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 over twenty 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. His writing expresses his concern to integrate operational and social approaches within military history.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. 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.

Dr Stanley has expressed differing personal views about the legacy of Australia's wartime Prime Minister John Curtin and has admitted that originally he was in error. At a "Remembering 1942" conference at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra in 2002 Dr Stanley said:

“Curtin did not save Australia from any real threat. Instead, one of the lasting legacies of his whipping up of the fear of invasion has been a persistent heritage of bogus invasion stories.”

But on Friday September 5 2008 Peter Stanley recanted that view to ABC presenter Richard Glover on ABC Radio 702 Sydney:

"I am at a disagreement with myself. In 2002 I was arguing that Curtin was motivating the people by gingering them up about a possibility that there was an invasion and that that was quite a deliberate manipulation. And I have to say that I have changed my mind on that.

"In the research for this book ("Invading Australia") over the last couple of years, I gained a deeper appreciation and a greater respect for John Curtin. And I now believe that he was absolutely sincere. Deluded perhaps, but sincere and he wasn't manipulating at all."

Dr Stanley commented further on his change of opinion over John Curtin's legacy on the ABC's Unleashed online opinion section:

"My fundamental argument in responding is to suggest that you won't get a lot of mileage out of saying 'ah ha! Stanley changes his tune between 2002 and 2008.' Of course I change my mind. My starting position is that when confronted with fresh evidence I modify my stance, providing it's persuasive. I changed my mind about Curtin as I read and thought more. Inconsistency in this is a virtue. I don't believe in taking a position and defending it to the death."

Later he wrote on the ABC's Unleashed website on 15 September 2008:

"Each time my ideas changed as I read more of the evidence and the relevant literature. Each time I wrote or spoke in good faith, willing to engage with and respond to criticisms. Why should I apologise for revising my arguments as I went?" On ABC Radio's Saturday Extra programme in Sydney on August 30 2008 Peter Stanley also said:

"When I first started to talk about this (Australians fear of Japan) I was quite dismissive. I'd like to think this book addresses that dismissiveness. That flaw."

Peter Stanley's current projects include a forthcoming book on indiscipline in the Great War - Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force (Murdoch Books/Pier 9, Sydney, 2010)-a fiction book for children, 'Simpson's Donkey', 'Fortitude', a revised popular edition of For Fear of Pain, and a book looking at the Australian experience of the Great war told entirely through the lives and words of people called Smith or Schmidt. In his work at the National Museum of Australia he is writing a book about the effects of the 2009 bushfires on a small rural community in Victoria, 'Black Saturday at Steels Creek'.

Books

• Commando to Colditz: Micky Burn's Journey to the Far Side of Tears - The Raid on St Nazaire (Murdoch/Pier 9, Australia, 2009)
• Men of Mont St Quentin: Between Victory and Death (Scribe, Australia, 2009)
• A Stout Pair of Boots: A Guide to Exploring Australia's Battlefields (Allen & Unwin Australia, 2008)
• Invading Australia: Japan and the Battle for Australia, 1942 (Viking Penguin, 2008)
• Borneo, 1942-1945, Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Canberra, 2005
• Quinn's Post: Anzac, Gallipoli (Allen & Unwin Australia, 2005. ISBN 1741143322)
• Whyalla at War 1939-45 (Whyalla City Council, 2004)
• For Fear of Pain: British Surgery 1790-1850 (Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, in association with the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, 2003)
• (with others) Stolen Years: Australian Prisoners of War, Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Canberra, 2002
• White Mutiny: British Military Culture in India, 1825-75 (Christopher Hurst & Co, London/New York University Press, 1998. ISBN 1850653305)
• Tarakan: an Australian Tragedy (Allen & Unwin Australia, 1997)
• (with Mark Johnston) Alamein: the Australian Story, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2002 & 2006
• Rosemary and Wattle: the Roll of Honour, Hall of Memory and Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier at the Australian War Memorial, Australian War Memorial, 1993
• The Remote Garrison: the British Army in Australia, 1788-1870, Kangaroo Press, Sydney, 1987
• Air Battle Europe 1939-45, Time-Life Books, Sydney, 1987
• (with Michael McKernan) Anzac Day 70 years on, Collins, Sydney, 1986
• A Guide to the Australian War Memorial, John Ferguson, Sydney, 1986
• (with others), Roll Call! A Guide to Genealogical Sources in the Australian War Memorial, AWM, 1986
• Bomber Command, Hodder & Staughton, Sydney, 1985
• (ed.) But little glory: the New South Wales contingent to the Sudan, 1885, Military Historical Society of Australia, Canberra, 1985
• (with Michael McKernan) Australians at War, 1885-1972: photographs from the collection of the Australian War Memorial, Collins, Sydney, 1984
• (ed.) What did you do in the war, Daddy?, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1983

Selected articles

• Threat made manifest (Griffith Review, Spring 2005, pp. 13-24)
• The men who did the fighting are now all busy writing: Australian post-mortems on defeat in Malaya and Singapore, 1942-45 in B Farrell and S Hunter (eds), Sixty Years On: the Fall of Singapore Revisited (Eastern Universities Press, Singapore, 2003)
• Great in adversity: Indian prisoners of war in New Guinea (Journal of the Australian War Memorial, 2002, no. 37)
• Diversity of visitors, diversity of interpretation: the Australian War Memorial's Second World War gallery, in D McIntyre and K Wehner (eds), National Museums Negotiating Histories (Canberra, 2001)
• Military culture and military protest: the Bengal Europeans and the "White Mutiny" of 1859, in J Hathaway (ed.), Rebellion, Repression, Reinvention: Mutiny in Comparative Perspective (Prager, Westort, 2001)
• ‘The green hole: exploring our neglect of the New Guinea campaigns of 1943-44’, Sabretache: Journal of the Military Historical Society of Australia, Apr-Jun 1993, pp. 3-11
• A horn to put your powder in: interpreting artefacts of British soldiers in colonial Australia (Journal of the Australian War Memorial, Oct 1988, pp. 13-29)
• Soldiers and fellow countrymen in colonial Australia', in Margaret Browne and Michael McKernan, Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace (Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1988)