The Author and The Podcaster
About this audiobook
Long before it became the centre of a murder investigation, the Juru cattle station sat quietly on the banks of the mighty Burdekin River, its red dirt tracks worn in by generations of graziers and stockmen. Established in the early 1900s, Juru was a family-run property—isolated, self-reliant, and steeped in Queensland bush heritage. The land carried its own stories, its own scars. But none as disturbing as what would come more than a century later.
When investigative podcaster Graham Grantham arrives in Bowen to gather material for the final episode of his series Searching for Barry Smedley, he is prepared for dead ends and folklore. Instead, he meets Rex Carrington—a former ADF intelligence officer turned novelist—whose book The Big Stitch eerily parallels the real-life disappearance of Smedley and the subsequent conviction of his longtime friends and neighbours, Brian and Ruth Harrison.
As Graham and his wife Sharon, a former police sergeant, retrace the case through Carrington’s fictionalised lens, they uncover a chilling theory: that the Harrisons were scapegoats in a much larger game. That Juru, with its history and strategic location, was wanted—not for cattle—but for what lay beneath it. Coal. And someone was prepared to do whatever it took to get it.
What unfolds is a twisting narrative of land grabs, falsified evidence, and systemic silence. With a new coal mine rising from the earth and an entire town prospering from its development, the truth about what really happened on Juru may be too dangerous to expose.
The Author & The Podcaster is a taut, character-driven thriller inspired by true events, pulling readers into the blurred lines between justice and convenience, fiction and truth, silence and exposure. And at the heart of it all lies one question: how far will they go to protect what they’ve taken?
