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Peter Stanley

Peter Stanley
Peter Stanley is a Research Professor at UNSW Canberra and the author of about thirty books, many of them on military history.

Peter Stanley reviews 'Diggers and Greeks: The Australian campaigns in Greece and Crete' by Maria Hill

May 2010, no. 321 01 May 2010
Late in 1944 Richard Turner was at last able to come home. A Sydney taxi driver, he had been captured in Greece in June 1941. Like 2,000 other Australians, he missed the last boats to leave. Though captured by the Germans, he soon escaped to join the andartes – partisans fighting the Germans in Greece’s rugged interior. With the Germans pulling out, British officers managed to contact Richard ... (read more)

Peter Stanley reviews 'Death or Liberty: Rebels and radicals transported to Australia 1788–1868' by Tony Moore

September 2010, no. 324 01 September 2010
On the shelves of Australia’s bookshops colonial history follows military history in popularity, though a distant second. While, say, Allen & Unwin has made brave efforts with a succession of books about the convict period – Hamish Maxwell-Stewart’s Closing Hell’s Gates (2008), Babette Smith’s Australia’s Birthstain (2008) or Grace Karskens’s The Colony (2009) – not one (not ev ... (read more)

Peter Stanley reviews 'Unnecessary Wars' by Henry Reynolds

June–July 2016, no. 382 23 May 2016
In 1885 the Singleton MHA and Militia officer Albert Gould reflected that, New South Wales having sent a contingent to fight for the empire in the Sudan, 'we shall be expected to do it again'. (Henry Reynolds, reliably casual about Dead White Men, just calls him 'AJ Gould'.) But indeed they did; next in South Africa in 1899, the subject of Reynolds's Unnecessary Wars, and again and again. Reynolds ... (read more)