Background
Cochrane was born in Melbourne in 1950.
Cochrane was born in Melbourne in 1950.
He completed an honours degree at Louisiana Trobe University in 1974 and a doctorate at the University of Adelaide in 1978.
After working for a couple of years in the Parliamentary Library of South Australia and as a tutor at the University of Adelaide, he published his first book Industrialisation and Dependence: Australia"s Road to Economic Development, 1870–1939 in 1980. Cochrane worked as a Lecturer in History at the University of Sydney between 1982 and 1996. Tom Curran criticised Cochrane"s version of the story of John Simpson Kirkpatrick and his donkey in a 1996 article in Quadrant.
In 2007, his book Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy shared the inaugural Prime Minister"s Prize for Australian History with Les Carlyon"s The Great War. He published Simpson and the Donkey: The Making of a Legend, which won a Fellowship of Australian Writers Award for Non-Fiction.
