A Walk Through the Battlefields

With special guest:

• Dr Will Davies
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

The battlefields of World War 1 are now mostly beautiful green fields with some still hiding bullets and ordinance from over 100 years ago. To fully appreciate the sacrifices made in the First World War by young Australians from “the Golden Generation” you have to know what you are looking at when you see these fields more than 100 years after the shots were fired. Our guest today Dr Will Davies can help visitors get the most out of a visit.

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Treasure and Dirt

With special guest:

• Chris Hammer
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

This is the first of Chris Hammer’s books to be set in the Australian outback.

There is a murder in a fictional opal mining town loosely based on Lightning Ridge in a far corner of NSW.

We go immediately to the gruesome murder scene. The early indications are that so-called “ratters” are involved and that is a story in itself as Chris explains to us what a ratter is in the context of small mining operations.

What a pleasure it is to get the latest book from Chris Hammer. Treasure and Dirt includes new characters each with a flaw that we discover just as the characters in the book do. We have to make a decision about which character we can trust.

Chris describes the town so well that we can almost taste the dust and feel the isolation. And there is the suspicion of opal fever throughout. When you throw in some big business shenanigans by rogue billionaires and even a religious cult there is plenty of action to follow as you get into this page turner.

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A Bloody Good Rant

With special guest:

• Thomas Keneally AO
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

A Bloody Good Rant you might expect from the title that this is going to contain some wild and extremist views.

However on the contrary except for some well-deserved and unapologetic criticism of one group of economists, you will not find in this book that sort of ranting and raving. It is instead Tom Keneally writing with intimacy and insight and an invitation to share his insight and humanity.

Tom Keneally has, on occasion, been branded as being “unAustralian”. Our guest is very much Australian, born in Homebush Sydney in 1935. Tom describes growing up with an ingrained primitive sense of being fortunate to live in Australia. The white society would frequently say it was the best country in the world while the outrageous treatment of Indigenous Australians and refugees was usually glossed over.

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Nancy Business

With special guest:

• RWR (Rob) McDonald
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

This story can stand alone. But if you have read the first book in the series, The Nancys, you will be even keener to see what happens in Rob McDonald’s new book Nancy Business.

For anyone who loves the British murder mysteries such as Frost, Inspector Linley, Taggart and all the others Nancy Business is a treat. But there are a few twists that you do not often find. The narrator and main character is a young girl in Otago a small town on the South Island of New Zealand whose father died about a year ago. Her name is Tippy Chan and with her uncle Pike and his boyfriend Devon they make a formidable team for solving a mysterious murder mystery.

This is a modern family story and the relationships are explored with all the black comedy and snappy dialogue we might hope for. Given that the author is himself in a “rainbow family” he has special insights and we explore with Rob some of how this type of family compares with other families.

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