When I worked for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, as it was then known, I was discouraged from publishing anything in public journals or newspapers. It was felt that members of staff should not share their private views on international developments, lest they be seen as somehow representing official policy. Even the use of pseudonyms was ruled out as it implied that the author had something to hide. On questioning this line, I was told bluntly that I had chosen a career as a diplomat, not as an academic or, God forbid, a journalist. It was to my great surprise, then, that after transferring to the Joint Intelligence Organisation (as it was then called) in 1986, I was given permission to publish articles and books, both under pseudonyms and my own name. The usual caveats applied, regarding the protection of classified material, for example, and all my drafts had to be cleared by a senior officer, but the intelligence community seemed to be able to tolerate my literary aspirations much more easily than the diplomatic one.

My first publication about Myanmar (then known as Burma) was an occasional paper on race relations in the country during the Second World War. It was released by James Cook University's Centre for Southeast Asian Studies in 1985. Since then, I have published nine books and more than 400 research papers, articles, commentaries and book reviews related to Myanmar in some way. About forty-five of these articles, many of them written under the pseudonym “William Ashton” for the Asia-Pacific Defence Reporter and Jane's Intelligence Review, formed the core of my full-length study Burma's Armed Forces: Power Without Glory, which was published in 2002. Ninety-seven other articles, all taken from the Lowy Institute's blog The Interpreter, were collected and published in 2020 by Australian National University Press as Interpreting Myanmar: A Decade of Analysis. This latest anthology reproduces another seventy-two works, covering a greater range of subjects, and taken from a wider variety of sources.