The Last Paradise

tom Cole hunted crocodiles and buffalo, was a horse-breaker, brumby runner and drover, owned and managed cattle stations and a coffee plantation. the Last Paradise is the sequel to tom Cole’s bestselling autobiography Hell West and Crooked and Recounts his story of thirty years in New Guinea amongst “crocodiles, cannibals and coffee”. Operating as the first professional crocodile shooter in New Guinea, tom Cole risked life and limb hunting from frail canoes in wild and sometimes unexplored country, working with everyone from cannibals to missionaries to government officials, and the larger-than-life characters still drifting around the Pacific after the war.

Author Biography

Tom Cole worked as an expert stockman on properties throughout northern Australia, as a repairman of the Overland Telegraph Line and manager a coffee plantation in Papua New Guinea before retiring at seventy-two years old. Born in England in 1906, Cole became a real-life Crocodile Dundee, renowned for an adventurous spirit that first brought him to Australia at the age of seventeen. Awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 1994 for his contribution to history, his experiences inspired his collection of short stories Spears and Smoke Signals and his memoirs Hell West and Crooked and, its sequel, The Last Paradise.