Stretton was posted to numerous supply depots and ships throughout his service, including HMAS Penguin in Sydney and two corvettes based out of Darwin.

[5] Upon his demobilisation on 8 February 1946, he successfully enrolled as a Rhodes Scholar to study history at the University of Oxford.

He has an interesting combination of solidity and humourStretton graduated Oxford with a Bachelor of Arts in 1948 and became a fellow in history at Balliol College.

[9] He taught modern history and economics but wrote chiefly about town planning, housing policies, and social scientists' ways of explaining complex historical processes.

His first, The Political Sciences, was published in 1969 during his tenure as a visiting research fellow at the Australian National University.

[6] His 1976 book Capitalism, Socialism and the Environment is regarded as a pioneering effort in the then-new field of environmental sociology.

[4] Stretton argued that the Australian suburb, much denigrated among professional architects and planners, was preferable to the agglomeration of large metropolises.

[12][13] He sought to approach urban issues from a historical and sociological perspective rather than a purely modernist or technical focus.

[13] Because of his background in sociology and history, he was an early modern advocate of concepts now considered part of post-modernist planning methods.

[18] A portrait of Stretton by Australian artist Robert Hannaford won the People's Choice Award in the 1991 Archibald Prize.

[19] Stretton married Pat, and they had four children: Simon, a judge[1] and punk musician;[20] Fabian, electronics engineer; Tim, history professor; and Sally Driden, IT specialist and environmentalist.

Stretton's willingness to assist both state and federal governments with policy development in a wide range of roles brought many of his ideas into the mainstream thinking and actions of bureaucracies throughout recent Australian history.