Peter Wesley-Smith

However, while much of his work was serious, often dealing with tragic issues and events, it also incorporated humour, usually in the form of satire and irony. They said in an interview in 2005:

Peter Wesley-Smith (born 10 June 1945) is an Australian librettist and legal scholar. He often worked as the librettist with his identical twin brother, composer Martin Wesley-Smith on work that crosses a range of musical styles, including choral music, operas, computer music, music theatre, chamber and orchestral music, and audiovisual pieces that integrate words, music and images. Wordsmith Peter Wesley-Smith and composer Martin Wesley-Smith were known as Australia's counterparts to "Ira and George Gershwin” Two main themes dominated the Wesley-Smith collaborations: the life, work and ideas of Lewis Carroll as portrayed in their rock opera BOOJUM!, and the plight of the people of East Timor.

Peter and Martin Wesley-Smith were both conscripted to go to Vietnam, but avoided military service by undertaking studies until conscription ended. Peter avoided conscription by studying law and history at the University of Adelaide followed by a Commonwealth Fellowship to earn a D.Phil. from the University of Hong Kong which, beyond fulfilling his natural predilection for research, delayed induction into the Australian army until national conscription was abolished. His Ph.D. thesis was published by Oxford University Press as Unequal Treaty 1898-1997 (1980, revised in 1998) and became a resource for the discussions that took place from the 1970s through the 1990s on the future of Hong Kong. It was referred to by the British negotiators, and the Chinese government had it translated into Chinese and a hundred copies distributed to cadres involved in the negotiation process. He also wrote a Reference to the Hong Kong Legal System published by Oxford University Press Peter Wesley-Smith served as Dean of the Faculty of Law of the University of Hong Kong from 1993 to 1996.