Graeme Hosken – Australia

GRAEME HOSKEN

Graeme Hosken is the Secretary of FFFAIF and Editor of its DIGGER magazine and COBBeR electronic magazine. In 2015 Graeme retired after being HSIE Head Teacher at Dubbo School of Distance Education. He began researching WWI Diggers in the 1990s when he was a member of the Byrock Tidy Towns Committee (Winner NSW Tidy Town 1998).

The techniques of researching soldiers was then transferred across to his history classes, and his students researched over 150 Diggers in the years since. In 2000 he was invited by John Laffin to be the Education Officer on the foundation committee of the FFFAIF. In 2002 he became FFFAIF Secretary and later Vice President and is presently Secretary and Editor of DIGGER, the quarterly magazine of the FFFAIF as well as its electronic magazine COBBeR and moderator of its Facebook pages. Graeme has authored or co-authored the following books: ‘Dear Da’ (Second Edition, 1995), ‘Four Australians at War’ (1996), ‘digging for Diggers’ (2002) and ‘Wellington’s Finest’ (2005). Graeme has participated in 2 FFFAIF Western Front Commemorative Tours.

His main interest is researching the experiences of individual soldiers, through their service records, diaries, letters and unit histories. He believes that “every soldier has a story to tell” and is always on the lookout for soldiers’ names on memorials, cemetery headstones and family trees.