A moving Australian story about the power of brotherly love over poverty and circumstance, a tale of playing the hand you've been dealt. At the age of twenty-one, James Dack found himself alone and responsible for raising his younger brother Stephen when their cherished mother lost her battle with cancer. Long estranged from their abusive father, the pair became homeless and took up residence at the local Police Citizens Youth Club.Through determination and loyalty to each other - and with the memory of their mother's love as the compass by which they kept their bearings - the brothers survived the often brutal culture of the inner-city public housing estates they had always called home and found their places in the world. James obtained work as a hospital orderly to keep his brother at school, but soon found some influential mentors who led him to becoming one of the most successful and respected figures in Australian real estate today.Stephen - always battling the...

A vivid story of the men and women who took a stand when sport mixed with politicsIn 1971, when the racially selected all-white Springbok rugby team toured Australia, we became a nation at war with ourselves. There was bloodshed as tens of thousands of anti-Apartheid campaigners clashed with governments, police, and rugby fans—who were given free reign to assault protestors. Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen declared a State of Emergency. Prime minister William McMahon called the Wallabies who refused to play 'national disgraces'. Barbed wire ringed the great rugby grounds to stop protestors invading the field.Pitched Battle recreates what became of the most rancorous periods in modern Australian history—a time of courage, pain, faith, fanaticism, and political opportunism—which made heroes of the Wallabies who refused to play, played a key role in the later political careers of Peter Beattie, Meredith Burgmann, and Peter Hain, and...