Temple Peter

Peter Temple (10 March 1946 – 8 March 2018) was an Australian crime fiction writer, mainly known for his Jack Irish novel series. He won several awards for his writing, including the Gold Dagger in 2007, the first for an Australian. He was also an international magazine and newspaper journalist and editor.

Peter Temple was born in South Africa in 1946 of Dutch and British/Irish ancestry.[1] He grew up in a small town near South Africa’s border with Botswana.[2] While English was spoken in the family home, he lived in a largely Afrikaans-speaking district and his early schooling was in both English and Afrikaans.[1] At the age of 15 he was sent to school in East London,[1] an area of stronger British heritage.

After school, Temple served a year of national service in the army, stationed at Cape Town.[3] Following that year of service he commenced a cadetship with the major afternoon daily in Cape Town, the Cape Argus,[4] a prominent voice of opposition against the dominant National Party during the apartheid years. During his years with the newspaper, particularly while doing police rounds in the courts of Cape Town, he saw at first hand the degrading effect of apartheid on people of colour and felt the experience changed him.[1]

During his mid-twenties he married his wife, Anita, and moved to Grahamstown (now Makhanda) in the Eastern Cape province to study history and politics at Rhodes University with the intention of becoming an historian.[1] However, he returned to newspapers until he was recruited to teach journalism in the earliest days of that course at Rhodes University.[4]

Temple eventually came to consider himself as "complicit" in the apartheid regime,[5] and after the death of Steve Biko in 1977 he resolved that he had to leave South Africa.[1] With the reluctance of Commonwealth countries to take white South African migrants, he moved instead to Germany that year.[2] Temple managed to secure a job with an English-language news digest in Hamburg, falsely claiming that he could speak German.[6]

Having obtained permanent residence in Germany, he successfully applied to emigrate to Australia and in 1980 he and his wife moved to Sydney, where he worked at the Sydney Morning Herald as education editor, before moving to teach at what is now Charles Sturt University in Bathurst.[2]

In 1982 Temple moved to Melbourne to become the founding editor of Australian Society, a magazine of social issues, where he stayed until 1985. He then returned to teaching, playing a significant role in establishing the prestigious Professional Writing and Editing course at RMIT, Melbourne.[7]