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Peter Biskup was born in Czechoslovakia in 1926 and studied law, eventually graduating with a doctorate from Comenius University, now in Bratislava. (Many years later it took Peter a long struggle to get the University of Canberra to accept this as a true doctorate.) After the Second World War he emigrated to Australia, where he regularly referred to himself as a "dud Czech". He worked in Papua New Guinea and as an historian at the ANU, publishing A Short History of New Guinea in 1970 (with Jinks and Nelson) and Not Slaves, Not Citizens on Aboriginal history in Western Australia (1973).
Peter was then appointed Senior Lecturer in librarianship at the then Canberra College of Advanced Education, now the University of Canberra, where he was to spend the remainder of his career. He retained his interest in history throughout, cooperating first with John Balnaves on Australian Libraries and then with Doreen Goodman on Libraries in Australia, and contributing to the Australian Library History Forum (and with Maxine Rochester organising and editing the 1985 meeting). He also edited several other volumes. He was a regular oral history interviewer for...