2. National Committee, Getting to know your National Committee

: David Donovan – August 2009

in

ARM Media Director and Queensland Branch Convenor David Donovan is 38 years old and was raised on a cattle property north of the small town of Dingo in Central Queensland. The youngest of four children, his father was a long-standing shire councillor for the area and his mother a school-teacher. David’s secondary education was completed at the Rockhampton Grammar School, where he was a very good student who excelled at cricket, gaining numerous representative honours.

When he was 16, on his holidays before going back to complete year 12, David rode into a barbed-wire wire fence on a motorbike on a family property north of Jericho near Longreach. Despite sustaining a severed trachea and two collapsed lungs he somehow managed to ride the motorbike, which was damaged in the accident, more than 12 miles back to the homestead.

Eventually, he was rescued by the Royal Flying Doctor Service and flown to Brisbane for more than 6 hours of surgery. There, he was given a brace over his shattered voice-box preventing any speech for six weeks and a tracheostomy tube that he breathed through for 6 months. Despite this, he was out of hospital after 8 days and back captaining the School’s First XI within a fortnight. The story of his miraculous survival, and subsequent full recovery, was reported widely in the national press. These days, the only lingering after-effects are a couple of scars and a slightly raspy voice.

David went to Brisbane after finishing school to study a combined degree in Business and Law at the Queensland University of Technology, graduating in 1993. Later, he went back to university to study Journalism, also at QUT, graduating in 2000. He also played top-grade district cricket for the University of Queensland club. He has spent about 6 years in London working mainly in investment banking, though he also found time to work as a reporter for a London suburban newspaper and later as a freelance journalist based in Greece. These days, he combines both careers, working 4 days as week as the Finance Manager for Queensland Airports Ltd, and the rest of the week working as a freelance journalist, and in helping progress the coming of the Australian republic.

David lives in Surfers Paradise with his wife Belinda, 4-year-old son, Xavier, and kitten, Matilda. David is staunchly unaligned with any political party.

 

Why I am a republican?

 

David Donovan has been a member of the ARM since 2005, joined the Queensland Council in 2006 and has been a member of the National Committee since 2007. He says that he is a republican for the following reasons:

To be lorded over by British nobility utterly opposes my conception of a free, open, egalitarian and democratic Australia. I do not believe any person has more worth than another, especially not because of they were born into a particular family. Then there’s the system of primogeniture and religious bigotry that is used to determine eligibility for the throne. Any right-minded person should find this to be completely out of step with the times.

Also, as a parent, I would like to be able to say to my son that one day he could become our head of state. What is it saying to them about our society that this is not possible today. And just having a foreign head of state sends a bad message to the world: that we are still a colonial offshoot of Britain. I cringe when the barmy army sings “God Save Your Gracious Queen” at the cricket.