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Mandaley Perkins Mandaley Perkins i(A91063 works by)
Born: Established: 1960 Darwin, Darwin area, Northern Territory, ;
Gender: Female
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BiographyHistory

Mandaley has travelled widely in Asia researching and retracing the events in her books. She was educated in Perth, completed postgraduate studies at the Australian Maritime College in Tasmania, and then moved to Brisbane.

Perkins's writing evolved out of her fascination for South East Asia and its colonial history, and the experiences of her own family. In each of her books she has woven the personal story of someone who was there through the important events of the time, attempting to recreate the scenes both vividly and accurately.

Tropic Tide (1998) was her father's biography, which covered among other things the fall of Singapore during World War II, the prisoner of war years on the Burma Siam railway, and the Communist Emergency in Malaya. Her second book, Hanoi, Adieu, is her French step-father's very personal story set against the dramatic events of the fall of the French empire in the Far East, leading on to the Vietnam War with the United States.

Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Hanoi, Adieu : A Bittersweet Memoir of French Indochina Pymble : HarperCollins Australia , 2005 Z1220078 2005 single work biography

Michel L'Herpiniere was a child of the French empire who arrived in Hanoi in 1936 with his family as a teenager. The family became enamoured with the country and the story follows the next fifteen turbulent years: through Michel's school and university years, his loves and opium addictions, his soldiering experiences, through resistance and incarceration and starvation under the Japanese, his marriage to a planter's daughter and the loss of their estate, through his experiences during the Vietminh siege of Hanoi and its aftermath, and his desperate attempts to keep his business going and raise a family in Hanoi long after most French civilians had left the country. The story is inevitably entwined through the traumatic events of the time, including the Japanese occupation in WWII, the post-war Chinese occupation, the rise of the Vietminh, the fall of French Indochina and the beginning of the American involvement in Vietnam. (author's website)
2006 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards — Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction
VIEW ALL AWARDS
Last amended 26 Apr 2007 09:19:42
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