Peter Stanley

At exactly 1.30 p.m. on 1 September 1918, the dozen men of Nine Platoon, 21st Australian Infantry Battalion, rose from Elsa Trench and walked across a weedy beet-field toward the German defenders of Mont St Quentin. Within hours, three were dead and five more were wounded, one of whom died six weeks later. The survivors returned from war, more-or-less intact,...

In 1945, the small island of Tarakan off Borneo's coast became the unlikely stage for one of the Second World War's most gruelling campaigns. As part of General Douglas MacArthur's plan to liberate the Netherlands Indies, Australian soldiers launched Operation Oboe One, a mission to capture Tarakan’s airstrip. What was meant to last three weeks stretched into two months of...

Australian civilians worked for decades supporting the survivors and orphans of the Armenian Genocide. 24 April 1915 marks the beginning of two great epics of the First World War. It was the day the allied invasion forces set out for Gallipoli, and it marked the beginning of what became the Genocide of the Ottoman Empire's Armenians. For the first time,...

What does Australia's military history reveal about us? In Beyond the Broken Years, fifty years after The Broken Years, Bill Gammage's classic on World War One soldiers was published, provocative military historian Peter Stanley argues why it's vital for Australians to understand how our military past has been created. By whom, how, and with what consequences. Stanley explores military history...

The year 1913 was a fascinating and important time for Australians, although the events of the following year have tended to cast a retrospective shadow over it. In places as far apart as Antarctica, Papua and Great Britain, Australian ambitions were high; the new navy was a source of national pride; the arts flourished and the motor car and movies...

English Is ... English for the Australian Curriculum Year 9 & eBookPLUS offers a creative approach to learning, inspiring students to embrace the English language in all its variations while developing key skills in reading, understanding, and creating. The series includes structured inquiry into the big ideas or concepts that support English, underpinned by the skills needed for literate citizenship....

Australians remember the dead of 25 April 1915 on Anzac Day every year. But do we know the name of a single soldier who died that day? What do we really know about the men supposedly most cherished in the national memory of war? Peter Stanley goes looking for the Lost Boys of Anzac: the men of the very first...

The island of New Aachen is a hotbed of turmoil, with more than just the enemy in the firing line. In May 1945, as Europe celebrates the end of WWII, the Pacific theatre remains a brutal battleground. On the remote Pacific Island of New Aachen, the site of a massacre of Australian troops three years prior, tensions run high. David...