Garry Linnell

Garry Linnell is an Australian journalist, editor, broadcaster, and nonfiction author whose books often recover dramatic lives from the country's colonial and criminal history. His senior media roles have included editorships at The Bulletin and The Daily Telegraph, news leadership at Fairfax, and broadcasting work, and his journalism has received a Walkley Award. Buckley’s Chance, published by Penguin in 2019, recounts the extraordinary life of William Buckley, an escaped convict who lived for more than three decades among the Wadawurrung people before re-entering colonial society. Linnell places Buckley's survival story against the violent expansion of settlement around Port Phillip, making the book both biography and colonial history. His related works include Moonlite, The Devil's Work, and The Kelly Hunters, each built around archival reconstruction and a forceful narrative pace. In Buckley’s Chance, the familiar Australian expression attached to Buckley's name becomes an entry point into a complicated record of endurance, cultural encounter, dispossession, and contested memory.