Brad Manera

Biography

Brad Manera is a social historian specialising in Australian colonial and military history.

He is Senior Historian and Curator at the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park, Sydney. His museum career spans five decades, beginning as a high school volunteer at the Army Museum of Western Australia. He later served as the first Travelling Curator in the Western Australian Museum’s Local Museums Programme, a foundation curator in Social History at the National Museum of Australia, historian at the Australian War Memorial, and Head Curator at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum. He is an affiliate of the History Department at the University of Sydney and a board member of the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust.

Brad publishes regularly for the Anzac Memorial and in history journals and conference proceedings. He has curated more than a dozen exhibitions at the Memorial and leads battlefield tours focused on the campaigns in which Australians served. His publications include Ninety Treasures: 90 Years, Anzac Memorial 1934–2024; In That Rich Earth (2020); and The Battle of Lone Pine: One Australian’s War (2015). He compiled NSW in the Great War for the NSW Government (2010) and co-authored New South Wales and the Great War (2016).

As Head Curator at Hyde Park Barracks, he contributed to the successful serial World Heritage listing of Australian convict sites in 2010. In 2020 his research supported the posthumous award of the Victoria Cross for Australia to Ordinary Seaman Edward ‘Teddy’ Sheean, 78 years after his death.

Brad has contributed to documentaries including The Battle of Crete (2020), Painting Gallipoli (2015), The Power of Ten: ANZAC VCs (2015), Waler: The Great Australian Warhorse (2014) and Gallipoli: The Frontline Experience (2004), as well as podcasts, televised interviews and public history programmes.