Kidnap: Focus on Faraday and Beyond
Australian History Local History Biography True Crime Criminology Kidnapping 1970s Social History
Kidnap: Focus on Faraday and Beyond is the definitive, long-out-of-print 1992 Australian true-crime classic that reconstructs the Faraday Primary School kidnapping—the 1972 ambush in which teacher Mary Gibbs and six little bush-town pupils were held for a million-dollar ransom. Edwin John Eastwood, a veteran crime reporter who watched the story unfold, gives a minute-by-minute narrative of the siege, the manhunt across Victoria’s high-country ranges, and the sensational trial that followed. Readers looking for a gripping, illustrated paperback on Australia’s first major school kidnapping will find this vintage Coeur De Lion edition the most complete single-volume account ever published.
What lifts the book above standard reportage is Eastwood’s access to primary sources: police logs, court transcripts, and exclusive interviews with hostages, detectives and townsfolk who had never before spoken on record. The 250-page biography is richly illustrated with crime-scene photographs, hand-drawn diagrams of the one-teacher schoolhouse, and newspaper front pages that chart the nation’s growing obsession with “the Faraday Falcon.” Collectors of Australiana, teachers of criminology, and true-crime buffs hunting for an authoritative yet readable study of kidnapping negotiation tactics will prize these unseen images and first-hand quotes.
Beyond the crime itself, Eastwood uses the Faraday case to trace Australia’s cultural shift from quiet rural innocence to headline-grabbing fear, foreshadowing modern lock-down procedures and nationwide emergency-response protocols. Young-adult and adult readers interested in local history, social change, and courtroom drama receive not just a kidnapping story but a snapshot of 1970s Australia—its politics, media, and bush ethos—all captured in crisp, Fleet-Street prose. Copies in very-good, unmarked, dog-ear-free condition have become scarce; securing this vintage 1992 paperback means owning a tangible piece of Australian true-crime history that no digital file can replicate.
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