BEHIND BAMBOO - Tapa blanda

The definitive first-hand account of life as an Australian POW during World War II, particularly on the notorious Burma railway, the setting for Richard Flanagan's Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Rohan Rivett was a journalist in Singapore when it fell to the Japanese in 1942.  He escaped south—across the treacherous Bangka Strait—to Indonesia, but was soon captured and became just one of thousands of POWs struggling for existence in a Japanese camp.  The struggle was to last for more than three years. Behind Bamboo is unflinching in its honesty and haunting in its realism.  It is a vivid, compelling testament to the Australians' will to survive and their unassailable spirit in the face of the most callous inhumanity.

Rohan Rivett (1917—1977) studied at the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford before joining the Argus newspaper in 1939 as a journalist. He was a war correspondent in Singapore when it fell to the Japanese in 1942, and survived as a prisoner-of-war for more than three years. Rivett returned to journalism after the war and later became a director of News Limited and a director of the International Press Institute, Zurich. He published several non-fiction books and a biography of his father.