Roland Perry

In 2020, Allen & Unwin published Perry's Red Lead: The Naval Cat with Nine Lives. Red Lead was ship's cat on HMAS Perth and survived its sinking in 1942 and life in Changi and on the Thai-Burma railway. The Australian Naval Institute reviewer said

Tea and Scotch with Bradman was published in 2019 and is a memoir of Perry's close relationship with Bradman.

In 2018, ABC Books also published Anzac Sniper: The extraordinary story of Stan Savige---From Gallipoli Marksman to WWII General.

In 2016, Perry published Celeste: Courtesan, countess, bestselling author (Harper Collins / ABC Books). It is the story of Celeste Venard, a downtrodden French woman whose drive, intelligence, sensuality and writing skills drove her to be France's bestselling author in the 1850s with the fictional publication about an Australian gold rush, Voleur D'Or.

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.

October 2014 saw publication of The Queen, Her Lover and the Most Notorious Spy in History, in which Perry claimed that Queen Victoria had an illicit affair with John Elphinstone, 13th Lord Elphinstone, Captain of the Horse Guards and President of Madras, and Bombay during the Indian Uprising of 1857–58.

In 2013, Perry's Horrie the War Dog was published. It is the true story of another maverick Australian character, Jim Moody, who saved a starving puppy in the Libyan Desert in WWII. The terrier, named Horrie, in turn saved the lives of countless Australian soldiers by acting as a canine early-warning system when he barked to warn them of attacking German Stuka planes. It mirrors the earlier book Horrie the Wog Dog, authored by Ion Idriess.

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 October 2012, Perry's Pacific 360: Australia's Fight For Survival in World War II, was published by Hachette Australia. The same month saw publication of Bill the Bastard: Australia's Greatest War Horse, billed as "dramatised non-fiction". It was chosen as one of 50 top reads in 2013 in the national "Get Reading" program. This is the story of Australia's greatest war-horse, and is featured in a documentary The Walers broadcast by ABC TV in April 2015. The feature film rights have been optioned by Australian producer/director Simon Wincer.

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 The Changi Brownlow is set in Changi prison and on the Thai-Burma railway in WW2. It features Peter Chitty, a non-combatant ambulance driver who had exceptional mental and physical fortitude. It was published in August 2010 and reached Australia's top ten best-seller list, and, similar to The Australian Light Horse was number one in the categories 'Military and History' for six months The Changi Brownlow was short-listed for the Australian Booksellers Industry Awards for non-fiction (2010).

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. 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 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." 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." John Hamilton reviewing in the Herald Sun said: "Perry conjures up the romantic image of the Light Horse that endures to this day."

ABC TV's Australian Story interviewed Perry extensively for a two-part series on Miller, which borrowed heavily from Miller’s Luck. It was broadcast over two nights in April 2009.

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In amongst his six books on WW1 and WW2, Perry made a departure to write a biography on Australian yachtsman, Rolly Tasker, titled Sailing to the Moon (published by Pennon Publishing in 2008).

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.

But David Frith, writing in The Cricketer, said: "Unfortunately, Roland Perry’s work here is anything but confidence-inspiring. He is an opportunistic author, Don Bradman, Shane Warne and Steve Waugh being among his previous subjects, together with a book on Australia's captains which gave the world nothing that the painstaking Ray Robinson had not already dealt with, apart from the update...the book is strewn with errors that undermine confidence in the work as a whole." And Martin Williamson, writing on Cricinfo, labelled this book as one of the two worst books of the year, saying it "polluted 2006". He said that its "lack of attention to detail made its unsavoury dredging of Miller's private life even less palatable".

Perry's 20th book was The Ashes: A Celebration. The Age's Steven Carroll wrote: "Having written voluminously before on cricket and cricketers... his knowledge on the game is formidable... he’s an authoritative observer, not shy... and a very entertaining read." Kit Galer in the Melbourne Herald Sun wrote: "This book serves as an excellent primer for those whose interest in the game was aroused by Australia’s defeat last year (2005)."

Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 2001 said of the Waugh biography

Perrry's biography of Shane Warne, Bold Warnie, was published in 1998 and followed in 2000 by Waugh’s Way: Steve Waugh—learner, leader, legend and Captain Australia, A History of the Celebrated Captains of Australian Test Cricket.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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".

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'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.

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."

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'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 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:

Captain Australia covered every Australian skipper (except for Ricky Ponting) since Test cricket began. Each chapter carried a mini-biography of the 41 leaders. Each reviewer seemed to have a chapter that stood out for them. For The Age, Melbourne 'the most interesting' was on the 34th captain, Ian Chappell, entitled Larrikin Leader, which notes cultural and political connections between Chappell, Bob Hawke, the advertising guru John Singleton, 1970s 'ockerism,’ and the promotion of WSC (World Series Cricket, sponsored by Kerry Packer.) The Herald Sun noted: "There are some good stories in Captain Australia... The chapter on Greg Chappell gives wonderful insight into the genius of Sir Donald Bradman." Cricket magazine Inside Edge wrote: "The appeal of Captain Australia... will be the detail on captains most of us never saw such as Murdoch, Blackham, Armstrong, Woodfull and Richardson... It’s a valuable addition to our cricketing canon." Robin Marlar wrote in The Cricketer International: "Perry is a prolific, stylish writer... What lifted this book for me was the 24-page prologue on a fascinating character, Charles Lawrence, the immigrant from England who took on the embryonic Australian establishment and brought the first, if not quite the only team of Aboriginals to England in 1868."

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's 22nd book (10th on cricket) was the fourth in a series of five volumes drawn from his years of interviews with Sir Donald Bradman—Bradman’s Invincibles. The Sydney Morning Herald noted: "This is a wonderful insider’s view of the (1948 Ashes) series... Perry is a good, unpretentious writer and the story he has to tell is one of courage and drama... It is a great Australian yarn." Adrian Nesbitt in Sydney's Sun Herald wrote: "Perry paints an excellent background picture of a tour that is remembered by Australians as a triumph over the mother country, often without consideration that England was still bearing the scars of war... Perry creates suspenseful moments, in the dressing-room and on the field... His meticulous approach gives us a great understanding of the subtleties and room for instinct that were Bradman trademarks." Teri Louise Kelly in Independent Weekly said, "Perry’s work, much like Bradman himself, is head and shoulders above the competition... Bradman’s Invincibles leads the reader into the dusty backrooms, on to windy training pitches and mid-Test; beautifully written and accompanies by excellent photographs." David Stanley in Cricket Boundary Magazine commented: "Bradman’s Invincibles is required reading for all cricket lovers, particularly those of the younger brigade who may not know much about the players, apart from Bradman, who made up his remarkable team... It is a good read and I recommend it."

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."

Bradman divulged to Perry his world's best cricket team selection from all cricketers who had played the game since Tests began in 1877 to the end of 2000. The book, Bradman’s Best (Random House) was published simultaneously in Australia and the UK in 2001. The UK Observer's Norman Harris noted that the book "containing the 11 precious names will be guarded like gold bars." However, Warwick Franks wrote: "Perry's reverential approach turns the process into Moses bringing down the tablets from Mount Sinai. To Perry, Bradman is without spot or stain so that much of his writing, as in the earlier biography, takes on the air of hagiography. As a selector, Bradman is presented as sagacious, prescient and fearless, but his work is never subjected to any critical scrutiny." Franks also said that the book contained many factual errors.