About David....
I grew up in Warilla, a small coastal town a couple of hours’ drive south of Sydney, Australia. It was a great place to spend a childhood, with swimming pools, beaches, forests, and a lake all close by. My summers were filled with bike riding and frolicking with friends.
The lovely Lake Illawarra
When I left school, I started a medicine degree at Sydney University, but was a bit put off by human bodies – especially dead ones – so I ran away to sea, studying instead at the Australian Maritime College in Tasmania to become a ship's deck officer. For a while I ‘sailed about a little and saw the watery part of the world’, as Ishmael puts it in Moby-Dick.
Warilla Beach today
I took this photo of the Nivosa departing Sydney Harbour
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I’m leaning against the bulbous bow of the crude carrier Nivosa at drydock in Singapore
I then returned to Sydney University to complete an arts/law degree, and spent about a decade working as a lawyer in Sydney and London, including several years at the law firm which, back in 1912, represented the owners of the Titanic. During this time, I became obsessed with ‘the Californian incident’ – the story of the ship that saw the Titanic’s distress rockets but did not go to the rescue
I took this photo at 2.20am, 15 April 2012, from the deck of the Balmoral. Beneath this black water lies the Titanic.
Jeff Rigby, ‘The Californian Entering Boston Harbour, 18 April 1912’
In 2002, I returned to Australia and became an English teacher. A few years later, I began writing a book about the Californian incident as part of a Doctorate in Creative Arts at the University of Technology, Sydney. The doctorate was conferred in November 2013 and The Midnight Watch published in 2016. My research for the book took me all around the world including London, Liverpool, New York, Boston and finally the Titanic wreck site itself in mid-Atlantic.
After publication of The Midnight Watch, I turned my attention to space, an interest I’d had since my early childhood. As a kid I’d read the book You Will Go to the Moon, written a few years before the Apollo missions. ‘The moon is up there, far away,’ it begins. ‘No one has been there yet. But some one will go there soon.’ At the end, it says, ‘Some day, you may go there too.’ I still hold out hope!
During a visit to the Johnson Space Center in Houston I saw for myself the famous Mission Control Room and the extraordinary Saturn V rocket, and afterwards I inspected one of the unused lunar modules at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. What an extraordinary machine! In 2019, I had the honour of meeting astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Charlie Duke and Walt Cunnigham at a gala celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. It’s my hope that my enormous admiration for the Apollo astronauts – and their wives – shines out from every page of my second novel, This Kingdom of Dust.
