Les Twentyman & Robert Hillman

Award-winning writer, Robert Hillman, has collaborated with one of Australia’s best-known youth outreach workers and social campaigners, to bring his story to the public in that wonderful storytelling style that Robert and Les share.

Raised in Braybrook in Melbourne’s Western suburbs, Les has devoted his life to young people doing it tough both in Melbourne’s west and more recently in western Sydney, setting up crucial programs, services and resources to assist youth at risk. His is a success story on many fronts: attracting a dedicated and passionate team who work directly with the young people to bring about individual change; and building a huge public profile to support his work. His personal contact list would be the envy of prime ministers: from politicians to prominent business people to police command to sports champions and CEOs of major sporting codes, to the governor general.

He is renowned for his knowledge and passionate advocacy for those forgotten and hidden from view who are victims of youth homelessness, drug abuse, and all the consequent problems that ensue; focusing on both the micro and macro levels of reforms as the only way to make permanent change.

He is the first stop for Victorian and national media outlets for the word on ‘how it really is’. He has featured in hundreds of TV, radio and print press interviews and has been a regular newspaper columnist and article contributor. He also features in a number of documentaries, most notably The Ohio Gun Buyback Scheme, LA Gangs, Can We Help, 20 Minutes with Twentyman and Heroin Without the Hype.

Les has consistently shone a light on emerging youth issues like gang violence, weapons carriage, cyber bullying and the growing trend of truancy in our education system. The hard-hitting DVD The Realities of Cyber Bullying and Knives Trash Lives are testament to Les’ ‘pull no punches’ approach to the damage caused to youth through peer pressure and social media. He is often called on to visit volatile regional areas of Australia in a bid to bring about harmony and cooperation where gangs and youth violence is a problem. He has also accompanied the Governor General, state government officials and prominent leaders from the private and public sectors to the ‘dark streets’ of Australia they never thought existed.

In addition to his tireless work with disadvantaged youth and media commentary, Les is a well-credentialed public speaker. His speaking engagements include schools, community groups, service clubs, corporate, Government Departments and business conferences. He has also been engaged by AFL and NRL teams to address young players on the pitfalls of ‘celebrity’. A testament to Les’s reach was being asked to introduce his Holiness, The Dalai Lama, at his Melbourne conference in June 2013.

In this memoir, Robert goes behind the public knowledge to find out what makes Les tick, where he came from, who and what made him Australia’s number one advocate for our most vulnerable young people. And what of his private life, if he has one at all? Take a journey with one of Australia’s living treasures to the ugliest side of life and to the best.

Take a look at Bill Shorten’s speech for the launch of The Mouth That Roared here

Cover 📷 Louise Chen Photography | Website

Najaf Mazari and Robert Hillman

From the authors of the highly acclaimed bestseller, The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, The Honey Thief is a compelling and beautifully told superb collection of spell-binding modern fables from Afghanistan that portray a vivid landscape of hardship and brotherhood, catastrophes and miracles, that bring to life the mystery and wonder of that country and its people. Tales of leopards that sing and bees that sneeze; of horseshoe bats in flights that blot out the sun, and of blackbirds that bring golden apples to earth is redolent of our best loved Middle-eastern writers and the magic realism of an Isobel Allende. The sorrow of this extraordinary land is here too, told through the story of the king-killer, Abdul Kaliq, who ends his life on a scaffold in Kabul; and of Majid the Madman who turns to music for solace when his children die of plague. Other tales include that of an aged wolf who proves to a shepherd boy that he is the most intelligent creature on earth; of proud Nadia, courted with a copy of Huckleberry Finn; and of the master poisoner, Nightfall, who creates a cookbook of enchantments. Whether the tale is of beekeepers or kings, The Honey Thief conveys in stories of surprising tenderness the stark beauty of the interwoven lore from a land of bloodshed and brotherhood, of miracles and catastrophes.

Craig Jurisevic with Robert Hillman

Listed in the 2011 Better Reading’s ’50 Books You Can’t Put Down’

The year is 1999, and a fresh hell is being created before our eyes. It is hardly to be credited that the enlightened nations of Europe are allowing this nightmare to occur only sixty minutes by jet from Paris and London. The forces of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic have swept into Kosovo on the Balkan Peninsula leaving a trail of death and heartbreak. Scenes of Milosevic’s ‘ethnic cleansing’ play out on television screens all over the world; haunted figures huddled behind barbed wire fences, bodies heaped in ditches.

Adelaide surgeon Craig Jurisevic recalls his grandfather’s ordeal in a Nazi concentration camp and resolves to honour his memory by offering his skills as a surgeon to the victims of the conflict. Leaving behind a wife and son, Jurisevic flies to the Balkans under the auspices of the International Medical Corps. Struggling to maintain his moral bearings, Jurisevic’s journey from Adelaide to the hell of Kosovo has become a descent into the heart of darkness. Blood on My Hands, co-written with award-winning author Robert Hillman, tells a story of terrible suffering, of extraordinary heroism, and of the savagery that lies coiled in the human heart.

Najaf Mazari & Robert Hillman

Best-selling memoir, The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, traces the story of a young Afghan man’s extraordinary journey from a shepherd boy in the mountains of northern Afghanistan, to asylum seeker in Woomera Detention Centre and, finally, to owner of a successful Afghan traditional rug shop in Melbourne, Australia, and founder of the charitable fund, AusGhan Aid.

Although Mazari flees his country in 2001, this moving and poignant work, laced with a good dose of humour, continues to delight and move readers because of its recognisably universal insights into the refugee experience: the conditions that create the ‘refugee’ in the first place, the trauma and heartache as a result of leaving everything and everyone behind, the dangerous journey to the ‘promised land’, and the often hostile reception and loss of identity, purpose and even freedom, on arrival.

Mazari begins life in a mountain village where families lived a simple, contented ‘milk and honey’ life typical of so many, before the Civil War ripped that country apart. The lives and livelihood of farmers, craftsmen and small business owners and their families that had existed for centuries, were destroyed in just weeks and months.

As a member of the Hazara tribe, hated and targeted by the Taliban, Mazari was forced to flee the brutal attacks on his people when the Northern Alliance fell to the advancing Taliban insurgents; although not before he was brutally tortured by them. His dangerous, overland flight to Pakistan, from there to Indonesia, then by boat to Australia, ends with him in the notorious Woomera Detention Centre in the Central Australian desert country, where the story begins.

The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif was the first book-length account from a representative of the many refugees who have arrived in Australia since the beginning of this century; and is exquisitely captured in his own voice. From the compelling opening sentence to the beautiful and touching final chapter, Najaf’s integrity, his extraordinary optimism and his generosity of spirit wins the hearts and minds of all readers. ‘Engaging’, ‘compelling’, ‘inspiring’ are the responses of readers of the book.