[15] Born in Melbourne in 1946, Peter Sutton's earliest years were spent growing up in a Port Melbourne working class environment[16] His paternal grandfather was a driver at the local fish markets (and prone to violent, alcoholic outbursts).

His maternal grandfather was a pastry cook, and his mother and father began life as factory workers.

[16] His father attended, and was profoundly affected by, a Lord Somers Camp held to 'dissolve' class barriers between waterfront children and the sons and daughters of Melbourne's doctors and lawyers, and, early on he and his wife pushed to break out of the working class mould:[16] "We were not dirt poor, but my mother pushed to get out of Port Melbourne, to get a small business, a Milk Bar in East Malvern, and then a block of land and build a house."

[18] After working as an anthropologist and linguist in Aboriginal Australia for more than 40 years, publishing or co-writing more than 15 books on Aboriginal languages, art, culture and land rights, Peter Sutton wrote a book titled The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the end of the Liberal consensus (2009) in which he reflects upon all he has seen and begins questioning Australian public policy across all those years, as follows:[16] "Through personal observation, forensic rigour and an anthropologist's eye, he questions the foundations on which 40 years of public policy, often imposed with bipartisan goodwill, has been constructed" A 2016 symposium on Sutton's life and work led to a two-volume tribute: Finlayson and Morphy (eds) 2020, Ethnographer and Contrarian.

Biographical and Anthropological Essays in Honour of Peter Sutton, and Monaghan and Walsh (eds),[19] More than Mere Words.