Showing results by narrator "Paul Haley" in All Categories

In the autumn of 2010, a little-known New Zealander called Joe Schmidt took over as head coach at Leinster. He had never been in charge of a professional team. After Leinster lost three of their first four games, a prominent Irish rugby pundit speculated that Schmidt had 'lost the dressing room'. Nine years on, Joe Schmidt has stepped down as Ireland coach having achieved success on a scale never before seen in Irish rugby.

Beginning with the return to Venice of an old and sick man determined to confront his past, and accompanied by his daughter who is escaping hers, The Antipodeans spans three generations of a New Zealand family and their interaction with three families of Northern Italy.

Russell Bass is a potter living on the edge of Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains. His wife has been dead less than a year, and although he has a few close friends, he is living a mostly solitary life. Each month he hikes into the valley below his house to collect rock for glazes from a remote creek bed. One autumn morning, he finds a chocolate wrapper on the path. His curiosity leads him to a cave where three siblings - two young children and a teenage girl - are camped out, hiding from social services and the police.

The workers and the government are heading for bloody confrontation and the waterfront is the frontline. But this is a war with more than two sides, and nothing is what it seems. Into the secret world of rival union politics, dark political agendas and worldwide anti-communist hysteria steps Johnny Molloy, soldier turned private eye, who has been hired by an insurance investigator to find a supposedly dead man – a major player in one of the trade unions fighting both the government and the other unions.