As a result of testimony to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse hearings in relation to the Ballarat area a heap of questions were unavoidable. As a person who grew up there at exactly the time that some of the worst offenders were at the heights of their...Read more
I can't pretend, even for a moment, that I'm able to dispassionately review a book like WALKING TOWARDS THUNDER. This is a very personal story about Peter Fox's ethical and moral stance against an institution lacking in both of those traits. Actively avoiding those traits, if the...Read more
Dulcie Markham might have been known as "deadly to know" according to newspaper accounts from the time, but all these years later, it's more striking how little is really known about a woman who was notorious at the time. Coming from the same era as Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine, Markham was...Read more
A while ago another much admired true crime writer mentioned the name Frederick Deeming to me, and kindly sent me a short synopsis about the man's background, and the theory that he could be the notorious Jack the Ripper. Prior to that time I confess to never having heard of him, or the...Read more
When Paddy Moriarty and his dog Kellie disappeared into thin air, an investigation was launched, a search undertaken, but this is sinkhole territory, and it's Larrimah and it seems nothing is ever straight-forward in these parts.
Oddly enough, you'd think in a town of 11 people...Read more
Following on from Terry Smythe's Denny Day Mark Tedeschi QC picks up the story of the aftermath of the Myall Creek Massacre, concentrating on events and the participants around the trial of the perpetrators of the massacre of 28 Aboriginal men, women and children in 1838 in northern New...Read more
Mark Tedeschi AM QC was, until 2019, the Senior Crown Prosecutor, and the head of Chambers of the Crown Prosecutors for New South Wales. He's now a private barrister, but in 35 years with Crown Prosecution he has prosecuted many high-profile trials in Australia, some of which have involved...Read more
Grazier Mathew Dunbar led a quiet life, working on his farm, helping out with the local poultry club, meeting up with the few very close friends he had. An adopted child, he'd had a tricky relationship with his parents, his father dying not improving things between Dunbar and his mother,...Read more
They just vanished … Disappeared. Gone. Lost. No answers. Still missing.
Imagine the pain, confusion and emotional roller-coaster that families experience when a loved one goes missing. What would you do? How would your family cope?
This is a heart- wrenching...Read more
In 2005 Nicole Morris founded the Australian Missing Persons register, an internet resource to help find missing people in Australia.
http://www.australianmissingpersonsregister.com/ (your browser may come up with a...Read more
Malcolm Brown is a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald, where he covered (amongst other things) courts, royal commissions and coroners' inquests for more than 30 years. As well as editing COLD BLOODED MURDER, he has contributed a number of chapters, with remaining sections coming...Read more
Fans of crime fiction, raised on a diet of lone wolf PI's, limping the dark and rainy backstreets in pursuit of justice for the downtrodden, or retribution for wrongs that nobody else cares about, might find the tales in PROBLEM SOLVED a bit of a surprise. Most of the cases that PI Andrew...Read more
Author Anne Lovell found out by accident that her aunt, Connie Sommerlad, had been murdered by John Trevor Kelly in 1939. John Kelly goes down in Australian history with the dubious honour of being the last man to be hung in NSW. Connie’s name had never been mentioned by any of the older...Read more
The collection of cases covered by Emily Webb's SUBURBAN TRUE CRIME go back to the 1940's, through to more recent times, covering a wide range of different murders and disappearances that have occurred in Australian suburban locations.
In the author acknowledgement at the front...Read more
In 2001, when a series of newspaper reports revealed that four women had accused Geoff Clark of rape I distinctly remember trying to follow the complicated legal and reporting machinations that were going on. I also distinctly remember feeling like I'd failed in that endeavour badly, but...Read more
It's worth taking a close look at the blurb of THE OUTBACK COURT REPORTER, and keeping the second paragraph in mind when you start to read:
Outback Court Reporter is a sometimes funny, sometimes tragic look at the comings and goings on inside the country
...Read more
In an interview from the Sydney Morning Herald with author Paul Daley, he describes the character of Daniel Slattery from CHALLENGE as :
“a “cross between Mark Latham and Holden Caulfield”. “He's a misogynist, idealist, class warrior and economic rationalist,
...Read more
Listened to the audio of this one, read by Casey Withoos, it's a rehash of a number of Australian cold cases, many of which will be instantly recognisable to local listeners / readers. Where this outing varies a little is in the way the author, Mallett, discusses the cases from a forensic anthropologist / criminologist viewpoint, which did provide some interesting insights.Read more
A COMPULSION TO KILL is one of those true crime books that reads like a ripping great yarn. It's an engaging method of delivering history, telling the stories of (in this instance) a range of Tasmania's earliest serial killers, setting them in a vivid example of the landscape in which their...Read more
I've gotten behind with my true crime reading, so what better way to kick an interest back into gear than a meander around "the cop stations, courthouses, back alleys and gangster mansions of Melbourne" through the skewering eye of journalist John Silvester - a man with a fine turn of...Read more
Anybody who knows me will probably be aware my family are from the Ballarat region, and I grew up outside the town during part of the worst of the excesses of the Catholic Church priests and bishops. We heard gossip, whether you were involved in the Catholic community or not. Very...Read more
Catching up with true crime reading meant I also had to pick up LIFE & CRIMES by Andrew Rule. A different tone from his sometime writing partner, John Silvester, Rule's style is more, I don't know, measured. Certainly he's less inclined towards calling a spade a bloody shovel, but...Read more