Advance Review Title: “Killing Babies: An Australian Digger Recalls His Vietnam War”

Advance Review Title: “Killing Babies: An Australian Digger Recalls His Vietnam War”

Author: Darryl Bishop

ISBN-13: 978-1-925230-24-6

510 pages

RRP $24.95

Sid Harta Publishers, Melbourne Australia

 

About the Book

 

Nineteen-year-old Darryl Bishop was away droving when his birth-date was drawn from the Tenth National Service Ballot, 1969. On the 13th May 1971, Private Bishop departed Australia on HMAS Sydney, having earned his place in the Fourth Royal Australian Regiment(4RAR)’s Second Tour of southern Vietnam via gruelling training regimes at Kapooka, Canungra, and Townsville.
Shot through with larrikin spirit and dry humour, yet unflinchingly honest, KILLING BABIES recounts the narrator’s journey into a war-zone which would test his valour, and an exotic world of sin city bars which would test his values. Through the vehicle of vivid memoirs Bishop transports us into the heart and mind of a young bushman who, by luck of the draw and by Government decree, becomes an ANZAC Digger.
Bishop delivers rich detail and dialogue in the best “bush yarn” tradition, as we travel with him from Army Bases, back tracks, and night clubs, to South Vietnam’s booby-trapped bamboo groves and rugged, jungle-clad ranges. In these pages Darryl Bishop invites you to sample the life he and his mates lived during the dying days of Australia’s involvement in that

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Darryl Bishop is a stockman. He is a jack-of-all-trades who laughingly says he is a master of none. He broke in a lot of horses at Brewarrina while moving mobs of sheep and cattle along the stock routes and contract mustering in that district of north-west New South Wales, worked in shearing sheds in the north and south of the state as a roustabout and woolroller and was at one time an Opal Miner. He worked as a labourer on construction sites and as an Iron Worker (Tradesmen’s lackey) at Dunlop’s Tyre Factory in Sydney in 1974 and was in Tennant Creek, Northern Territory, as a Backhoe Operator when Cyclone Tracy went through Darwin on Christmas night of that year. Apart from the short time spent in Sydney, eight months in Townsville and the time he was away in Vietnam, he has lived all his life west of the Great Dividing Ranges.
He hung up his stockwhip, spur and saddle in 2003 and moved to the western Darling Downs with his little mate, Midge, where he and she now live the quiet life of retirement; however, he still likes to keep his hand in by doing occasional work in the cattle and sheep yards of friends in the district at mate’s rates.