This presentation tells the life story of Harold John Timperley, and the story of getting the story. Timperley left no great collection of papers and no personal archive, and the reason for that is central to the talk. It works in neatly with this year’s History Week theme, “Keeping Stories”.
Join Brendan Cook, author of A Man of Exquisite Honour, as he brings Timperley’s story to light.
The MOCA History Forum returns for its fifth event, co-presented with the Chinese Heritage Association of Australia (CHAA) as part of NSW History Week 2026.
Who was Harold Timperley
A Western Australian-born journalist who was active in China during the 1920s and 1930s, most famous for his book What War Means: The Japanese Terror in China, which laid bare the depredations inflicted on the people of Nanjing and Northern China by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Sino-Japanese war that commenced in July 1937.
Timperley later went on to work for the Chinese Ministry of Information, the United Nations, and the War on Want organisation. Whilst he was always relatively well-known in relevant academic circles, he started to disappear from discourse on modern Chinese history until the publication of Iris Chang’s 1997 The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.
Author of A Man of Exquisite Honour: The life and work of Harold John Timperley, journalist, propagandist, pacifist. By day Brendan is a tax advisor who lives in Perth, Western Australia. Brendan has a passion for history, and A Man of Exquisite Honour is his second book. His first, To Their Credit: The Australian Army Pay Corps of the First World War, is where he discovered Harold Timperley.
2026年11月3日
Museum of Chinese in Australia, 744 George Street, Haymarket NSW 2000
