a succession of Victorian country towns before attending Wesley College and the University of Melbourne. While at university he resided at Queen's College and was editor of Farrago, the newspaper of the University of Melbourne Student Union. After graduating, Blainey took a freelance writing assignment and travelled to the Mount Lyell mining field in Tasmania to research and write the history of the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company, at Queenstown. In the 1950s, many older residents could remember the beginnings of the community. The resultant book, The Peaks of Lyell (1954), achieved six editions. He then wrote a history of his university: The University of Melbourne: A Centenary Portrait (1956). He married Ann Warriner Heriot in 1957, who as Ann Blainey has become an internationally regarded biographer. Blainey has published over 40 books, including his highly acclaimed A Short History of the World. His works have ranged from sports and local histories to interpreting the motives behind the British settlement of Australia in The Tyranny of Distance; covering over two centuries of human conflict in The Causes of War (1973); examining the optimism and pessimism in Western society since 1750 in The Great See-Saw; Aboriginal Australia in Triumph of the Nomads (1975) and A Land Half Won (1980); and his exploration of the history of Christianity in A Short History of Christianity (2011). He has also written general histories of the world and the "tempestuous" 20th century. Triumph of the Nomads is "a book which has done more than any other to open Australian minds to the pre-European past of their land" , according to Ken Inglis of the ANU. Blainey was also "the first writer to make that daring comparison that Aboriginal societies differed as much from one another as do the nations of Europe". The Causes of War has become one of the most cited works in founding modern scholarship on international conflict (as at Sep 2020 - 2095 citations on Google Scholar). It is commonly cited by the Hoover Institution as a foundation work in the field. He has revisited some of his earlier successes to take into account new discoveries and scholarship - Triumph of the Nomads and A Land Half Won were revised as The Story of the Australia's People Vol 1 : The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia and The Story of the Australia's People Vol 2: The Rise and Rise of