After it's Annual General Meeting, the Australian Publishers Association held a dinner to celebrate its 60th anniversary. The highlight of the evening for Wiley was the presentation of the inaugural APA George Robertson Service to the Publishing Industry Award in recognition of more than 30 years devoted and loyal service to the publishing industry. The initial group of recipients numbered 21, including our Managing Director, Peter Donoughue.

The award is named in honour of George Robertson, a founder of the Australian publisher Angus & Robertson. George Robertson published The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses by A.B. Paterson (in 1895) and Henry Lawson’s In the Days When the World was Wide and While the Billy Boils (in 1896) as well as many other well-known Australian writers. He died in 1933.

Citation about Peter Donoughue

Peter Donoughue has been a member of the publishing community for 34 years. He started in 1974, working for McGraw-Hill for eight years, including two years running their operation in Japan.

He joined Wiley Australia in 1982 and worked in various senior marketing and publishing roles until being appointed Managing Director in March 1993.

Under Peter's leadership, Wiley Australia has had a strong culture of innovation, benchmark performance and leading-edge human resources policies. Wiley has won the Secondary Publisher of the Year award seven times in the last eight years and Tertiary Publisher of the Year award every year since 2001, and it has consistently demonstrated market-leading distribution performance. It has also received an Employer of Choice award from the Federal Government's Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency for each of the six years since this program started. It is the only publishing company to be recognised in this way.

Peter has always taken a broad view of Australian publishing and has contributed much for the benefit of the industry. He was a board member of the Australian Publishers' Association for 10 years beginning in 1987, becoming President in 1996 for a two-year term. He was also convenor of the APA's Education committee for four years in the 1990s and a member of the Copyright Committee for several years. He was a Director of the Copyright Agency (CAL) for two five-year stints since the early 1990s, the only person to have this role twice. Further he has drafted several APA submissions, particularly in the copyright arena.

Peter has fostered a workplace at Wiley in which fresh ideas and clarity of thought and expression are championed. He is decisive, compassionate and erudite and has a great ability to 'think outside the square'. Peter is of an independent mind and, as his many colleagues inside and outside Wiley will attest, he is never afraid to express his opinion across a wide range of briefs, even if others do not share the wisdom of his observations.