BIOGRAPHY Australiana
- 210 p., [6] p. of plates : ill., music, ports. ; 23 cm. First Edition
- Ryan, Peter, 1923-2015
- Publishers and publishing — Australia — Biography
- Publishers and publishing — Australia — History — 20th century
- Peter Allen Ryan MM (4 September 1923 – 13 December 2015) was a newspaper columnist, author, World War II spy, director of Melbourne University Press and an officer of the Victorian Supreme Court.
- He served as an intelligence operative behind enemy lines in New Guinea for eighteen months, much of the time alone. He was awarded the Military Medal and mentioned in despatches.[3] His 1959 book Fear Drive My Feet is his famous account of his experiences
- In the September 1993 edition of Quadrant he wrote an attack on the six-volume History of Australia by Manning Clark, which Melbourne University Press had published between 1962 and 1987. Among other things he said Clark’s history was “over a million printed English words, probably unrivalled in their power to combine the non sequitur with the anticlimax, and to wring the last drops from a series of foregone conclusions”. The article aroused considerable controversy, which Ryan dealt with in a subsequent article in Quadrant in October 1994.