Redbill: From Pearls to Peace - The Life and Times of a Remarkable Lugger

by Kate Lance

There were once hundreds of ketches like Redbill fishing for pearlshell in the waters of the old northwest Australia, but few had her gift for survival or friendship. Built in 1903, Redbill sailed, pearling through the great days of Broome and the hard years of the Depression. When war came to the Pacific, Redbill was there as the first bombs fell on Darwin. When her pearling years ended, Redbill took on new lives and new masters. In Papua she hunted crocodiles in giant swamps, carried cargo for missionaries and lived with ex-headhunters as they rebuilt their lost artistic past. Redbill continued her adventurous life as Redbill of Greenpeace, sailing the Pacific to defy the might of French nuclear testing. She supported the refugees of East Timor, helped troubled teenagers through the rough waters of Bass Strait and found the way home for a young Aboriginal man. It was cyclone Rosita's destructive force that eventually ended the lugger's extraordinary life and brought to an end a centu

400 pages, Paperback

First published February 9, 2004

About the author

I grew up near Lake Macquarie, NSW, Australia. My history of the charmed life of an old pearling lugger, Redbill: From Pearls to Peace, won the Western Australian Premier's Book Award for Non-Fiction 2004, and in 2009 Alan Villiers: Voyager of the Winds won the Mountbatten Maritime Award. The WWII novel, The Turning Tide, was published in 2014 under the name CM Lance, as was the thriller Atomic Sea in 2016. Recent books include Silver Highways, Testing the Limits (Tempo 1), and Embers at Midnight (Tempo 2). I live in green South Gippsland, Victoria, Australia.

This author is the same as C. M. Lance