David Donovan is the founder and director of popular news publication Independent Australia, as well as its longtime former editor, award-nominated reporter, and Canberra Press Gallery representative. He is widely known for being the the former national media director and vice chair of the Australian Republican Movement, but he is probably best known for miraculous tale of survival as a 16 year-old in a remote desert region of Australia.
EARLY YEARS AND ACCIDENT
Born 1970, David was raised on cattle properties in Central Queensland. He suffered a severe motorbike accident in January 1987, at the age of 16, on his family's remote cattle property, north of Jericho in in Central Queensland.
The accident shattered his voice box, snapped his vocal cords, collapsed his lungs, and snapped his trachea. This snapped windpipe caused his body to swell to twice its normal size by air not reaching his lungs going directly into his body tissue. As if this wasn't bad enough, his motorbike was damaged in the incident, almost wouldn't start and stalled every time he tried put it into second gear. Nevertheless, he managed to slowly ride the crippled machine 20 kilometres home and get help from his father, Gordon.
He should have died in less than an hour, yet David survived for nearly four hours before receiving any medical treatment, when a Royal Flying Doctor Service surgeon operated on him David at the kitchen table, The Flying surgeon's pilot then negotiated a severe electrical storm to fly David to Brisbane to gain treatment at the Royal Brisbane Hospital. This almost unbelievable tale of survival attracted national media attention — and still does today, almost 40 years later.
(Image: Courier-Mail, Brisbane, p3, 24 January 1987)
David had an almost just as incredible recovery. After six hours surgery, David woke up in intensive care utterly immobile because of tubes reinflating to lungs. He was unable to speak, with a brace over his voice box. He breathed through a plastic tube inserted into a hole in his neck, which he was told, to his dismay, he would have permanently. Despite doctors urging him to stay in hospital for at least six weeks, he checked out after just a week to get back to school on time. And five days later, despite breathing through a tube in his throat and being unable to speak, he captained his school's First Eleven to a win, top-scoring with 67. His pre-accident role as singer for the school rock band he was, however, unable to resume.
He did, however, regain some sort of a voice after six weeks, although he had to entirely relearn how to speak. After six months, it was found his vocal chords – severed nerves – had somehow reattached and regained movement. To his delight this enabled him to breathe normally and throw away the tracheotomy tube in his neck — an unprecedented medical first anywhere in the world.
CAREER
David went on that year to graduate among the top few students at the Rockhampton Grammar School and went on to study Law and Accountancy at the Queensland University of Technology. To support himself at uni, he worked in various jobs, including cocktail barman and nightclub bouncer, joke writer and magazine model.
After graduating, Dave worked as a marketing analyst and accountant in Australia. While working, he studied journalism part-time at QUT, before moving to London in 1997.
He settled in the UK for the best part of a decade, where he first worked in journalism and public relations, then as a finance analyst foir major investment banks, including UBS and Merrill-Lynch. He also married overseas, and for lived with his wife, Belinda, in Greece for six months. He also worked as a freelance journalist in his spare time during his entire expatriate period, mostly for music magazines and with the ABC's London bureau chief Matt Peacock.
After coming back to Australia in mid-2004, David went back to the land for a while, running with his brother Lachlan one of Australia's largest horticultural operations, Donovan Avocados, in Bundaberg. He later moved to Brisbane and became the finance manager of Queensland Airports Limited, the owner of Gold Coast Airport, among others. He also continued his freelance journalism, writing extensively for the ABC, News Corp publications and Crikey.
He joined the Australian Republican Movement in 2006 and by early 2007 was its Queensland branch convenor. This also put him on the ARM's National Committee, which he was elected to anyway in 2008 and appointed as media director. Proving to be a tireless campaigner, he was appointed to the National Executive as vice chair that same year, a position he held until his resignation in 2012. While in the role, he became the ARM's most active advocate and spokesperson, penning hundreds of opinion pieces and press releases and performing hundreds of radio and television interviews. This included a sit-down interview on ABC's 7.30 Report in February 2010 over an opinion piece he had written for the ABC, in which he claimed Australians were generally not that interested in Prince William's then royal tour. Receiving a fierce grilling, David unapologetically maintained his line. Afterwards, media academic Andrew Dodd, writing in Crikey, lamented Donovan's lack of fawning, comparing him unfavourably to Malcom Turnbull and falsely claimed he was a Labor Party backroom operator. Dodd also declared he had set the Australian republican cause back ten years.
David founded what was to become Crikey's main competitor, news website Independent Australia months later, publishing its first article on 24 June 2010, which received 3 views. He built the website from scratch and performed every role in the first year. Nevertheless, the publication's brash and unashamedly progressive style, unknown in Australia at that time, combined with Donovan's tenacity, flair and wide array of skills, especially in business and media, soon had IA competing with Crikey, often exceeding its web traffic.
As managing editor of IA, his standing in the ARM soon drew several high-profile writers to IA, including Barry Everingham, Tess Lawrence and Bob Ellis. In the early years, David gave the publication a strong focus on Australian sovereignty, the media and Federal politics. As a journalist, he personally broke many important national stories, and launched IA's ground-breaking Ashbygate and Jacksonville investigations. By 2015, IA attracted national attention by crowdfunding almost $60,000 to complete its Ashbygate investigation, galvanising the support of hundreds of ordinary Australians. It resulted in its first print publication, the book Ashbygate: The Plot to Destroy Australia's Speaker, written by private enquiry agent and investigations editor Ross Jones.
In 2018, Crikey Representing IA, in 2019, Donovan was a guest on the ABC TV panel show The Drum, on which the host accused him of setting up an leftwing echo chamber". Crikey for his outsider approach to journalism. In the article, he is quoted as saying, "I didn't come into journalism to make friends and I have succeeded."
Dave has been a member of the Canberra Press Gallery and nominated for a MEAA Clarion journalism award for his dramatic interview with an LNP Government minister outside a pre-polling booth in the final days before the 2015 Queensland Election. This dramatic interview, Channel 10's The Project put to music, was dubbed the Chicken Dance interview and gained massive national media attention, and helped narrowly unseat the one-term Newman Goverment.
David has an unpublished a book of poetry, fully illustrated by Independent Australia cartoonist Mark David, which features forewards by award-winning cartoonist Cathy Wilcox and media icon Phillip Adams OAM. In his foreward, Adams gave the anthology a glowing report, saying David 'should be Australia's next poet laureate'. He also writes short stories, satire and increasingly irate tweets. His ultimate goal is to finally finish writing a novel, a project he commenced in Greece in 2002.
He remains a passionate activist, chiefly for Indigenous rights, equality, representative democracy, Australian sovereignty and peace.
PERSONAL LIFE
He has played representative cricket in Australia and semi-professional cricket in England. These days he lives in Surfers Paradise with Belinda, cat and two spoodles. He is still married to Belinda, with whom he has a son, Xavier, who has just completed and communications degree at RMIT. David Donovan is the younger brother of former South Australian Liberal Party state candidate, barrister Matthew Donovan. His eldest brother, Lachlan Donovan, is a highly successful horticulturalist and former board director of Avocados Australia. He is also second cousin to the notorious vigilante Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read, although they never met.
In his spare time, Dave enjoys napping, and watching cricket for hours and hours on end, preferably simultaneously. He loves animals, especially wombats, and is universally hated by German Shepherds, including those of the canine variety.
Image above: David Donovan's speaking the Gold Coast March in Surfers Paradise, March 2014. You can read that speech here. Follow David Donovan on Twitter @davrosz.
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