The nine-volume history was commissioned to cover Australia's involvement in the Malayan Emergency, Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation and Vietnam War.
Edwards spent fourteen years at the Australian War Memorial (AWM) writing two of the volumes, while also researching, editing, and dealing with budget limitations and problems with staff turnover.
At school Edwards was head prefect, captain of debating and the shooting club and won prizes in English, Latin, French and athletics.
[1] He graduated from the University of Western Australia with a Bachelor of Arts with Honours, and in 1967 received a Rhodes Scholarship to undertake doctoral studies at Wadham College, Oxford.
[6] Edwards continued the tradition established by Charles Bean, Gavin Long and Robert O'Neill in Australia's earlier official war histories by adopting a holistic approach that sought to analyse the operational, strategic, political, social and medical aspects of the Australian experience.
John Murphy criticised the volume for what he saw as an overemphasis on the diplomatic and for skirting the social controversies of the Vietnam era; he also questioned the need for an official history.
[7][8] Pemberton, a senior researcher on the history who drafted several of the earlier chapters before leaving the project acrimoniously in 1990,[9] took issue with the book as well, arguing that his input "had been censored and sanitised in the final product".
[10] Edwards acknowledged substantial rewrites to Pemberton's drafts in the foreword to Crises & Commitments, but the extent of and reasoning for the changes was not made clear.
[9] A Nation at War experienced a warmer reception, winning the Foundation of Australian Literary Studies Award and H. T. Priestley Medal.
Aside from Pemberton, the unexpected death in 1998 of Ian McNeill, author of the volumes on the Australian Army, caused extensive delays to the series' completion.
[5][12] The first seven volumes (including McNeill's To Long Tan [1993], dealing with army operations up to 1966), were delivered in a timely fashion and published successively from 1992 to 1998.