Roland John Perry OAM (born 11 October 1946) is an Australian author and historian. His work includes three works of fiction and more than twenty documentary films. His book Monash: The Outsider Who Won the War was awarded the Fellowship of Australian Writers' Melbourne University Publishing Award in 2004 and described as "a model of the biographer's art."Fellowship of Australian Writers, 2004, FAW National Literary Awards 2004 , accessed 16 July 2009
In 2011, Perry was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia "for services to literature as an author."It's an Honour. Retrieved 27 October 2014 The same year Monash University awarded him a fellowship for "high achievement as a writer, author, film producer and journalist."Monash University, 2011 , accessed 12 October 2011
Perry's sports books include biographies of Sir Donald Bradman, Steve Waugh, Keith Miller, and Shane Warne. He has also written on espionage, specialising in the British Cambridge Five ring of Russian agents and he has been a member of the National Archives of Australia Advisory Council since 2006.National Archives of Australia, 2011 , accessed 18 July 2011
In late 2012, Perry accepted an adjunct appointment at Monash University as a professor, with the title Writer-in-Residence, in the university's Arts Faculty.Monash University, National Centre for Australian Studies, School of Journalism, Australian and Indigenous Studies, Faculty of Arts, 2012
Career Roland Perry began his writing career at the age of 22 on The Age, where he worked from January 1969 to June 1973. He studied economics at Monash University, and journalism and journalism law at Melbourne University. He won the Exhibition Prize in Journalism at Melbourne in 1969, and was awarded the Frederick Blackham Scholarship Award.
Perry told ABC Radio's Australia Overnights program on 16 August 2008 that he was
Perry said he also had luck when tackling his secondary career as a film script-writer in London where he lived and worked for 12 years from mid-1973:
Grossman was involved with Arts for Labour, a movement which supported the UK Labour Party, then led by Neil Kinnock, in its bid to unseat Margaret Thatcher as UK Prime Minister. Grossman was commissioned to make Labour's televised party political broadcasts, which Perry scripted and helped to produce.
In 1984, while briefly back in Australia, Perry wrote and directed some of the documentary series Strike Swiftly about Australia's reservist military force. It was broadcast by ABC in 1985. Three years later he joined forces with Tim Burstall to write a TV mini-series based on Perry's biography of Wilfred Burchett, The Exile.
Perry covered three US presidential campaigns, in 1976, 1980, and 1984, primarily for newspapers and magazines in the United Kingdom including The Times and The Sunday Times. This led to a series of political articles for Penthouse Magazine UK and a documentary on the election of Ronald Reagan titled The Programming of the President.'The Crisis Machine', Penthouse Magazine UK, Volume 19 No 6, June 1984. See Perry’s articles 'Candidate Reagan', UK Sunday Times, 29 April 1984 and 'The Man Who Monitored the World During a Crisis,’ Computing UK, 24 May 1984; 'Caed Mile Demos' by Paddy Prendiville, Sunday Tribune, Ireland 29 April 1984; 'The Programming of the President,’ Andrew Casey, Sydney Sun-Herald, 19 August 1984; 'Pollsters: ignore them at your peril,’ Business Review Weekly, Australia 3–9 November 1984; 'Strategists use programs to put politicians in power,’ by Bill Johnston, The Australian, 27 November 1984. The one hour documentary produced by Grossman and Perry was 'The Programming of the President,’ Program Film Productions, 1984. Perry's book on that subject, Hidden Power: The Programming of the President, was published in 1984 in the UK and the US. At this time, he also wrote a book for French publishers, Elections sur Ordinateur (Elections on Computer), which was well received in France and covered the marketing of political candidates in Europe.
In 1991, Perry was commissioned by the Weekend Australian Magazine to write a feature about an Australian syndicate attempting to raise the treasure from a sunken galleon off the coast of Guam. He returned with a film crew to make a documentary entitled The Raising of a Galleon’s Ghost.
Fiction Perry's first book, a novel, Program for a Puppet, was first published in the UK by W. H. Allen in May 1979 and then Crown in US in 1980.; In the US entitled Newgate Callendar in The New York Times called it "altogether an exciting story... an exciting panorama."Newgate Callendar, New York Times, 1 September 1980. Publishers Weekly (US) said: "In a slick, convincing manner, Perry welds high-tech with espionage."Publishers Weekly, US 18 June 1980.
In an interview on Sydney radio a decade after its publication, Perry spoke about learning more from the negative reviews for his first fiction book than the good reviews:
The author's second novel, Blood is a Stranger, was set in Australia's Arnhem Land and Indonesia.Blood is a Stranger, William Heinemann, Australia, 1988; This covered the 'issue' of the misuse of uranium mining and dangers of nuclear weapons, a theme in Perry's early writing and documentary film-making. Stephen Knight in The Sydney Morning Herald wrote: Blood is a Stranger is a skilful and thoughtful thriller... with a busy plot and some interesting, unnerving speculations about what might be going on in the world of lasers, yellowcake (uranium mining and manufacture) and Asian politics—things that most people prefer to ignore in favour of more simple and familiar puzzles.''From Mulga Ashtray to Mainstream,’ by Stephen Knight, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 June 1988.
Roland Perry returned to fiction and a pet theme — nuclear weapons — in his third novel Faces in the Rain (1990). Set mainly in Melbourne and Paris, he used the first person to expose the nefarious activities of the French in testing and developing nuclear weapons in the Pacific.Faces in the Rain, Mandarin Publishing, Australia, 1990;
In 2015, Perry began releasing a three-book 'Assassin' fiction series. In the first two, The Honourable Assassin and The Assassin on the Bangkok Express, he tackled the operations of Mexican drug cartels and their operations in South East Asia. The third in the series, The Shaman was published in February 2021.
Non-fiction Perry's Hidden Power (1984) followed the factual theme in Program for a Puppet on the way the American public was manipulated into voting for candidates by slick computer-based campaigns. Hidden Power concentrated on the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. The book explained how advertising techniques had been superseded in elections by more sophisticated methods, including marketing and computer analysis. The book, as much narrative as analysis, told how the two key campaign pollsters steered their candidates. It was not critical of Reagan, but was seen by the Republican campaign as hostile to him.Computers Maketh the President, by Caroline Wilson, Melbourne Herald, 24 August 1984.
In the UK, The Economist opined that the book had a "frightening message: the pollsters with their state-of-the-art computers, which keep a finger on the pulse of the electorate, hope they can manipulate almost any election and have ambitions to control what the people’s choice can do in office."The Economist 7 September 1984. Oliver Pritchett in the Sunday Telegraph thought the book's main concept was "an alarming idea, and the author... plainly intends to give us the shivers."UK Sunday Telegraph, Oliver Pritchett, 15 July 1984.
Perry's book The Exile, about Australian journalist, Wilfred Burchett, was published in 1988. Perry based the book on the 1974 defamation trial, when Burchett sued Jack Kane of the Democratic Labour Party for calling him a KGB agent.The Exile: Burchett, Reporter of Conflict, William Heinemann, Australia, 1988; Stuart Macintyre dismissed the book as "a hostile life by ... a far less distinguished journalist who then turned his attention to John Monash and Don Bradman".
The Fifth Man For his seventh book, published in 1994, Perry set out to discover the identity of the alleged fifth man in the Cambridge Five spy ring, most commonly thought to be John Cairncross. All members of the ring worked for the Soviet Union's KGB under the control of Yuri Ivanovitch Modin.
After initial research, Perry presented a 20,000-word evidentiary statement to William Armstrong of Sedgwick & Jackson UK, who had published various books on espionage, notably by British journalist Chapman Pincher. Armstrong had been caught up in circumstances surrounding the MI5 agent Peter Wright, who published Spycatcher. The Fifth Man was published during an avalanche of spy book collaborations.Spies Without Cloaks: The KGB’s Successors; Knight, Amy, Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press, US, 1996.
The book named Victor Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild, as the fifth member of the ring, the other four being Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, and Sir Anthony Blunt. Reviews were mixed. The Irish Times said, "Few writers on espionage achieve the page-turning fluency of Roland Perry."'Victor Ludorum,’ by Kiernan Fagan, The Irish Times; 10 November 1994. whilst The Weekend Australian said "it only takes a couple of phone calls to establish that the Rothschild operation had been pretty small beer for a long time."Richard Hall, The Weekend Australian, 14 January 1995. Norman Abjorensen in The Sunday Canberra Times wrote: "Perry makes a plausible case that the Fifth Man was... Rothschild... even from the most critical viewpoint it has to be conceded that the circumstantial evidence pointing to Rothschild is compelling."'Following the Moscow Line,’ by Norman Abjorensen, The Sunday Times Canberra, 22 January 1995. Christopher Hitchens was disparaging of both Perry's writing style and investigative ability, noting that he "would not know the difference between Bukharin and Bakunin, and makes the case that Victor Rothschild was a spy because he was a Jew."
Recent non-fiction Perry's Monash: The Outsider Who Won a War was a critically acclaimed WWI biography set on the Western Front. He subsequently turned his attention to the Eastern Front with the publication in 2009 of The Australian Light Horse, which comprised the dual part-biographies of General Sir Harry Chauvel and T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia). The book reached number one in the bestsellers list for the categories of 'Military' and 'History' in November 2009, and remained in that position for six months.The Australian’s Australian Literary Review, 3 February 2010, p 27. Paul Ham wrote of The Australian Light Horse in The Australian that it "must be rated the first great read about the victories of the Australian cavalry in Arabia."The Australian, 7–8 November 2009. The Age made the book a 'Pick of Week' and noted the author "emphasises the significance of the Light Horse achievement... it’s briskly written, well-researched popular history."The Age, 31 October 2009. Rod Moran in The West Australian called the book "an example of popular history at its best, with a compelling overview of the Australian Light Horse Regiments' exploits... what they achieved was quite remarkable."The West Australian, 27 October 2009. John Hamilton reviewing in the Herald Sun said: "Perry conjures up the romantic image of the Light Horse that endures to this day."Herald Sun, 31 October 2009.