Tony Griffiths (1940) was born in Semaphore, South Australia. Following the completion of secondary school in 1958, Griffiths began his academic career at the University of Adelaide. Griffiths received his BA Hons (1964) MA (1965). Following graduation Griffiths worked as research assistant to Professor OOGM MacDonagh at the University of Adelaide at Bedford Park. The principle fruit of this work was an article on Coal Mine Regulation and MacDonagh’s book Ireland.
Between 1965 and 1968 Griffiths was a research student at Cambridge University. His research at Cambridge was supervised by Professor Nicholas Mansergh who was appointed Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University in 1968 resigning his Mastership of St John’s College. Griffiths’ research at Cambridge was rewarded by two prizes, the Holland Rose studentship and the Trinity Hall research studentship. The PhD dissertation The Irish Board of Works in the famine Years was published as a book in 1987. The thesis was examined by the Junior Dean of Trinity College Dublin, Dr R B McDowell, and Dr G S R Kitson Clark of Trinity College, Cambridge. His principle findings were published in 1970 in The Historical Journal (formerly the Cambridge Historical Journal). The book ISBN 0 92X0 7810 1 was published by Garland Publishing Inc New York.
In 1968 Griffiths was appointed a lecturer at Flinders University in the
History department of the Faculty of Social Sciences. Griffiths then began
two projects, one on Australian history, and one on Scandinavian history.
The Australian history project was a Contemporary History Exercise, and grew
out of commissions from the Encyclopaedia Britannica to write
annual reports on Australian economic, political and diplomatic developments.
This research was published from 1965 to 2003, on an annual basis, and has
been expanded to include Australia’s Pacific neighbours, Nauru, Palau,
and Papua New Guinea, as well as biographical research on individual Australian
figures. The book Contemporary Australia (1977) grew out of this work.
This book, ISBN 8 5664 545 1 was an important pioneering study of contemporary
history and recognized as such by The Times Literary Supplement and
The Times Educational Supplement. The TES wrote ‘to understand
modern Australia, study this. The TLS wrote ‘no other book I
know describes so succinctly the forces that in less than forty years turned
Australia from a vassal of the UK’. This book was published by a consortium
of three publishers to distribute it in their markets: Macmillan New York
distributed in the US, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne distributed it
in Australia and Croom Helm distributed it in the United Kingdom. It was published
in both hard and soft covers and reviewed also in the weekend Australian,
the Advocate, the Age, the Library Journal, the Historian, the Journal of
Australian Studies, History, Sabretache, the Queen's Quastery, the American
Historical Review, the Economic Record, the Commonwealth, Choice, the British
Studies Intelligencer, and elsewhere. The book was revised and published in
1993 ISBN 1 8 6254 284 8 by Wakefield Press, Adelaide, with a more descriptive
title Beautiful Lies: Australia from Kokoda to Keating, and is currently
at the point of publication for the third edition expected in 2004, revised
and retitled Australia from Menzies to Howard.