Showing results by narrator "David Tredinnick" in All Categories

Lee Kernaghan has created his place in the history books of Australian Music and continues to grow his audience with every new album. Two thousand sixteen will see the release of yet another new album, and 2017 will be a special year that will feature the 25th Anniversary Tour of Australia's Boy From the Bush. For the first time, Lee steps off the stage and invites you behind the scenes, into the ute and over the rutted red dirt on a rollocking journey through his songs and the stories that inspired them.

The son of a struggling country butcher, Stan Savige left school at 12 to become a blacksmith’s striker. But in 1915, a passage in the Bible inspired the devout scout leader and Sunday school teacher to enlist. Soon, his abilities as a crack marksman attracted the attention of officers and he was put in charge of the sniper’s post, his job to eliminate enemy assassins at Anzac Cove. Savige succeeded and survived Gallipoli, only to be sent to the Western Front, then to Persia as part of the elite squad Dunsterforce.

With a Victoria Cross and Medal for Gallantry, Ben Roberts-Smith was the most highly decorated Australian soldier, the best of the best. When he returned to civilian life, he became a poster boy for a nation hungry for warrior heroes. He embodied the myth of the classic Anzac, seven-foot-tall and bulletproof. But as his public reputation continued to grow, inside the army rumours were circulating.

Australia has always been a land of mysteries. Some are ancient, some are historical and many continue to perplex us today—and will probably continue to do so tomorrow. More often than most of us would like to think, things simply vanish and people disappear without explanation, leaving a trail of heartbreak across generations. Australia also has its fair share of buried loot and fabulous riches gone missing—somewhere. Master storyteller Graham Seal has gathered mysteries from around Australia.

On 4th July 1975, Juanita Nielsen set out on foot through the wintry streets of Sydney's red-light district. The chic heiress and newspaper publisher had a business meeting with a man called Eddie Trigg, a manager at the seedy Carousel Cabaret nightclub in Kings Cross. The following day, Juanita was reported missing. She has not been seen since and her body has never been found.

Watsonia gathers the fruits of a writing life. It covers everything from Australian humour to America gone berserk; from Don Bradman to Oscar Wilde; from birds and horses to history and politics. Wherever Don Watson turns his incisive gaze, the results are as illuminating as they are enjoyable. Watsonia displays the many sides of Don Watson: historian, speechwriter, social critic, humourist, biographer and lover of nature and sports.

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.

Elizabeth posts a ‘room for rent’ notice in Trevor’s bookshop and is caught off-guard when Trevor answers the advertisement himself. She expected a young student, not a middle-aged bookseller whose marriage has fallen apart. But Trevor is attracted to Elizabeth’s house because of the empty shed in her backyard, the perfect space for him to revive the artistic career he abandoned years earlier. The face-blind, EH Holden-driving Elizabeth is a solitary and feisty book editor, and she accepts him, on probation.

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.

In March 1945 Reg Cleworth, a navigator on PBY Catalina seaplanes flying out of Darwin, went missing in action. No details were ever given about the incident that took his life, nor the reason his plane went down. For Reg’s younger brother, Robert, the news came as a prophecy fulfilled. The last time they saw each other, Reg confided in Robert, ‘I don’t think I’m coming back’.

On an unnamed island, in a Gothic hospital sitting in the shadow of a volcano, a wordless orphan girl works on the wards housing the insane and the incapable. When a silent, unmoving and unnerving new patient - a foreigner - arrives at the hospital, strange phenomena occur, bizarre murders take place and the lives of the patients and the island's inhabitants are thrown into turmoil. What happens between them is an extraordinary exploration of consciousness, reality and madness.

At first it looked like a swag, said the grader driver who found the body just off the road outside the outback town of Katherine. Police identify the dead man as Ray Nicefero, who'd recently appeared in court for aggravated assault and breaching a domestic violence order. Three days later, the constabulary rounds up three young local suspects: Christopher Malyschko, 24, Darren 'Spider' Halfpenny, 22, and 19-year-old Zak Grieve, who happens to be Indigenous.

How a famous cold case, a murderous fire and a quest for justice finally brought down one of Australia's worst killers. In 2017, Vincent O’Dempsey was sentenced to life in prison for the brutal murders of Barbara McCulkin and her two young daughters. It took over 40 years to bring him to justice. Feared for decades by criminals and police alike, O’Dempsey associated with convicted underworld figures and has been linked to a string of haunting cold cases, including the deadly Whiskey au Go Go nightclub firebombing that killed 15 innocent people.

In McGahan's prequel to his best-selling debut, Praise, Gordon, failed writer and bottleshop boy, feels his life is going nowhere and heads north with Wayne in search of their rightful place in the culture of a nation. It's the Bicentennial year, and for Gordon it seems his life is going nowhere. It's time to escape. From his overcrowded house, from Brisbane, from Expo 88, from everything.

Cavalier has heard that his daughter - kidnapped by a notorious Mexican drug warlord - is still alive but is a sex slave for the Mexican drug gang operating in the Golden Triangle. Through his contacts, he manages to uncover the fact that the Mexicans plan to secretly leave Thailand in the next few days on the Bangkok Express, along with their accumulated fortunes from drugs and sex slave trafficking. Their imminent departure is prompted by intel from their insider contacts that the Americans, led by the CIA and involving Navy Seals, may be closing in on them.

Lance Dillon is owner of a new cattle station on the southern fringe of Australia's Arnhem Land. When an aboriginal hunting party targets Dillon's prize bull for a ritual killing and then spears Dillon in the shoulder, it's clear they want him off their traditional land. Under the merciless rays of the burning sun, the wounded Dillon flees into the bush, with expert tracker Mundaru in hot pursuit. Dillon's city-born wife, Mary, and handsome local policeman Neil Adams set out to search for her husband.

The story of the emergence and dominance of two brilliant Australian soldiers who commanded the most effective armies in defeating the Germans and the Turks in the Great War. Monash and Chauvel is a gripping narrative history that follows the extraordinary campaigns of the two most outstanding battlefield commanders of the First World War across all the Allied armies: John Monash and Harry Chauvel.

Sixteen stories of amazing outback doctors and their heroic deeds, from the best-selling author of Nurses of the Outback. Imagine yourself critically injured or seriously ill in the middle of nowhere. You'd be hoping like hell there was a doctor nearby to take charge - someone resourceful, who'd think quickly and stay calm under pressure; someone who could, if necessary, take charge from a distance. You'd want to be in the safe and sure hands of one of these amazing bush doctors.

The gripping finale to Three Crooked Kings and Jacks and Jokers brings to a close Matthew Condon's best-selling true-crime trilogy. In 1983, the soon-to-be-knighted Police Commissioner Terry Lewis continues to turn a blind eye to the operation of The Joke, a highly organised system of graft payments from illegal gambling, prostitution and illicit drugs. As the tentacles of this fraudulent vice network spread, the fabric holding together the police, judiciary and political system starts to unravel.

Three Crooked Kings is the shocking true story of Queensland and how a society was shaped by almost half a century of corruption. At its core is Terence Murray Lewis, deposed and jailed former police commissioner. From his entry into the force in 1949, Lewis rose through the ranks, becoming part of the so-called Rat Pack with detectives Glendon Patrick Hallahan and Tony Murphy under the guiding influence of Commissioner Frank Bischof.