Ian W. Shaw – författare

On October 5, 1892, the last of the major outlaw gangs of the Old West was destroyed in a gun battle in Coffeyville, a small town in southeastern Kansas. When the smoke cleared, eight men were dead and three others were seriously injured. Four of the dead were members of the notorious Dalton Gang: Dick Broadwell, Bill Powers, and two brothers, Bob and Grat Dalton. A fifth outlaw, twenty-one-year-old Emmett Dalton, was captured alive but with twenty-three bullet and buckshot wounds.

Emmett Dalton not only survived Coffeyville but prospered. After serving a fourteen-year prison term at the Kansas state penitentiary, he moved to Southern California. In a world completely foreign to him, he published two accounts of his and his brothers’ exploits (both of which were made into movies) and became a celebrity who worked with the first generation of Hollywood cowboys and one of Los Angeles’s most respected property developers.

Ian Shaw’s Into the Sunset is the remarkable story of Emmett Dalton and how he and his brothers drifted from one side of the law to the other in the frontier lands of the late nineteenth century. It is the story of shoot-’em-ups and train robberies, of the closing frontier, and of what desperate men in desperate times do to survive. Following Dalton to California, Shaw tells the story of how Emmett was able to live a life that would become the stuff of legend and achieve the level of success that was once the object of each member of the Dalton Gang.

The unknown story of how a fleet of Australian fishing boats, trawlers and schooners supplied US and Australian forces in the Pacific - and helped turn the course of World War II.Mid-1942: from China to New Guinea, the Pacific belonged to the Japanese. In this desperate situation, a fleet of hundreds of Australian small ships is assembled, sailing under the American flag, and crewed by over 3000 Australians either too young or too old to join the regular armed forces. Their task: to bring supplies and equipment to the Allied troops waging bloody battles against Japanese forces across the South Pacific. THE RAG TAG FLEET is the unknown story of the final months of 1942 - when these men ran the gauntlet of Japanese air attacks, malaria and dysentery, reefs, and shallow, shark-infested waters to support the US and Australian troops that defeated the entrenched Japanese forces at Buna on the New Guinea coast, and so helped turn the war in the Allies'' favour. Their bravery, ingenuity and mettle helped turn the tide of the war. For the first time, their story is told.''enthralling . . . makes for a fascinating read.'' CANBERRA TIMES

Far away from any World War II battlefront, the citizens of Melbourne lived in fear of a serial killer - the Brownout Strangler.May 1942: Melbourne was torn between fearing Japanese invasion and revelling in the carnival atmosphere brought by the influx of 15,000 cashed-up American servicemen. But those US forces didn''t guarantee safety. Not long after their arrival, the city would be gripped by panic when the body of a woman was found strangled, partially naked and brutally beaten. Six days later another woman was found dead and her body told the same horrific story. A murderer was stalking the streets. As women were warned not to travel alone, an intense manhunt ensued. Not long after a third woman was murdered, American soldier Eddie Leonski was arrested. A calculating psychopath, he had a twisted fascination with female voices, especially when they were singing . . . Acclaimed author Ian W. Shaw brings World War II Melbourne to life, and takes us into the mind of the Brownout Strangler, and a very different kind of terror.''enthralling . . . makes for a fascinating read.'' Canberra Times on Ian W. Shaw''s The Rag Tag Fleet

In late March 1975, as the Vietnam War raged, an Australian voluntary aid worker named Rosemary Taylor approached the Australian Embassy seeking assistance to fly 600 orphans out of Saigon to safety. Rosemary and Margaret Moses, two former nuns from Adelaide, had spent eight years in Vietnam during the war, building up a complex of nurseries to house war orphans and street waifs as the organisation that built up around them facilitated international adoptions for the children. As the North Vietnamese forces closed in on their nurseries, they needed a plan to evacuate the children, or all their work might count for little ... Based on extensive archival and historical research, and interviews of some of those directly involved in the events described, Operation Babylift details the last month of the Vietnam War from the perspective of the most vulnerable victims of that war: the orphans it created. Through the story of the attempt to save 600 children, we see how a small group of determined women refused to play political games as they tried to remake the lives of a forgotten generation, one child at a time.