Roland Perry

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.

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 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: "I wanted to broaden my writing skills and applied everywhere for a job. I landed a position as the International Wool Secretariat's film's officer [in London]. This led to me working as a producer, script-writer and on-camera interviewer with some exceptional feature and documentary writers, including Tony Maylam and Jack Grossman."

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.

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.

Perry worked for three years part-time on his first book, a fictional thriller, Program for a Puppet, which was first published in the UK by W. H. Allen in May 1979 and then Crown in US in 1980.

Newgate Callendar in The New York Times called it "altogether an exciting story... an exciting panorama."

Publishers Weekly (US) said: "In a slick, convincing manner, Perry welds high-tech with espionage."

In an interview on Sydney radio a decade after the publication of Program for a Puppet, Perry spoke about learning more from the negative reviews for his first fiction book than the good reviews: "Some were a bit cranky; some were patronising, but they were all in some way instructive. One thought the writing was 'too high mileage.' Another spoke of a 'staccato' style. I recall another mentioning that it was, at times, like a film script. One reviewer thought I had two good thrillers in one, which had merit. I did meld two big themes that may have been better separated. But you don't really know what you are doing on a first fiction. I did all the heavy research, 'forty ways to pick a lock', that sort of thing."

The author's second novel, Blood is a Stranger was set in Australia's Arnhem Land and Indonesia.

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.'

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.

In 1984, while briefly back in Australia, Perry wrote and directed some of the documentary series Strike Swiftly about Australia's reservist military force.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Perry told ABC Radio's Australia Overnights program on 16 August 2008 that he was "fortunate to have strong mentors at the beginning of my career. I was hired by the legendary editor Graham Perkin. My first editor was Les Carlyon [who went on to write Gallipoli], who was an early influence. Carlyon was always over-worked but managed to find time for advice if requested, and that was valuable early [in the career]."

In 2011, Perry was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia "for services to literature as an author."

The same year Monash University awarded him a fellowship for "high achievement as a writer, author, film producer and journalist."

Perry's sports books include biographies of Sir Donald Bradman, Steve Waugh, Keith Miller, and Shane Warne.

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.

In 2015, Perry began 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.