About
Dr Tom Lewis OAM is a military historian, an author of 25 books, and a public speaker and on-screen presenter. He is also a retired naval officer who served unusually in land combat as an intelligence analyst, and a retired secondary school teacher. His Order of Australia was bestowed on him for services to naval history. He was the Director of Darwin Military Museum for its 2007-2012 redevelopment. He has won numerous prizes for his literary works, the most recent being as the national winner of the 2024 Australian Naval Institute’s Commodore Sam Bateman Book Prize for The Sinking of HMAS Sydney, an honour he also won in 2021 for Teddy Sheean VC.
Tom’s history works cover WWI, WWII, battlefield behaviour, and medieval combat. He is in popular demand from radio and television stations across Australia for his insightful comments on military history and how it intersects with modern-day life. He is a regular speaker to community groups, and appears often in TV documentaries. Recent works include The Tiwi Warrior and the Samurai from the Sky; Coasts with Neil Oliver; Sir Tony Robinson’s Tour of Duty; Drain the Oceans: the Bombing of Darwin, and The Borella Ride, the Anzac Centenary commemoration of Albert Borella VC.
Tom lives in Canberra with his wife Kaylene, and has just seen released Cyclone Warriors; the Armed Forces in Cyclone Tracy; The Secret Submarine - about a Japanese fleet boat sunk by air attack off NSW in 1943, and Australia's Coastal War, a compilation of all of the thousands of enemy air, submarine, and surface attacks off Australia in World War II.