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Roland Perry (born 1946) is a Melbourne-based author, best known for his books on cricket. He has written numerous books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Monash: The Outsider Who Won The War, which won "The Federation of Australian Writers Melbourne University Publishing Award" in 2004. Perry has also written biographies on Sir Donald Bradman, Steve Waugh, Keith Miller and Shane Warne among others. Perry recently published his twentieth book; The Ashes: A Celebration, a book commemorating The Ashes.

Perry is a member of the Advisory Council of the National Archives of Australia; the Sir John Monash Foundation; and a director of the Spirit of Australia Foundation. He is also a member of the Alliance Francaise, the Melbourne Cricket Club, the Melbourne Football Club, the RSL (Elwood Branch), and an honorary member of the Murrumbeena Football Club coterie.

Roland Perry began his writing career as a journalist on the Melbourne Age from 1969 to 1973. His first editor (in the paper’s business section) was Les Carlyon (later author of ‘Gallipoli’ and ‘The Great War’) under Editor-in-Chief Graham Perkin. While working on the paper, Perry gained an Economics Degree at Monash University (1970-1972) and studied at Melbourne University, winning the Exhibition Prize and Frederick Blackham Journalism Scholarship in the subject ‘Journalism’ in 1969. (His primary education was at Murrumbeena State School and secondary education at Scotch College, Melbourne.)

He moved to England in 1973 to further his writing career and spent five years making documentary films, notably with feature-director Tony Maylam and documentary producer, Jack Grossman. Grossman was involved with ‘Arts for Labour’ (the UK Labour Party) under Neil Kinnock in his bid to unseat Margaret Thatcher as UK Prime Minister. Grossman was commissioned to make Labour’s television political broadcasts (party commercials). He brought Perry in to help produce a controversial 10 minute party advertisement refuting Thatcher’s claim that she had primary control of all nuclear weapons on UK soil. The sensational clip suggested that the US President still maintained his ‘finger on the button’ concerning US Cruise Missiles based in the UK and aimed at the (then) Soviet Union. Thatcher was forced to defend her claims in a hostile Parliament.

FIRST FICTION

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.

The book became an international best-seller in paperback, primarily with Hamlyn in the UK and Pocket Books in the US. Program for a Puppet was translated into several languages, including German, Spanish, Japanese and Italian. Newgate Callendar in The New York Times called it ‘altogether an exciting story...an exciting panorama.’ Author Morris West sent the publisher a review, saying it was ‘a compelling read. I found the narrative fascinating.’ Publisher’s Weekly (US) said: ‘In a slick, convincing manner, Perry welds high-tech with espionage.’

Playboy Magazine said it was, ‘the story of the century, incorporating, assassination, corporate blackmail, terrorism, love, sex and death. A little bit of Forsyth, a dash of Arthur Hailey, this is a first rate story...a good read.’ The UK Guardian’s Tom Tickell said ‘Police chases and shoot-outs are a part of any thriller. Making them gripping enough to raise the heartbeat is far rarer but this book succeeds in doing it. The book has great pace and excitement...taut and extremely well written.’

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,’ he said, ‘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.’ In a further interview on ABC TV, when talking about his first novel, the author said he kept the story moving---Freddie Forsyth style---from city to city around the world. Characterisation was minimal. The plot was strong, but being a good ‘plotter’ and researcher were the least important elements, he claimed, of distinctive writing. Perry didn’t think he had a ‘voice’---or any strong confidence in what he was doing until book number 4, which seemed to be the general rule for authors. He remarked that he was fortunate ‘Program’ did so well. It allowed him to buy time to concentrate on developing a writing career.

The ‘film-script’ element was noticed. Screen International reviewed Program favourably, saying it was ‘eminently filmable...about big business, the CIA, the KGB, intrigue and assassination...Perry is a good writer and his involved story zips along at a nice pace. Can’t wait to see the film version!’ This attracted British producer Sir Lew Grade, who sought to option the film rights. But this coincided with his film version of the Titanic, which was a box-office flop. It sank hopes for future Grade productions, including the adaptation of Program for a Puppet.

JOURNALISM & CRISES

While based in the UK, Perry covered three US Presidential elections as a free-lance journalist in 1976 (Jimmy Carter v Gerald Ford); 1980 (Ronald Reagan v Jimmy Carter); and 1984 (Ronald Reagan v Walter Mondale.) His outlets were The Times, London; The UK Sunday Times; The UK Daily Telegraph; The UK Sunday Telegraph; The Guardian, UK; BBC TV and radio; TV Channel 4; radio LBC: Harpers & Queen; Penthouse; Columbia University Magazine; Time Out; Campaign Magazine UK; and Computing UK. (The author has written articles for all Australia’s leading papers and magazines over a 40 year span, 1969 to 2009, including The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Sunday Age, The Melbourne Herald Sun, the Sydney Daily Telegraph, the Brisbane Courier Mail, The Adelaide Advertiser and West Australian. He has also contributed to the Heritage Magazine and Medical Observer.)

One of the most striking features he wrote in those four decades appeared in Penthouse UK in 1984. This investigative article was based on interviews by Perry (in 1981, on camera with Jack Grossman directing) inside the White House. The key interviewee, Dr Richard Beal, explained how the US Government planned for world ‘crises’ long before they happened or might happen by using advanced ‘war-gaming’ techniques. These included how a ‘crisis’ might be created, for instance, to allow the US to go to war to protect its oil interests in the Middle East. The author believed that the Reagan administration was in an over-confident mood in 1981---soon after Reagan’s inauguration. In this atmosphere, he said, its guard was down. Nobody would have secured such footage or commentary, he claimed, at any time after 1981.

FIRST NON-FICTION, HIDDEN POWER

The author’s second book followed up on a factual theme in Program for a Puppet ---the way the American public was manipulated into voting for candidates by slick computer-based campaigns. Entitled Hidden Power: The Programming of the President it concentrated on the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The book explained how advertising techniques had been superceded in elections by more sophisticated methods, including marketing and computer analysis. It was published by Aurum Press in the UK and Beaufort in the US in 1984. The book, as much narrative as analysis, told how the two key campaign ‘pollsters’ steered their candidates. It was not critical of President Ronald Reagan, but was seen by the Republican campaign as hostile to him.

In mid-1984 Perry received a phone call ‘from someone saying he was an American student interested in doing a thesis on the book,’ the author told Melbourne Herald’s Caroline Wilson in an interview in London, ‘I thought it seemed a bit strange so I asked him to leave a number. When I rang back I found it was the headquarters of the Reagan-Bush re-election committee. My publishers had a few phone calls like that and just started playing along without giving too much away.’

Perry said that Republican and Reagan pollster, Dr Richard (‘Dick’) Wirthlin, used his lawyers to attempt to stop Perry from promoting the book in the US. The author and his publishers went ahead with a 20 city promotional tour. He had a rollercoaster ride during the second election of Reagan in 1984.

Hidden Power had a good run of reviews during the early campaign election months. US Publishers Weekly said: ‘An alarming expose of the political mass manipulation made possible by modern technology.’ John Barkham Reviews said, ‘This is a landmark book form Americans. They should read, mark, learn, and remember come November.’ ALA’s Booklist commented: ‘An authoritative, behind-the-scenes study of political polling in America.’ Sydney Blumenthal (later a key advisor in the Clinton Presidency), a polling expert who had written his own well-received tome, The Permanent Campaign, wrote: ‘Roland Perry’s book is a wonderfully revealing tour guide for anyone planning to travel to the polls on election day.’

The San Francisco Chronicle noted that ‘Hidden Power presents a frightening view of the process by which we elect public officials. This is a fascinating book.’ Library Journal was also positive: ‘This is a timely and interesting account of a new breed of political technocrats.’ ‘Fascinating and timely’ was also the Houston Post’s refrain with the added poser: ‘How should a President conduct his administration, by consensus or conviction?’

Publisher Beaufort took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times Sunday Book review section citing a selection of these reviews. Conservative journalist Jack Honomichl in (US) Advertising Age attacked the book. He found the subject ‘fascinating’ but called it ‘chock full of hyperbole.’ Newsweek dismissed it saying that ‘it’s the techniques for mass manipulation of computer-aided pollsters that have Perry in a tizzy.’

The New Scientist’s Theodore Roszak wanted the facts much dryer. He thought the book was ‘something like—but not quite—a non-fiction…for a study which aspires to be a significant expose, that is nearly lethal.’ The US’s Bloomsbury Review wrote: Perry’s book is neither metaphorical nor is it analogous to modern politics. It is a painstakingly objective and accurate documentation of the world’s governing forces. Without making grim predictions or fatalistic judgements, Perry looks at recent Western politics in terms of computerisation and points out some imposing new developments. Perry is a journalist not a moralist or a dreamer. His conclusions are backed by hundreds of hours of taped interviews and years of extensive research. But Hidden Power is not a dry, tedious textbook account of the subject. It reads like a docu-drama and gives a realistic portrait of some of the media-made, computer-programmed politicians. “Up close and personal” is applicable to Hidden Power, and so in “the inside scoop.” Hidden Power is a story well told; a story the public needs very much to know and understand.’

In the UK, the book received wide coverage. The Economist opined that it had a ‘frightening message: the pollsters with their state-of-the-art computers, which keep a finger on the pulse of the electorate, hope they can manipulate almost any election and have ambitions to control what the people’s choice can do in office.’ Oliver Pritchett in the London Sunday Telegraph thought the book’s main concept was ‘an alarming idea, and the author...plainly intends to give us the shivers.’

Perry published a further book on the marketing and programming of political candidates in the UK and Europe, Elections Sur Ordinateur, which was published first in French by publishers Robert Laffont and Bonnel Editions. At this time Perry and Jack Grossman produced a one-hour documentary film ‘The Programming of the President’ segments of which were broadcast on the UK’s Channel 4 in 1984. Wirthlin, Caddell and political candidates such as Ted Kennedy, were interviewed by Perry for the film before the book was released.

Perry's works have been the subject of some criticism, including from fellow cricket writer Gideon Haigh. Haigh was critical of Perry's book Captain Australia—a book on Australia's Test cricket captains—claiming that Perry had "... a disquieting tendency to, quite casually, mangle information for no particular reason" and "...  there are assertions whose origins are, at least, somewhat elusive." Referring to Perry's biography of Bradman, he said "the book-shaped object of Roland Perry, had "access" , and used it to mainly unenlightening, and sometimes tedious, effect".

The historian David Frith said of his book Miller's Luck, about Keith Miller, "Perry's work here is anything but confidence-inspiring. He is an opportunist 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".

Frith said "the book is strewn with errors that undermine confidence in the work as a whole". He pointed out that Keith Johnson the cricket administrator was not the father of Australian cricket captain Ian Johnson, that Army cricketer JWA Stephenson was not the colonel who became the Marylebone Cricket Club secretary. Frith also noted that an error when Perry wrote that Cyril Washbrook took a run after being hit on the head it was not a bye, under the laws of cricket it would be a leg bye. He also noted that George Tribe was not a leg spinner. Tribe was a left-hander and leg spinners are right-handed. Frith also noted that Wally Hammond was not dropped for the final Test of 1946–47, but that he was out of action because he had fibrositis.

Of the same book, Ramachandra Guha said the Perry had done little except reword Miller's autobiography Cricket Crossfire. He said that "conversations are invented, thoughts imputed, motives intuited – without any directions as to their source or provenance". Guha also criticised Perry for mistakenly claiming that Lahore is in North West Frontier Province and for referring to Vijay Merchant as "Vijay Singh". He also criticised Perry for claiming that Miller and his Australian Services cricket team saw Merchant as a cheat when Miller called Merchant "one of the finest sportsmen India has produced".

Noel Annan, Baron Annan, in reviewing The Fifth Man, Perry's book accusing Victor Rothschild of being the fifth spy working for the Soviet Union of the Cambridge Five, cast doubt on whether Perry had actually interviewed Rothschild's relatives or whether he had made up material in his book.

Warwick Franks reviewed Bradman's Best, which was a book that profiled Bradman's selection of his greatest all-time XI and profiles of the players. Franks said "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". Franks criticised Perry for depicting Bradman as an all-powerful influence and prescient when it came to strategic successes as a administrator and leader, but when a dubious selection such as the omission of a leading player who had angered Bradman occurred, Perry blamed Bradman's administrative colleagues. Franks also criticised the large number of factual errors in the book, such as in the profile of Don Tallon.

References

1. "Roland Perry biography". andrew lownie literary agency. Retrieved 2007-12-12.
2. "Roland Perry". Random House Australia. Retrieved 2007-12-12.
3. The National Archives of Australia is charged with maintaining the memory of the nation. Other members of the Advisory Council are Mr Paul Santamaria (chairman), Mr Peter Grant (deputy chair); Professor Mick Dobson, Director AIATSIS; Senator Kate Lundy; the Honourable Alex Somlyay MP; Mr Ian Hancock; Mr Aladin Rahemtula; Mr David Irvine, Director-General of ASIO; Dr Dianne Snowden; Professor John Williams; Dr Helen Irving; Dr Mickey Dewar. The Sir John Monash Foundation promotes scholarship, leadership and Australia’s heritage and values. In particular, the Foundation raises funds for and administers the nation’s most prestigious postgraduate scholarships---Australia’s General Sir John Monash Awards. The Spirit of Australia Foundation was incorporated in 2005 to ‘remember and commemorate Australia’s heritage.’
4. Time Out Magazine London, UK, 23 September 1981.
5. ‘The Crisis Machine’, Penthouse Magazine UK, Volume 19, No 6, June 1984.
6. Perry, Roland (1979). Programme for a Puppet. UK: W H Allen. ISBN 0 491 02197 6.; In the US entitled Program for a Puppet. Crown. 1980.
7. Newgate Callendar, New York Times, 1 September 1980.
8. Arthur Morris, Programme for a Puppet, 2nd printing paperback, Hamlyn Paperbacks, UK, 1981.
9. Publisher’s Weekly, US 18 June 1980.
10. Playboy Australia, May 1980.
11. UK Guardian, 22 May 1979.
12. Owen Delany interview with the author, News Overnight Program, Macquarie Network, 18 May 1988; ABC TV Australia Sunday Arts program, 20 February 1993.
13. Screen International UK, 28 July 1979.
14. ‘The Crisis Machine’, Penthouse Magazine UK, Volume 19 No 6, June 1984. See Perry’s articles ‘Candidate Reagan’, UK Sunday Times, 29 April 1984 and ‘The Man Who Monitored the World During a Crisis,’ Computing UK, 24 May 1984; ‘Caed Mile Demos’ by Paddy Prendiville, Sunday Tribune, Ireland 29 April 1984; ‘The Programming of the President,’ Andrew Casey, Sydney Sun-Herald, 19 August 1984; ‘Pollsters: ignore them at your peril,’ Business Review Weekly, Australia 3-9 November 1984; ‘Strategists use programs to put politicians in power,’ by Bill Johnston, The Australian, 27 November 1984. The one hour documentary produced by Grossman and Perry was ‘The Programming of the President,’ Program Film Productions, 1984.
15. Computers Maketh the President, by Caroline Wilson, Melbourne Herald, 24 August 1984. Hidden Power, Beaufort US, 1984; The Programming of the President, Aurum Press, UK, 1984; ISBN 0 906053 78 1; Elections Sur Ordinateur, Robert Laffont & Bonnel Editions, France, 1984; ISBN 2-221-01932-6
16. ibid
17. US Publisher’s Weekly, 7 July 1980.
18. John Barkham Reviews, US, 21 July 1980.
19. ALA’s Booklist, US, 21 July 1980.
20. Sidney Blumenthal, The Permanent Campaign (publisher etc needed)
21. The San Francisco Chronicle, 18 September 1984.
22. Library Journal, September US 1984.
23. The Houston Post, 30 September 1984.
24. New York Times Sunday Book review Section, 12 August 1984.
25. US Advertising Age, 17 September 1984.
26. ‘Packaging the President’ Newsweek, 3 September 1984.
27. ‘All the President’s Men’ by Theodore Rozak, New Scientist, 10 January 1985.
28. ‘Pollsters & Powerbrokers’ Bloomsbury Review US, October 1984.
29. The Economist 7 September 1984.
30. UK Sunday Telegraph, Oliver Pritchett, 15 July 1984.
31. UK Channel 4, 8 September 1984; Elections Sur Ordinateur, Robert Laffont & Bonnel Editions, 1984
32. Haigh, Gideon (2004). "No Ball". Game for anything: Writings on Cricket. Melbourne: Black Inc. ISBN 1 86395 309 4.
33. Haigh, Gideon (2008-11-22). "The First Word". Cricinfo. Retrieved 2009-01-08.
34. ^ Frith, David. "Fault lines in a hero's tale". Cricinfo. Retrieved 2009-01-08.
35. ^ Guha, Ramachandra (2005). "Big hitter, Huge Heart". The Monthly: 60–62. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
36. "The Fifth Man". New York Review of Books. 1995-03-23. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |Accessdate= ignored (|accessdate= suggested) (help)
37. ^ Franks, Warwick (December 2002). "Bradman's Best". The Australian Public Intellectual Network. Retrieved 2009-01-08.

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