The Killer Kop & the Murder of Donald Mackay
$25 + postage

Underbelly 2 was the fiction! The killer cop deals the facts! Who killed Donald Mackay?

Frank Nugan was a banker who had the power to make money disappear. His financial trickery lay behind the bottom-of-the–harbour scandal and the Nugan Hand Bank.

Fred Krahe was the Frightener, an ex-detective who had the power to make people disappear. He was the killer cop.

Donald Mackay was murdered to protect an enormous secret. In The killer cop and the murder of Donald Mackay, historian Dr John Jiggens reveals that secret.

Get your copy of The Killer Kop directly through this website

“Here is a book so rich in character and plot, it would make a great crime fiction thriller but for one important fact - it’s all true.”
Tony Reeves, author of Mr Sin and Mr Big

“For those of my vintage who call Sydney home, names such as Donald Mackay, Nugan Hand Bank, Juanita Nielsen, Premier Bob Askin and Murray Riley were regularly in our conversation. 25 years later John Jiggens makes sense of so many of the disconnected stories of my youth. This book joins the dots on the scandal and crimes we read about and lived through.”
Lee Rhiannon MLC

The Best of The Cane Toad Times
The Cane Toad Times Warts and All (Toadshow: 2005) $50 + postage

The Cane Toad Times was a Brisbane satirical magazine that put out 22 issues between 1977 and 1990.

Emerging from the swamp of DIY punk-era culture in Brisbane in the 1970s, the Toad was a self managed magazine, organized along a collective structure, and there were two distinct collectives in the 1970s and 1980s.

A best of collection, The Cane Toad Times Warts and All, was published in September 2005. The anthology is: full-colour throughout, A3 size,64 pages, cover by Matt Mawson, introductory essay by John Jiggens, the final previously unpublished episode of Killer Greely by Dave Tyrer, the best material from all 22 editions plus reproductions of the covers.

 

Marijuana Australiana
(HEMP: 2001) - $20.00

The word ‘marijuana’ was introduced to Australia by the US Bureau of Narcotics via the Diggers newspaper, Smith’s Weekly, in 1938. Marijuana was said to be ‘a new drug that maddens victims’ and it was sensationally described as an ‘evil sex drug’. The resulting tabloid furore saw the plant cannabis sativa banned in Australia, even though cannabis had been a well-known and widely used drug in Australia for many decades.

In 1964, a massive infestation of wild cannabis was found growing along a stretch of the Hunter River between Singleton and Maitland in New South Wales. The explosion in Australian marijuana use began there. It was fuelled after 1967 by US soldiers on rest and recreation leave from Vietnam. It was the Baby-Boomer young who were turning on and the ‘War on Drugs’ in Australia began with paramilitary attacks on the hippie colonies at Cedar Bay in Queensland and Tuntable Falls in New South Wales. The attack on pot users served as code for an attack on the young, the Left, and the alternative. During this decade, organised crime moved into the pot scene and the price of pot skyrocketed, reaching $450 an ounce in 1988. Thanks to the Americanisation of drugs policy, the black market made ‘a killing’. As the subtitle suggests, Marijuana Australiana relies significantly on ‘alternative’ sources, and it trawls the waters of popular culture, looking for songs, posters, comics and underground magazines to produce an ‘underground’ history of cannabis in Australia.

Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy in Australia
('The Emperor Wears No Clothes' Australian Version with Jack Herer) (HEMP: 1995) $40.00

HEMP (Help End Marijuana Prohibition) has reprinted the classic The Emperor Wears No Clothes and has added an Australian supplement, Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy in Australia. The Emperor has long been considered a bible for those seeking information on hemp, prohibition and marijuana drug use. The book aims to educate the public on the historical, current and possible future uses of the hemp plant.

Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy in Australia provides an interesting historical account of the discovery of the wild Hunter River crop of the 1960s, from which marijuana use was popularised in youth culture, and provides evidence that the colonisation of Australia was, in part, motivated by the British wanting a large source of hemp fibre.

Many aspects of the hemp plant are detailed, including the historical use of hemp for fibre, as a medicine, for biomass fuel and the seed as a food source. A historical analysis of marijuana use as a drug is presented as well as the ongoing efforts by governments and business interests to maintain prohibition. The lies, the bogus experimental data, the suppression of scientific results and media disinformation are contrasted with the real social costs of prohibition and the state enforcement of these laws.

The Emperor presents two major reasons why legalisation of hemp must happen. The first is the need to stop wasting millions of dollars enforcing laws that criminalise marijuana users, and instead address drug use in a realistic and educational way. The second is that hemp is a potentially trillion-dollar environmentally sustainable plant that can be used for food, fibre and fuel. The simple reality is that hemp could replace the non-sustainable oil and forestry industries of the world.

The Incredible Exploding Man
(Samisdat: 1991) $40.00

Sydney, 1978. The Hilton bombing, an act of horrific violence, leaving three men dead. This was no game. Yet in The Incredible Exploding Man, John Jiggens shows that justice sometimes sits in the pavilion when our legal system comes out to bat.

The real-life characters in this book could provide the material for a thrilling video: the exploding man himself, Evan Pederick; the NSW police; the perspiring crown prosecutor; Mark Tedeschi, the 12 laypeople and peers; the softly spoken defence counsel; and the scapegoat, Tim Anderson. As he leads the reader through the marathon trial, Jiggens never lets us forget the very real and vulnerable who are the players. Anderson as much as Pederick is a disposable pawn in a ritualised justification of our “morality”.

Jiggens shows us the heavies of the legal system in full flight, but he also shows the ordinary individuals, the Joe Bloggs and Evan Pedericks, who get caught up and carried along by the power and the glare of the ritual. He paints in vibrant, sometimes psychedelic, colours the conflict between prosecutor and defence counsel, umpired with quiet omnipotence by Justice Groves.

The conviction of Tim Anderson showed that Australian law enforcement agencies were deliberately attempting to pervert justice and nail someone they knew to be innocent, and that senior members of those agencies were willing to fabricate evidence to convict outspoken critics of the system. An excellent examination of history in the making, and a must reading for anyone with a sense of justice. As Bob Dylan sang “To see him obviously framed / Couldn't help but make you feel ashamed / To live in a land where justice is a game.”