David’s background includes 45 years of military service in both the Regular Army and Reserve. He graduated from the Royal Military College Duntroon in December 1975 into the Royal Australian Infantry Corps. He has completed a wide variety of regimental, training and staff postings, including operational tours of duty in Uganda with the Commonwealth Military Training Team (1983) and in Cambodia with the UN (1991-92). In 2006-07 he was deployed as an Operations Analyst in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2004-05 he served as the ADF Liaison Officer to the USMC-led headquarters with other international assistance forces based in Thailand during the tsunami relief operation.
His keen interest for military history is long-standing and widely varied. This includes being involved as a specialist technical adviser to the movies “Breaker Morant” and “Gallipoli” which were filmed in South Australia in the early 1980s where he was posted at the time.
While researching various aspects of family involvement in WW1, he was invited to co- author the history of the 19th Infantry Battalion AIF. It was one of the many untold stories of the Great War and “Fighting Nineteenth” was published in June 2011. As a result of this work, he has set up his own business AIF Research Services which assists families and other interested groups to track their First AIF ancestors both in Australia, as well as providing advice for potential battlefield tourists. David is regularly booked to speak to local historical societies on a variety of WW1 topics.