David Donovan

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 also known for being the the former national media director and vice chair of the Australian Republican Movement, and miraculous teenage motorbike accident survivor.

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 tissues. 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 occasionally, 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 almost 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 the ABC's London bureau.

After coming back to Australia, David ran with his brother one of Australia's largest horticultural operations, Donovan Avocados, and then, until 2010, as a finance executive in for a major airport operator, Queensland Airports Limited. In his spare time after coming back to Australia, he became a leading activist for the Australian Republican Movement, including as national media director and vice chair between 2008 and 2012. In this role, he did hundreds of radio and television interviews, including a sit-down grilling on ABC's 7.30 Report, about which Crikey claimed he had helped set the republican cause back 10 years.

David founded news website Independent Australia in June 2010, which he soon turned it into one of Australia's most popular progressive publications. As managing editor of IA, his standing in the ARM soon helped attract to IA several high profile contributors, including Barry Everingham, Tess Lawrence and Bob Ellis. He gave the publication a strong focus Australian sovereignty and exposing political corruption. As a journalist, he broke many important national stories, and launched IA's ground-breaking Ashbygate and Jacksonville investigations. In 2015, IA published its first print publication, the book Ashbygate: The Plot to Destroy Australia's Speaker, by Sydney bureau chief Ross Jones.

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". He has been described as a "maverick" by competing online news outlet 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.

PERSONAL LIFE

Dave 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 film and televison 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 infamous Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read, although they never met.

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.

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. He is a passionate anti-war activist, as well as strong proponent for Indigenous rights, equality and fairness, representative democracy and Australian sovereignty.

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.