John Pilger grew up in Sydney, Australia. He was a war correspondent, author and film-maker. He twice won British journalism's highest award, that of Journalist of the Year, for his work all over the world, notably in Cambodia and Vietnam. He was also voted International Reporter of the Year and winner of the United Nations Associated Peace Prize and Gold Medal. For his broadcasting, he won France's Reporter Sans Frontières, an American television Academy Award, an Emmy, and the Richard Dimbleby Award, given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. In 2003, he received the Sophie Prize for 'thirty years of exposing deception and improving human rights'. He died in December 2023.

"Reminiscent of a sabre-toothed, unexpurgated Dickens" -- Robert Carver New Statesman "A moving account of the abuse of human rights in Australia, all the more valuable because it is written by an Australian writer" -- Graham Greene "Pilger is a first-rate dissident journalist... Presents a harsh narrative of class, race and power; of the oppression and resistance, the betrayal and amnesia, that lie behind the sunny illustions of the Australian self-image" -- Robert Hughes "This is a patriotic book in the best sense, written in the belief that Australia deserves not old bromides and stereotypes, but the respect of critical appraisal... A necessary book for those of us who believe in the redeeming power of truth" Daily Telegraph "Pilger's Australia is so different from the image conveyed abroad by films and TV soap operas, so different indeed from the way many Australians see themselves, as to be another country...but none of it alters one starkly apparent fact - he still loves the place." Sunday Express