Adam Courtenay has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators. The most-rated is The Ship That Never Was.
The Ghost and the Bounty Hunter
Summary
Just after Christmas 1803, convict William Buckley fled an embryonic settlement in the land of the Kulin nation (now the Port Phillip area), to take his chances in the wilderness. A few months later, the local Aboriginal people found the six-foot-five former soldier near death. Believing he was a lost kinsman returned from the dead, they took him in, and for 32 years Buckley lived as a Wadawurrung man, learning his adopted tribe's language, skills and methods to survive. The outside world finally caught up with Buckley in 1835, after John Batman, a bounty hunter from Van Diemen's Land, arrived in the area, seeking to acquire and control the perfect pastureland around the bay. What happened next saw the Wadawurrung betrayed and Buckley eventually broken. The theft of Kulin country would end in the birth of a city. The frontier wars had begun. By the best-selling author of The Ship That Never Was, The Ghost and the Bounty Hunter is a fascinating and poignant true story from Australian colonial history.
©2020 Adam Courtenay (P)2020 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Blood Rubber
Summary
Blood Rubber: How the Amazon Died tells the extraordinary story of one of the blackest episodes in Amazonian history, known as the Putumayo Affair. In 1907 Walter Hardenburg, a young American explorer and engineer, was canoeing slowly down a meandering tributary of the great river, in deepest Amazonia, in search of adventure. The realm of Captain Kurtz’s Apocalypse Now seems tame by comparison with what he found through the mist up ahead. Hardenburg had entered the rubber domain of Julio César Arana, a rubber fiefdom gone mad - where the only law that counted was the ‘Winchester constitution’: the rifle made all the rules. The native people were routinely enslaved to work the rubber plantations and flogged, raped and tortured to death if they resisted. Something snapped inside the young, idealistic Hardenburg when he witnessed these scenes of horror: thousands of native people were being slaughtered to satisfy the West’s insatiable demand for rubber. The rubber extraction methods that produced car tires, rubber hoses and countless other products relied on an entrenched system of utter barbarism. Hardenburg vowed to seek justice for the thousands of victims of the Putumayo atrocities and to publicize the destruction of their lives and culture across the world. This is the story of how he did it. Blood Rubber is about the power of one versus the power of the machine...of utter evil versus improbable goodness. Adam Courtenay is an Australian adventurer and writer who canoed up the Amazon as part of his research for this book. He has trekked some of the world’s most enthralling and difficult trails: retraced Hannibal’s footsteps over the Alps; slogged over the Kokoda Trail in New Guinea; and walked the Aboriginal Larapinta ‘Dreamtime’ in the central Australian desert. As a journalist he has worked for the Financial Times and as a Sydney-based correspondent for the UK’s Sunday Times. He currently writes for The Sydney Morning Herald/Age and is the Australia correspondent for the online finance platform TradingFloor.com. His interest in Amazonian history goes back five years - he has explored the Amazon twice and written one ebook, Grand Mistresses of the Amazon. He is currently writing a larger nonfiction work on the entire history of the Amazon basin, which he plans to publish soon as Amazon Men.
©2015 Adam Courtenay (P)2015 Audible, Ltd
The Ship That Never Was
Summary
The greatest escape story of Australian colonial history by the son of Australia's best-loved storyteller. In 1823, cockney sailor and chancer James Porter was convicted of stealing a stack of beaver furs and transported halfway around the world to Van Diemen's Land. After several escape attempts from the notorious penal colony, Porter, who told authorities he was a 'beer-machine maker', was sent to Sarah Island, known in Van Diemen's Land as hell on earth. Many had tried to escape Sarah Island; few had succeeded. But when Governor George Arthur announced that the place would be closed and its prisoners moved to the new penal station of Port Arthur, Porter, along with a motley crew of other prisoners, pulled off an audacious escape. Wresting control of the ship they'd been building to transport them to their fresh hell, the escapees instead sailed all the way to Chile. What happened next is stranger than fiction, a fitting outcome for this true-life picaresque tale. The Ship That Never Was is the entertaining and rollicking story of what is surely the greatest escape in Australian colonial history. James Porter, whose memoirs were the inspiration for Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life, is an original Australian larrikin whose ingenuity, gift of the gab and refusal to buckle under authority make him an irresistible antihero who deserves a place in our history.
©2018 Adam Courtenay (P)2018 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd