Major Samuel White

Samuel White is the Australian War Memorial Army Fellow, attached to the Memorial’s Art section. Whilst at the War Memorial, Major White is working on the official history of the Northern Territory Special Reconnaissance Unit.

Samuel has served as both a Royal Australian Infantry Corps and an Australian Army Legal Corps officer in a variety of tactical, operational and strategic level postings. These include platoon command in the 9th Royal Queensland Regiment; Staff Officer in the Directorate of Operations and International Law; Deputy Command Legal Officer - Headquarters Maritime Border Command; and as a Legal Officer within Special Operations Command. He transferred to the reserves in early 2023, and in 2024 took up a posting as the SO2 First Nations Strategy, within Army Headquarters. In this role, he is the Officer in Command of Project Greenskin, which looks at strategic story telling of Army military history. 

Major White holds titles as the Army Visiting Fellow at the Australian War Memorial (2024 – 2027) and as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Adelaide. In 2025, he was appointed a Fellow of the National Library of Australia for his research on Australian legal history. His military experiences focused his doctoral studies (awarded by the University of Adelaide in 2023), which addressed the constitutional authority for domestic military operations. This was published in Keeping the Peace of the Realm (LexisNexis, 2021). He is the editor of another multi-volume series, called The Laws of Yesterday’s Wars (Brill Nijhoff) which critically questions how international the laws of war are. This arose from his work as a Senior Legal Officer in the Office of International Law, Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department.

In 2018, he served as Associate to the Honourable Justice John Logan of the Federal Court of Australia, Supreme & National Courts of Papua New Guinea, and President of the Defence Force Discipline Appeals Tribunal. He is admitted to practice as a Solicitor in the State of Queensland and before the High Court of Australia, as well as a Barrister and Solicitor in New Zealand.