David’s areas of interest include Australian cities and culture, biography, industrial and regional communities, wine, publishing, newspapers and media, consumer behaviour and Australian communities abroad.
David has degrees in History from Monash University and the University of Melbourne. He has taught in Victorian secondary schools. He completed the Graduate Diploma in Editing and Publishing at RMIT University and has taught History and Australian Studies at the University of Melbourne, at Monash University and at Deakin and RMIT universities.
David was a wine and travel journalist in the 1980s and 1990s and contributed to the Age, Business Review Weekly, the National Times, the Sun-Herald, and the Wine Spectator in the United States. He has worked as a consultant and researcher for industry and government. He worked with the Victorian Ministry for Planning and Environment and the Historic Buildings Council (now Heritage Victoria) 1984-1990. From 1990 to 1993 he was with Museum Victoria. In 1994 he was appointed Lecturer in Public History with the History Department at Monash University (now the School of Historical Studies). He is a member of ICOM, the Australian Historical Association and other professional associations.
David joined the National Centre for Australian Studies in 1997 and was its Director from 2004 to 2006. David co-ordinates and teaches in the Graduate Publishing and Editing program. With other colleagues, he teaches in the undergraduate Sports Studies program.
In 2010 he was the Menzies Fellow at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies at Kings College London.
Research interests
David’s has written extensively on his home city of Melbourne. His study of Melbourne’s nineteenth century government was published as Governing the Metropolis (Melbourne University Press 1984). He is a contributor to public debates about the city’s urban government, planning and transport systems. His urban history interests embrace government and politics, social reform, built form and planning, population movements, consumption, the drink trades, crime and sport.
David has been the recipient of research and project grants from the Australian Research Council, the Co-operative Research Centre for Tourism, the Institute for Global Movements, Monash International and industry and business.
David is working on a long term project on the history of the Melbourne Herald newspaper and Australian journalists, columnists, correspondents and cartoonists at home and abroad. His interest in biography and journalism has resulted in a scholarly edition of a convict autobiography Owen Suffolk’s Days of Crime and Years of Suffering (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2000) and a collection of his father, Keith Dunstan’s journalism, The Melbourne I Remember: Batman in the Bulletin (Arcadia 2004).
David researches the history of wine and the drink trades in Australia; also, industry regulation, temperance, prohibitionist and anti-drink trade movements, the regional character of wine and concepts such as terroir. He is the author of Better Than Pommard! A History of Wine in Victoria (1994) and Wine from the Hills (2000). He is writing a history of the Viticultural Society of Victoria.
Together with his colleague Dr Tom Heenan he is researching the history of Australian Indian cricket and as part of his wider interest in newspaper history is researching Australian sports writers and writing. David contributed a paper on the 1947-48 Indian Cricket Tour of Australia to the Indian Australian Studies Conference (IASA) held at Kolkata, India, in January, 2008. He is researching cricket and decolonization with his colleague Dr Tom Heenan.
David contributes to scholarly journals in Australia and is a reviewer and contributor to the national and local press. He is a regular contributor to Reviews in Australian Studies conducted by the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies at Kings College London.
David has been a prolific contributor the Australian Dictionary of Biography with more than thirty individual entries under his name. David’s studies of Victorian premiers William Watt, John Murray and Sir Henry Bolte appeared in The Victorian Premiers (Federation Press, 2006). He chairs the Victorian Working Party of the Dictionary and is a member of its Editorial Board.
David’s book Victorian Icon: Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Building (1996) helped the REB to achieve World Heritage Listing. His co-authored essay ‘Don Bradman – Just a Boy From Bowral’ is included in the Cambridge Companion to Cricket (2011).