The mother of four in her early 50s was heading to Queensland to make two drops of hydroponic marijuana, each weighing a little over four kilograms and each worth $30,000.

Her first drop was at the Gold Coast where Mick Corby was expecting delivery early on Thursday afternoon, a day before his daughter Schapelle was booked to fly from Brisbane to Bali.

When Eastwood didn't turn up on time, an agitated Mick Corby rang his Adelaide-based supplier, Malcolm McCauley.

McCauley, an alcoholic who served 15 months' jail for running drugs to Queensland in 2004-05, recalls the steaming conversation in a new book that argues Schapelle Corby took the marijuana to Bali for her father.

''He was banging on about the time,'' McCauley recalls. ''He was saying it's [the so-called hooter] got to leave here at this time today because it's flying out from Brisbane in the morning,'' McCauley says in Sins of the Father, by the Sun-Herald journalist Eamonn Duff.

McCauley tried to call Eastwood without success. She turned up hours late.

Despite that, McCauley is certain Corby still followed the procedure well established in the four years the two men worked together moving high-quality marijuana from Adelaide to Queensland.

''Mick would never have dared pack the 10 heat-sealed bags he'd received as they were. It would have been sloppy; it would have been suicide,'' Duff writes.

''And he didn't,'' McCauley says.

''He had to take a Stanley knife to the lot, fluff it back up to its original state then redo it all - something that should have happened four or five hours before. He then had to go through the whole process of spreading the hooter out into a bigger bag - which looks a lot like a suit bag until it's had the air sucked out of it in the heat seal. He had to make sure there were no leaks. It also had to resemble a boogie board shape.''

Mick Corby has said in TV interviews he had to fix his daughter's boogie board bag at his home at Tugun before Schapelle took it to her mother Ros's house where she slept the night before heading to the airport - and a 20-year jail sentence - the next day.

Releasing the book yesterday, Allen and Unwin consultant publisher Richard Walsh said Indonesians had always said Schapelle Corby was guilty and Duff's book was saying to a domestic audience, ''We agree.''

In building his case against Schapelle Corby, Duff has focused heavily on her father Mick, who died of cancer in 2008 after decades of involvement with marijuana including two convictions for use and possession in 1973.

Schapelle Corby was caring for her father and the book argues it was impossible for her not to have known about his involvement in drugs.

When Duff interviewed Mick Corby in May 2005, Corby said: ''This family has no links to marijuana in any way, shape or form so none of this makes any sense.'' Interviews with old school friends along with court and police records and police informants are used to explode that claim.

In the 1980s Mick Corby lived next door to his best friend Tony Lewis in Middlemount, a small coalmining town inland from Rockhampton. When he appeared in court on drug charges years later, Lewis said it was a time when he was using so much marijuana he got addicted.

In the mid-1990s they bought adjoining rural properties at Inveragh, population 80, about 30 kilometres south of Gladstone, where their friendship was so close they did not even bother with a dividing fence.

Lewis was happily growing marijuana there when Kim Moore, a former heroin addict and friend of Lewis's girlfriend, told police she knew a man growing a marijuana crop.

In a statement three weeks before Schapelle's arrest, she also told police that couriers were flying amphetamines and cannabis wrapped in waterproof tar paper into Bali.

Police responded to the first allegation, raided Lewis's property and found marijuana everywhere including 197 plants, some more than a metre high, and 3.5 kilograms of marijuana in vacuum-sealed bags in the freezer.

Despite his inoperable prostate cancer, Mick Corby went to Bali in September 2004. He told the media he had done so because he could not get tickets on the same flight as Schapelle, who was heading to Bali for her sister's birthday celebrations a fortnight later .

It's a claim McCauley ridicules in the book. ''Couldn't get tickets? Give me a break. History now shows that Mick got an order - that's why he went over a few weeks before. He needed to iron out the details … You don't just ring in and order and say give me 10 pounds and then tomorrow it lobs up on your doorstep.''

Eastwood was arrested on drug charges in Queensland in 2005, found guilty, and served 12 months of a three-year sentence.