Home
Patricia A. O’Brien, who was born in Darlinghurst, Sydney, is a historian and writer on Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands. She is the author of Errol Flynn: The True Story of Australia's Hollywood Icon (2026); Tautai: Sāmoa, World History and the Life and Ta’isi O. F. Nelson (2017), The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (2006), and is co-editor of League of Nations: Histories, Legacies and Impact (2018) and numerous other works. She has taught Australian and Pacific history at Georgetown University, Washington DC since 2000 and held the Jay I. Kislak Fellow in American Studies at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the J. D. Stout Fellow in New Zealand Studies at Victoria University Wellington in 2012 and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of History, Australian National University, Canberra until 2019. She has written extensively on regional issues for The Conversation, The Diplomat, The Saturday Paper and other publications, and appears regularly in international media as a commentator.
Reviews for Errol Flynn: The True Story of Australia's Hollywood Icon
'Such a great story. I wish I had written this.' Peter FitzSimons
'Immaculately researched and brilliantly told. Errol Flynn is more gripping than all his movies put together.' Alison Bashford
'O'Brien brilliantly takes us to the dark heart of the world's most famous dream factory and one of its most notorious, and celebrated, habitues.' Frank Bongiorno
'By any measure, this is a portrait of a life lived on an intensely epic level that thoroughly justifies the saying that his life generated: "In like Flynn".' The Sydney Morning Herald
'Fascinating and scrupulously researched' The Age
'[A] fascinating biography ... As O'Brien relates, the reality of Flynn's (not so) private life was chaotic, complicated and squalid. Flynn was gifted with impossibly handsome looks and outrageous good fortune yet was hellbent on self-destruction.' The Australian
'Absorbing ... O'Brien's attentive book illuminates a rare man, one type of hero in his context. But the context is nothing if not disturbing.' The Monthly
'Compulsive reading' The Conversation