Great Australian Scams, Cons and Rorts: A book of dodgy schemes and crazy dreams from the bush to the city

‘Australian history is…so curious and strange, that it…does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies… It is full of surprises, and adventures, and incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.’ - Mark Twain

Australia is the birthplace and setting of some of the wildest, craziest and least-likely-to-succeed cons and rorts in history. From the cleverest double-crosses to the most unlikely and maddest schemes, master storyteller Jim Haynes reminds us that we’ve never been shy of pulling a trick or two.

So how did a clever bushman who ‘couldn’t lie straight in bed’ steal a thousand head of cattle and get away with it even though he was caught ‘red handed’? And what about the disappearing work of art that suddenly dissolved only to reappear at an auction years later? Or how about the butcher from Wagga who passed himself off as a French-born English duke to inherit a small fortune. And then there was the small matter of a horse, a tin of paint and a million dollar double-cross that became known as the Fine Cotton Affair.

In only the way he can, Jim Haynes has collected a veritable ‘Gullible’s Tales’ of unexpected and surprising true stories that may seem hard to believe!