Tony was progressively Fellow, Senior Fellow and Professor in SE Asian History at ANU 1970-99. He retired early to become first Director of SE Asian Studies at UCLA 1999-2002, and then founding Director of the Asia Research Institute at NUS in Singapore, 2002-7.

His early work was on northern Sumatra, then the Indonesian revolution, but since the 1980s Early Modern Southeast Asia ('SE Asia in the Age of Commerce', 1988-93). His most recent work is 'A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads' (2015), and a novel, 'Mataram' (2018)