On this page, I've put the first chapter of each of my books. If you'd like, you can download them onto your computer. Click on any of the following icons to download the chapter as a PDF file to your computer and read it at your leisure. |
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Over the Top with Jim - this is about growing up in a Queensland house, specifically in Brisbane, in the 1940s and 1950s. It is the biggest-selling Australian childhood memoir ever. A lot of kids read this book, not just nostalgic adults. When I speak at schools I always ask the students: "Who had the best childhood, you or me?" And I always get knocked over by their response: "You did! You had fun and freedom and got to make canoes and bows and arrows and fight the State School Kids. We just watch TV & play video games."
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More Over the Top with Jim Stories - after Macca serialised OTTWJ on Australia All Over on ABC Radio, he asked me to write some more stories for broadcast. Brisbane artist David Mackintosh, now an art director in London, did the wonderful drawings.
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The Over the Top with Jim Album - people kept asking me: "Is there such a place as Annerley Junction? Does Jim exist or did you make him up? Did you really have such wonderful parents as Fred and Olive?" This pictorial companion album, as one reader at the Ekka said: "Fills in the Gaps". David Mackintosh's drawings and 1940s and 1950s Australian memorabilia answer those questions. Skip to the gallery page & you get to see some of these pics. Click here to see some of those pictures.
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Head Over Heels - the sequel to OTTWJ, this is a memoir about getting your first job, first car, first love. I was a cub reporter while my tough inventive friend Jim (Dimitri Egoroff) drove around in a truck with no windows or floor and a Plymouth Belvedere. My childhood friend from Annerley Junction, Ken Fletcher, introduced me to fellow Wimbledon champions and Davis Cup players. I stayed with Rod Laver and went on a double-date with John Newcombe.
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Spies Like Us - what do you do when it's the swinging 1960s and you've got the job as a reporter and the car, a Sunbeam Alpine, but lost the love? I went to Hong Kong with my Wimbledon tennis-playing mate Ken Fletcher. He knew all about gambling and women and my education was completed by Steve Dunleavy, the Sydney reporter who wrestles grizzly bears on TV and invented tabloid TV in the United States. Which is how I ended up in "Red" China in 1965 and got into trouble in Russia.
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Vietnam: A Reporter's War - this is a book, as someone wrote, where `even the lies are true'. It's about the year Reuters news service in London sent me to cover the Vietnam War as a foreign correspondent. I got caught up in the Tet Offensive in 1968 when the Viet Cong overran the American Embassy in Saigon. Made friends and lost them there.
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