A word of warning first. If you have come to this page looking for the blog. you've come to the right place. It's there okay, just a tad hard to find. If you hover your cursor over the link ABOUT ME on the so-called horizontal menu, you should see a kind of empty rectangle with rounded ends. This contains links, which will appear if you are patient enough and hover nicely over the 'rectangle'. There are three links in all to be found there:  the link to the blog is on the far right. Thank you Wix, and good luck to anyone looking for the blog!

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  Meanwhile this is meant to be an ABOUT ME page, not a page of Trumpish grievances. For a start, let me not bore you with a mini CV. The only facts that matter are that I started my working life as a journalist on the Sydney Daily Mirror, moved to London as a foreign correspondent for The Australian, switched to literary agency with Curtis Brown, first in Sydney then back in London, switched to book publishing with Martin Secker & Warburg in London, stayed as a publisher, first on my own and then with Australian Consolidated Press (UK), then started writing books. My first book A Very Rude Awakening told the story of the Japanese midget submarine raid on Sydney Harbour in May 1942. My second book An Awkward Truth dealt with the Japanese bombing raid on Darwin in February 1942 (by the same force that hit Pearl Harbor 10 weeks earlier). My third book A Good Place To Hide  (published in hardcover in the UK and Europe as The Greatest Escape, now in paperback there under its original - and much better - title) tells the story of the small French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the surrounding communities in the Auvergne region of France, where some 3500 Jews were rescued from the Nazis during World War 2. Book four Ten Rogues tells the story of ten convicts who in 1834 stole a brig they had helped to build and sailed it from Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) to Chile.

  I still think of myself as a journalist. I make no claim to be an academic historian. I try to write in an accessible and conversational style. My main focus is on telling a story, the more dramatic the better. I also have a weakness for cock-ups, hence the first two books. To my mild surprise, book number three might just about be described as inspirational.