Peter Rees is an author specialising in Australian military history. His books have also included politics, biography and true crime. His career began inauspiciously as a copyboy on the Daily and Sunday Telegraph in 1966 when the proprietor, Sir Frank Packer, sent him to the David Jones food hall in Sydney to collect freshly shucked oysters for his lunch.
A circuitous route took him from Sydney to Wagga Wagga, Melbourne and Canberra to work in the federal parliamentary press gallery during the Gorton-McMahon-Whitlam years, and then the Hawke-Keating and Howard years in government. He worked as federal political correspondent for the Melbourne Sun-News Pictorial, the Western Mail, the West Australian and the Sunday Telegraph.
books
A Week In September
Coming soon - July 2021
A POW on the Burma Railway, Scott Heywood, wrote hundreds of letters to his wife, all the while knowing they could not be posted. This is his story of love and resilience.
The Missing Man
June 2018
He was our first Aboriginal fighter pilot, he flew multiple sorties during Australia’s World War II Pacific campaign, and he should have had a world of opportunity ahead of him at the war’s end, but Len Waters became the missing man in the country’s wartime flying history.
Anzac Girls
March 2016
Previously published as “The Other Anzacs”.
The harrowing, dramatic and profoundly moving story of the Australian and New Zealand nurses who served in the Great War.
Now a major six-part television series.
Bearing Witness
March 2015
A full biography of the man known as CEW Bean – war correspondent and official historian of World War I – that for the first time captures and portrays the essence of the man, his work, his influence on Australian history, and how Australians have seen themselves in the century since the Great War.
Lancaster Men
February 2015
The extraordinary story of the Aussie men of Bomber Command in the air and on the ground.
Anzac Girls
June 2014
Previously published as “The Other Anzacs”.
The harrowing, dramatic and profoundly moving story of the Australian and New Zealand nurses who served in the Great War.
Now a major six-part television series.
Lancaster Men
April 2013
The extraordinary story of the Aussie men of Bomber Command in the air and on the ground.
Desert Boys
August 2012
Australians fought in the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East in both World Wars. This is the very human story of those soldiers, sailors and airmen and their involvement in some of the toughest campaigns of modern times, and their life away from the battlefield.
Tim Fischer’s Outback Heroes
August 2003
Tim Fischer and Peter Rees tell the tales of some real outback heroes, their communities and their success in bouncing back from hardship to success. Full of canny thinking, hard work and a refusal to give up, these truly inspiring stories come from every corner of Australia.
Killing Juanita
February 2004
Description
On 4 July 1975, Juanita Nielsen, a wealthy heiress, Sydney newspaper publisher and anti-development campaigner left an appointment at a Kings Cross nightclub and simply disappeared. For a quarter of a century, the Juanita Nielsen case has remained one of Australia’s great unsolved mysteries.
The Boy from Boree Creek
August 2002
Description
A candid account of the life and career of Tim Fischer, one of Australia’s best-known and most respected politicians.
Other books and film
Inside the Vault
Lavishly illustrated, Inside the Vault reveals never-before-seen design sketches and photographs of rare Australian coins, along with stunning archival images of important events and people in the history of Australian coinage, starting from 1799.
Anzac Girls – Adapted into an ABC TV series
Six-part drama series following five young nurses serving with the Australian Army Nursing Service during the First World War.The girls encounter the brutal realities of war when they are sent to Egypt and the Greek island of Lemnos to treat officers from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps fighting in the Gallipoli campaign.After the Gallipoli evacuation the nurses are sent to France, as the war intensifies, to provide aid for those fighting on the Western Front.