Peter Stanley - Biography

Biography

Peter Stanley was born in Liverpool, UK, and migrated to Whyalla, South Australia, with his family in 1966. He attended the Australian National University and has three degrees from it, a BA (1977), Litt. B. (1984) and PhD (1993).

Stanley has published twenty five books, mainly in Australian military history, with a strong bent towards social history. He has also written on the military history of British India, and has published a book on British surgery in the final decades of surgery before the introduction of anaesthesia, and on the effects of bushfire on an Australian community. His writing expresses his concern to integrate operational and social approaches within military history and relates in one way or another to the theme of human experience in extreme situations.

His historical ventures also include leading the Memorial's Borneo battlefield tour, 1997; Commentator, ABC television broadcast of Anzac Day march, Sydney, 1998–2001; Historical advisor, television series Australians at War (Beyond Productions, 1999–2001); Commentator, Anzac Day national ceremony, Canberra, 2002–06; Leader, Australian War Memorial-Imperial War Museum Joint Study Tour to Crete and Egypt, Sep 2002; Presenter, Revealing Gallipoli, December Films, Apr 2005; Participant, National Summit on History Education, Canberra, Aug 2006; Commentator, ABC television broadcast national ceremony Anzac Day, Canberra, 2007–10. In 2008 he appeared in the documentaries Monash: the Forgotten Anzac and the 4 Corners report on The Great Great History War and Wain Fimeri's recent Charles Bean's Great War. In 2011 he participated in the Shine/Channel 9 series In Their Footsteps as an historical consultant and an on-screen presenter, and contributed to an episode of Who do you think you are? in 2013.

He has recently been a major participant in a public debate regarding the "Battle for Australia", contesting opinions that events in Darwin in 1942 during the Second World War represented Japan's intention to invade Australia. He argues that the wartime slogan of a 'battle for Australia', used by John Curtin in February 1942 in anticipating invasion by Japan, was taken up in the mid-1990s and applied unjustifiably.

In his work at the National Museum of Australia Peter Stanley wrote a book about the effects of the 2009 bushfires on a small rural community in Victoria, Black Saturday at Steels Creek (published in 2013 by Scribe Publications). He is contributing to a volume on Australia and the Great War in the 'new Bean' series for Oxford University Press, and part of a chapter in the forthcoming Cambridge History of Australia.

Stanley writes as a freelance author and in the course of his employment. A recent book is a novel for children, Simpson's Donkey (Murdoch Books, Sydney, 2011). Future books include Fortitude, a revised popular edition of his 2003 book For Fear of Pain, and Lost Boys of Anzac, a book looking at the men of the 3rd Brigade who died on 25 April 1915. His most recent military history book, one surveying the Australian experience of the Great War, is told entirely through the lives and words of people called Smith or Schmidt – Digger Smith and Australia's Great War published by Murdoch/Pier 9 in October 2011. Stanley has been contracted to publish Lost Boys of Anzac with NewSouth in 2015, and Die in battle: Do not Despair: Indians on Gallipoli, 1915 with Helion (UK). He is also editing Welch Calypso, Tom Stevens's memoir of his time in the West Indies in the early 1950s, also for Helion.

HisBad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force was the joint winner of the 2011 Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History.

In 2001, Stanley was an outspoken critic of the ABC Television mini-series Changi, claiming that the program was an in-accurate and misleading portrayal of the Second World War POW camp in Singapore.