John A Moses is the eldest of six siblings, born 10th June 1930 of the marriage between Anthony Moses and his wife Wilhelmina née Macfarlane, in Atherton, North Queensland. Both parents were Christians, his father being a descendant of Syrian Orthodox Christians who migrated to Australia in 1888 while his mother's family of Scottish Episcopalians migrated from Glasgow in 1920. He was brought up as an Anglican in the parish of Atherton staffed then by the Anglican Bush Brotherhood of St Barnabas. He attended their secondary school of All Souls’ in Charters Towers and later, after completing an apprenticeship in radio engineering, furthered his education at St Francis Theological College, in Brisbane, the University of Queensland and finally completed his post graduate training in modern German history at the universities of Munich and Erlangen. From 1966 to 1984 John Moses taught at the University of Queensland in the Department of History and was ordained priest in 1974. He has published widely on German labour history, historiography, German colonialism in the Pacific, the German Church Struggle under both the Nazi and Communist regimes, Anzac Day commemoration and the culture of imperial German militarism.