[1] Grant cut short his final year of secondary schooling to join Perth afternoon newspaper, the Daily News as a reporter.

From that he launched a career writing criticism on Australian film and theatre[3] noting in 1958, that; If we get a dramatist with the same poetic vision for lonely heroism as the painter Sidney Nolan and novelist Patrick White, the stage will need more air .

[12][13] In the UK Grant covered subjects as diverse as Britain's "Color Problem,"[14] buskers,[15] Labour party disunity,[16] Malta's bid for independence,[17] London's premiere of the Australian play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll; Robert Menzies' 1956 failed attempt to negotiate with Egypt's president Gamal Nasser during the Suez Crisis; and the Hungarian revolution.

Conversely he was writing features on Australian subjects, such as the Eureka Stockade,[18] a shearers' strike,[19] and education in the Outback,[20] for The Guardian, and occasionally for its sister paper The Observer,[21] whose Guy Wint wrote one of the first reviews of Grant's Indonesia in 1964,[22] which he said; "must be the model of its kind.

Grant was chairman of the Australia-Indonesia Institute and his book Indonesia (1964)[22][34][35] remains a classic and insightful study of Australia's relations with its most powerful near neighbour.

[46] In 2008, Grant initiated the colloquium 'Australia as a Middle-Ranking Power' hosted in Canberra at Manning Clark House in Conjunction with the Australian Institute of International Affairs.