Watchwords
Brief Author Bytes
R-Z!
PETER WATT
Peter Watt has
been there and done that: soldier, articled clerk, prawn trawler deckhand, builder’s labourer, pipe layer, real estate salesman, private investigator, police sergeant and adviser to the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary. If you can’t get a book
out of that lot you’re not really trying. Peter also speaks, reads and writes Vietnamese and Pidgin.
As a boy during the 1950s Peter grew up on a soldier settler farm
at Warrawidgee west of Griffith in New South Wales where he would hang out with the other kids around a sly grog shop and listen to the adults talking about their war experiences from the Boer War, the Great War, World War II and Korea. Many of those men experienced
the influenza epidemic of 1919, the death toll from which was horrendous as the disease was carried home by debilitated soldiers, only to kill those they had fought to protect.
In the latest of his books in the Duffy/Macintosh series, Beyond the Horizon, the stories Peter remembers as a child inform descriptions of the bloody fields of the Western Front to the desert plains of the Middle East, where Tom and Matthew
Duffy are trapped on the front lines facing the enemy. As nations come to terms with the devastating consequences of the Great War, there will be a new world order but not everyone will live to see it.
These days Peter lives at Maclean on the Clarence River in northern New South Wales and is a volunteer fire-fighter with the Rural Fire Service, having recently joined the Gulmarrad Rural Fire Service team. Fishing and the vastness of outback
Queensland are his main interests in life. Find out more about Peter and his work by visiting his website at http://www.peterwatt.com.
Books:
Cry of the Curlew (the first book in the Duffy/Macintosh series): ‘I will tell you a story about two whitefella families who believed in the ancestor spirits. One family was called Macintosh and the other family was called Duffy...’ In
the middle years of the nineteenth century squatter Donald Macintosh little realises what he is setting in motion when he orders the violent dispersal of the Nerambura tribe on his property, Glen View. Unwitting witnesses to the barbaric exercise are bullock
teamsters Patrick Duffy and his son, Tom.
Shadow of the Osprey: Twelve years have passed since the murderous event which inextricably linked the destinies of the
Macintoshes and the Duffys. On a Yankee clipper bound for Sydney Harbour the mysterious Michael O’Flynn is watched closely by a man working undercover for Her Majesty’s Government. O’Flynn has a dangerous mission to undertake and old scores
to settle.
Flight of the Eagle: From the battlefields of the Sudan to colonial Sydney and the Queensland outback, no one is left untouched by the dreadful curse
which haunts the Macintosh and Duffy families, linking them together in love, death and revenge. On the rugged Queensland frontier, Native Mounted Police trooper Peter Duffy is torn between his duty, the blood of his mother’s people – the Nerambura
tribe – and a predestined deadly duel with Gordon James, the love of his sister Sarah.
To Chase the Storm: When Major Patrick Duffy’s beautiful wife
Catherine leaves him for another and returns to her native Ireland, Patrick’s broken heart propels him out of the Sydney Macintosh home and into yet another bloody war on the battlefields of Africa. Through the dawn of a new century in a now federated
Australian nation, from South Africa to Palestine and Townsville to the green hills of Ireland, behind the tale of love and loss there lurks a trail of sinister politics.
To
Touch the Clouds: They had all forgotten the curse, until it touched them. In 1914 the storm clouds of war are gathering and Matthew Duffy and his cousin Alexander Macintosh are sent by Colonel Patrick Duffy to conduct reconnaissance on German-controlled
New Guinea. But someone close to them has an agenda of his own.
To Ride the Wind: In 1916 war rages across Europe and the Middle East and Patrick and Matthew Duffy
are both fighting the enemy, Patrick in the fields of France and Matthew in the skies above Egypt. But their enemy George Macintosh is secretly passing information to the Germans, seeking to consolidate his power within the family company.
Beyond the Horizon (2012): In the latest of the Duffy/Macintosh series, while the war rages in Europe, back in Australia George Macintosh is outraged by the stipulations of
his father’s will that provide for his despised nephew and he is determined to eliminate any threats to his power. And in a sacred cave in the far Outback, old Wallarie foresees a tide of death sweeping through his homeland.
Further reading - The Papua Series: Papua, Eden, The Pacific. Standalone novels: The Silent Frontier, The Stone Dragon, The Frozen Circle.