April 2000 Volume 80 Number 4 "serving the protectors"
By John Ballantyne

David Crookes is a highly-acclaimed fiction writer who gives his Australian stories realistic historical settings. These give his adventure-romances just the touch of authenticity to make them gripping reading.

His three novels are now available in inexpensive paperback from Hodder Headline at only $19.95 each.

BLACKBIRD

This novel is set in colonial Queensland, when the early wealth of that state depended on slavery, known in Australia as ‘blackbirding’. Unsuspecting natives from the South Sea Islands were tricked or forced aboard slave ships and then sold, at tremendous profit, to plantation owners to work in the cane fields of the north.

Beautiful young Kiri, destined for slavery, is rescued by half-caste Ben Luk who plans to make his fortune in Brisbane using wealth from the Palmer River goldfields. Racial prejudice runs high in the colony, and Ben makes unforgiving enemies. But ultimately his refusal to bow to tyranny, and Kiri’s steadfast love, carry them triumphantly through their many turbulent adventures.

Blackbird’s cast of vivid and unforgettable characters, each driven by greed, need or a sense of honour, brings this little-known period of Australia’s past dramatically to life.

THE LIGHT HORSEMAN’S DAUGHTER

The year is 1931. Australia is in the throes of the Great Depression. The McKenna family is being evicted from a property in drought-stricken Queensland, which the family has owned for three generations. The father, who has loyally served his country in Palestine during the First World War, resists eviction and is shot dead.

With a crippled mother and 12-year-old twin brothers to care for, young Emma is forced to work as a seamstress. A rich Sydney lawyer, Stephen Fairchild, falls passionately in love with her, but their very different social situations and Stephen’s foolish involvement with the paramilitary New Guard oblige him to enter a loveless marriage, abandoning Emma at her moment of greatest need. But Emma is not easily defeated.

The Light Horseman’s Daughter offers a panoramic view of Australia in the 1930s - the big landowners of the outback, the corrupt bankers who supported them, the wealthy elite of Sydney’s eastern suburbs, the battlers of Redfern and the bush, and the idealists who joined the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.

SOMEDAY SOON

David Crookes’ third novel opens dramatically with the 1942 Japanese bombing of Darwin in which hundreds were killed. Faith Brodie and her brother, Joe, escape the devastation and chaos aboard Joe’s island trading ketch Faraway, along with Joe’s lifelong friend Koko Hamada, an Australian-born Japanese fleeing internment. But the fortunes of war soon send them in disparate but equally testing directions.

As the war rages on in the jungles of New Guinea and the Pacific Islands, Nackeroo Sergeant Joe Brodie and POW Koko Hamada fight bitter personal battles at home against espionage and injustice. And Faith suffers her own ordeal when a senior US officer creates an elaborate web of deceit designed to take her away from the man she loves.

David Crookes tells a gripping story of intrigue and romance, in which heroism, cruelty and prejudice all play their parts.

The author’s passion for solo sailing and his first-hand knowledge of the coast and islands of far north Australia give a special authenticity to this novel.

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