Brogan's Bella. SYNOPSIS

Brogan met his Isabella Maldonado in Brogan, fell in love with her in Brogan’s Bust and now brings her to Australia to show her ‘his country’.

Brogan’s Bella is her story of the journey that took not the two to three intended weeks of happy adventure, but incarceration in remote South-East-Asian jungles suffering for an indefinite future, the fear, trepidation and yearning that only hijack can create.

They find themselves in the catch-twenty-two situation of either becoming embroiled in the cut-throat intrigue of local politics and guerrilla warfare, or facing the cutting of their own throats for even knowing the truths behind the hijack.

 The aftermath of the Second World War leaves South-East-Asia in turmoil with the victorious allies carelessly hasty in ridding themselves of colonial ties in favour of domestic priorities … except France that quickly moves not only to safeguard its French-Indo-Chinese colony, but to increase its power in the region.

History has proved that the impetuous haste with which independence was granted by Great Britain to India, Pakistan, Burma and Malaya, by Holland to its Dutch East Indies and by the United States to the Philippines, left each in political turmoil, the bloody aftermath of each still unresolved after fifty years.

And France’s re-occupation of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam proved so bloody even from day one, that within ten years it conceded defeat, to cast those nations into states of continuing civil war. 

It was into these bubbling cauldrons of intrigue and political unrest that Bella and Brogan become so innocently embroiled, not only forced to take sides, suffering capture, intimidation and humiliation, but to discover sympathies and allegiances that twist the inner peace of each into as much disarray as the equanimity of natives in the several innocent nations.