealing with the city's first serial killer. Berlin's investigation leads him through inner-city discothèques, hip photographic studios, the emerging drug culture, and into the seedy back streets of St Kilda.

When Brendan Watkins was eight years old, his parents told him he was adopted. In his late twenties, he discovered the identity of his birth mother - a woman who had been a Catholic nun when he was born - but she wanted nothing to do with him. For thirty years he only managed limited communication with her, and had no clues to the identity of his birth father. In 2018, a DNA test led him to the truth: he was the son of a celebrated missionary priest.

Meet Osamah Sami: a schemer, a dreamer and a madcap antihero of spectacular proportions whose terrible life choices keep leading to cataclysmic consequences...despite his best laid plans to be a good Muslim boy. By the age of 13, Osamah had survived the Iran-Iraq war, peddled fireworks and chewing gum on the Iranian black market, proposed 'temporary marriage' not once but three times, and received countless floggings from the Piety Police....

After the departure of the woman he loves, Frank drives out to a shack by the ocean that he had last visited as a teenager. There, among the sugarcane and sand dunes, he struggles to rebuild his life. Forty years earlier, Leon is growing up in Sydney, turning out treacle tarts at his parents’ bakery and flirting with one of the local girls. But when he’s drafted to serve in Vietnam, he finds himself confronting the same experiences that haunt his war-veteran father. As these two stories weave around each other, we learn what binds Frank and Leon and what may keep them apart.

Catholic priests don't generally have children, but Australian legend Father Chris Riley has brought up about 60,000 – and they're some of the toughest kids around. He regularly encounters some of the most troubled children on Earth – kids who have given up or refuse to talk to others, who steal, take drugs, see themselves as irredeemable failures, hate everyone and everything, self-harm, have been abused or abuse other kids, and prostitute themselves.

Bill was massive. He had power, intelligence, and unmatched courage. In performance and character he stood above all the other 200,000 Australian horses sent to the Middle East in the Great War. But as war horses go he had one serious problem. No one could ride him but one man - Major Michael Shanahan. Some even thought Bill took a sneering pleasure in watching would-be riders hit the dust. Bill the Bastard is the remarkable tale of a bond between a determined trooper and his stoic but cantankerous mount. They fought together.

Brett Dalton is a tough guy - hardened, angry, uncaring and always ready to use his fists. When the world hates you, you might as well hate it back. But when Brett is busted by the cops for stealing and sent to The Farm for rehab, there are no fences to keep him in and anger gets in his way - but so does love. Brett's trapped in a grave world, a world where he's not hardened at all; he's raw.

Steve Austin isn't your average dog trainer. In this feel-good, yarn-laden memoir he shares amazing stories from a career of rescuing and training shelter dogs to become a crack force of K9s, culminating in his work for the Young Diggers program, which pairs specially trained dogs with returned Diggers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and more, with astonishing results.