Jeffrey Grey | |
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Jeffrey Grey at ADFA graduation ceremonies in 1999
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Born | Jeffrey Guy Grey 19 March 1959 |
Died | 26 July 2016 Queanbeyan, New South Wales |
(aged 57)
Nationality | Australian |
Fields | Military History |
Institutions |
University of New South Wales Marine Corps University |
Alma mater |
Australian National University University of New South Wales |
Thesis | British Commonwealth Forces in the Korean War: A study of a military alliance relationship (1985) |
Doctoral advisor | Peter Dennis |
Jeffrey Guy Grey (19 March 1959 – 26 July 2016) was an Australian military historian. He wrote two volumes of The Official History of Australia's Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975, and several other high-profile works on Australia's military history. He was the first non-American to become the president of the Society for Military History, but is perhaps best known as the author of A Military History of Australia (first edition 1990).
Jeffrey Guy Grey was born on 19 March 1959, the son of Ron Grey, an Australian Army officer and his wife Patricia. He had two sisters, Penny and Gina. His family was a military one; his father eventually reached the rank of major general, and two of his uncles became brigadiers. Raised as an Army brat, he moved about frequently; but lived most of his early life in Canberra, where he settled. He entered the Australian National University, from which he graduated in 1983, and joined the Faculty of Military Studies at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, as a teaching fellow. He completed his doctorate there under the supervision of Peter Dennis, writing his 1985 thesis on "British Commonwealth forces in the Korean War: a study of a military alliance relationship".
Grey joined the Historical Section of the Department of Foreign Affairs, but returned to the University of New South Wales at the new Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) campus in 1988, and became a professor there in 2003. Over the years he taught thousands of cadets and midshipmen, and supervised numerous postgraduate students. He wrote prolifically about the Korean War and the Vietnam War. With Peter Dennis he wrote about the Indonesian Confrontation in Emergency and Confrontation (1996), a volume of The Official History of Australia's Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975, and was the sole author of another volume in the series, Up Top (1998), which detailed the role of the Royal Australian Navy in the Malayan Emergency, the Indonesian Confrontation and the Vietnam War. He was perhaps best known as the author of A Military History of Australia (fist edition 1990), a widely used single-volume textbook.