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  • Published: 29 August 2016
  • ISBN: 9780857989833
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336
Categories:

Fifteen Young Men

Australia's Untold Football Tragedy




Fifteen Young Men is the true story of a doomed adventure.

Fifteen Young Men is the true story of a doomed adventure.

Few people know an Australian football team drowned in 1892.

Yet the boat disaster still ranks alongside the Manchester United plane crash (1958) as one of the world’s greatest sporting tragedies. Lost were fifteen men and boys from one town - brothers, fathers, sons, uncles and best mates – ‘youths that might have made the best colonists Australia ever had.’ Only one or two members of the team were spared: the captain, who at the jetty had a strange sense of impending danger, and gave away his ticket before the voyage, and one other.

For the first time in 122 years, journalist Paul Kennedy reveals why the Mornington Football Club never made it home. In doing so, he brings to life nineteenth-century Australia during depression and its first banking crisis, a period of trauma, resilience, friendship, love and grief for a generation of settlers’ children.

  • Published: 29 August 2016
  • ISBN: 9780857989833
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336
Categories:

About the author

Paul Kennedy

Paul Kennedy is a national television presenter for ABC News Breakfast. He has worked for three television networks and has written three books, including co-authoring Hell on the Way to Heaven (with Chrissie Foster), one of the triggers for Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

He lives on the eastern shore of Port Phillip with his wife, Kim, and their three sons, Jack, Gus and Leo.

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Finding emotional truth

 Paul Kennedy answers our questions about writing Fifteen Young Men.

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The pull of the story

  Author and journalist Paul Kennedy details the inspiration behind Fifteen Young Men.