Vanessa Smith of the University of Sydney spoke of "...his unique gift as a historian, unobtrusively demonstrating that the most acute critical perception is not incommensurate with the deepest appreciation of his subjects' human circumstances".
In 1970, he left the priesthood because he could not preach against the use of birth control, the banning of which was outlined by Pope Paul VI in his encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968.
Together with his wife, American-born Donna Merwick (another significant historian who dealt mainly with the early colonial histories of New York) Dening served as a mentor for many and often described history-making as a process of "performance".
They thus centred their collaborative seminars around this notion of performing and "Doing History", as Dening called it, since it involved "present"-ing the past.
He devoted much of his time to nurturing students and exploring his own fascinations with Oceania and encounters between indigenous people and outsiders on the in-between spaces of the "beach", a metaphor he developed rigorously.