[3] Ayres' biography subjects included Malcolm Fraser,[4] Douglas Mawson,[5] former Australian Chief Justice Sir Owen Dixon,[6] Sydney's late-19th-century, early-20th-century Catholic Archbishop Patrick Francis Moran[7] and Sir Ninian Stephen[8] (who had been Australia's Governor-General for most of the 1980s).
[14] Fortunate Voyager, the account of Sir Ninian Stephen's life, displays similar research and narrative methodologies.
The other biographies have also received generally excellent reviews in the relevant professional journals,[15] although the author has been chastised by one (clerical) critic for declining to moralise his avowedly non-moral and objectivist presentation of character.
[16] He also wrote first-hand accounts of several conflict zones, having travelled with Malcolm Fraser in South Africa (1986)[17] and Somalia (1992),[18] and with the Hezb-i-Islami jihadists in Afghanistan in 1987.
[19] The lists below of learned articles and book reviews are representative of published works too extensive to be noticed here.