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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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Works By

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1 4 y separately published work icon Hanoi, Adieu : A Bittersweet Memoir of French Indochina Mandaley Perkins , 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)
1 y separately published work icon Tropic Tide : An Adventurer's Life Mandaley Perkins , Sydney : Bantam Books , 1998 Z1220075 1998 single work biography Tropic Tide follows the extraordinary life and interesting times of Bruce "VB" Perkins, from the high life of pre-war Singapore to the disastrous battle for the island, from the horrific POW years on the Burma-Siam Railway to the rescue effort at wars end when VB went back into the jungle in search of thousands of Malayan labourers lost and dying in Siam. It is a story of the Communist Emergency in Malaya in the fifties and how the communists were eventually defeated. It is the story of expeditions into remote sakai tribal areas deep in the jungles, of terrorist guerillas, Special Branch plots and of Arnhem Land, of traditional aborigines, bush characters and remote cattle stations in the Northern Territory. It is a story of losing everything twice and beginning again, of following a vision to establish an international shipping company and of taking on the Waterside Workers Federation at the height of their power and winning against all odds. (Author's website)
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