LINE OF FIRE

Ian Townsend Harper Collins

Life for the white man in the 1930s and 40s on plantations in Rabaul, in the Australian territory of New Guinea, was exotic and rarified. Overshadowed by oppressive heat, a narrow and destructive social life, the ever-present threat of volcanic eruptions and the drumbeat of the aggressor, Japan, Rabaul simmered. As gripping as a detective novel, Townsend brilliantly evokes the claustrophobic ‘frontier’ life of the times while telling a hitherto littleknown story of how, in 1942, an 11-year-old Australian boy and members of his family came to be shot by the Japanese as suspected spies. A misadventure of an extraordinary kind.