Peter Stanley | Historian, Writer, Commentator, Consultant.

Lost Boys of Anzac

Lost Boys of Anzac (NewSouth, 2014 [forthcoming]) Ever since Quinn’s Post (2005) I’d wanted to write another book about Gallipoli. Thinking in 2010 about how Gallipoli has been treated in books in Australia, I realised that it had become a bit of a doughnut. There was of course a plethora of books about the campaign, but the actual day of the landing – for all the rhetoric of Anzac – had either attracted very little attention from...

Digger Smith

Digger Smith and Australia’s Great War (Murdoch/Pier 9, Sydney, 2011) I got the idea for this book from the research for Men of Mont St Quentin. C.J. Dennis was a close friend of the Robertses (he wrote The Sentimental Bloke in atheir back garden at Sunnyside). Frank Roberts fed Dennis snippets of AIF slang. Soon after Frank was killed at Mont St Quentin Dennis published Digger Smith. Hoping to find something of Frank’s experience in the...

Simpson’s Donkey

Simpson’s Donkey (Murdoch Books, Sydney, 2011) I can’t remember why or where I had the idea of thinking about the Simpson story from the donkey’s point of view. It was certainly years before Glyn Harper’s New Zealand children’s book. I tootled about with it for a while. Then in 2006 I applied for and won a creative fellowship from the May Gibbs Children’s Literature Trust. This would have given me some time to write a manuscript...

Bad Characters

Winner of the 2010-2011 Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History. Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny and Murder and the Australian Imperial Force (Murdoch/Pier 9, Sydney, 2010) Bill Gammage’s The Broken Years of 1974 - one of the Ur-texts of the revival in Australian military history which has governed my professional career – included a group photograph which ten Australians deserters sent to the Provost Marshal (the...

About me

Peter Stanley is an award winning historian and writer who has published twenty-five books and who is a Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. In 2011 Peter’s book Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force (Murdoch Books/Pier 9, Sydney, 2010) was jointly awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History. His agent is Diana Hill of Crimson Lane.

Recent Blog Posts

Here you will find my latest blog posts...

Jan 31, 2012

One pound equals…

The other day I was asked to write a puff for an author whom I admire and a book I very...