Peter Stanley
Prof. Peter Stanley of UNSW Canberra is one of Australia’s most active military historians and the author of 40 books. His Bad Characters jointly won the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History in 2011.
Peter's recent articles
17 January 2024
The living and the dead: Gaza war cemetery
Gaza is surely now among the internets most recognisable words, for obvious reasons. It used to be far less familiar to Australians. Up to about 1948, if they knew it at all it was as the place where the Biblical blinded Samson pulled down the temple, or where the Light Horse fought in 1917 to carry the British empires war against the Ottomans from Sinai into Palestine. In 1943, Australians serving in the 9th Division fresh from their victory at El Alamein paraded there proudly, before returning to fight the Japanese.
18 July 2023
The Native Mounted Police: extermination on the Australian frontier
Native Mounted Police took a leading part in conflict on the Australian frontier. As police they are supposedly ineligible to be included in the Australian War Memorial: but why not? They acted as mercenary cavalry, Australias own extermination squads.
31 August 2022
The Australian War Memorial goes AWOL
The little world of Australian military historians is talking about Daniel Lanes The Digger of Kokoda and the resurgence of the debate over whether the Australian War Memorial should recognise Frontier Conflict. The two are connected by the Memorials reprehensible silence.
8 August 2022
Time to tell the truth at the Australian War Memorial
Imagine an Australia where government agencies operated according to grossly outdated ideas. The Department of Health still accepts the theory of Humours regulating the body; Treasury tries to keep to the Gold Standard; Defence believes in the Domino theory.
24 April 2022
A strange Anzac day
Its what Australian military historians tend to call Anzac season the weeks preceding the one day of the year when they get asked to speak on talk-back radio about current anniversaries (there are always a couple), or to discuss how Anzac seems to be both changing and un-changing. But this year, Anzac season seems somehow different.
16 February 2022
Remembering Darwin ... and Timor, February 1942
While 150 Australians died in the Timor campaign, 40,000 Timorese paid the real price. Has Australia made good the price in blood that they paid? We owe Timor a debt.
24 April 2021
Anzac: a tale of two nations
National days are usually by their nature, you might think exclusive. No one but the USA celebrates 4 July. Even when nations share a date (as Australia and India share 26 January) they are not the same occasion. 25 April Anzac Day is perhaps the only national day celebrated in common by two nations.
20 February 2021
Remembering Darwin and ...
On a warm Thursday morning 79 years ago, on 19 February 1942, two forces of Japanese bombers swept over the Arafura Sea to drop bombs on Darwin...When Australians remember the bombing of Darwin which they should as a shocking and potentially portentous event in Australias history, they might also consider the sufferings of the people of Timor, and Australias part in it.