The Sunday Smuggler

(Paperback)

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Christopher was on a holiday with his family in Bali when the unthinkable happened. He and his family had been in Bali barely two hours when their holiday complex was raided and police claimed to have uncovered 12.5kg of hashish. Parnell and a travelling companion, Glen Robert Turbull, were immediately arrested on suspicion of transporting drugs. Turnbull was later released and the charges dropped. While Parnell awaited trial, Turnball signed a statutory declaration back in Australia to say that the drugs had belonged to him. He admitted that he had been afraid to face Indonesian justice but believed the mix up would be rectified and Parnell released. Instead, Parnell was sentenced to the death penalty. That sentence was later reduced to 20 years and a fine of US$30,000. Over the next 11 years, Parnell was subjected to unthinkable sessions of torture, many of them because of unimaginable bureaucratic bungles by Foreign Affairs and Australian Consulate staff. Left to starve and fight every day for his survival, Parnell became a man forced to eat everything from cockroaches to human flesh. This is a story of fatalism and bureaucracy, of corruption and the horrors of prison, but most of all it is a no-holds-barred account of what the human spirit can endure.

Author Bio

Christopher V.V. Parnell was born in Sydney in July 1953 and went to school in Brisbane. When he left school at 14 he became an apprentice jockey in Sydney, but he left the country in 1972 at the age of 19 for Papua New Guinea and since that time has spent less than one year back in Australia. Now, 29 years on, Parnell lives in Victoria.