Captain Gavin Irwin awarded Order of Australia medal for management of Garden Island Dockyard

The award was given to Captain Irwin for "meritorious performance of duty" in his role as the Superintendent of the Royal Australian Navy' Garden Island Dockyard Precinct, where he has overseen the "transformation and modernisation" of the facility.

Captain Irwin told the Northern Beaches Review it was an honour to receive the award after many years of service.

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"It's really nice to get that public recognition that your service has meant something, which is a really good feeling and I'm very greatly honoured by it," he said.

Captain Irwin began his career in the Australian Defence Force in 1978 and initially enrolled for all three branches of the service, before selecting the Navy on the advice of his father.

"My father said to me, 'Well, where do you want to spend your life living?'," Captain Irwin said.

"The Army tends to be inland, the Air Force tends to be in remote places... and I've always lived my life by the sea spending my time surfing and in the last twenty odd years I've been living in the Northern Beaches.

"So the Navy was the choice and that was back in 1978 and I'm still there now."

While Captain Irwin said receiving the Order of Australia was certainly a career highlight, he named serving as the engineer of the ship that supported the 75^th anniversary of the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli in 1990 and serving as the Defence Force attaché at the Australian Embassy in Berlin between 2009 and 2012 as some of his other memorable experiences in the Navy.

But for the last eight years, Captain Irwin has assumed responsibility for the Garden Island Naval Precinct and the Captain Cook Graving Dock, a feat of Australian wartime engineering he said most Sydneysiders "would not even know existed".

"The Captain Cook Graving Dock is recognised as being second only to the (Snowy Mountains) hydro systems as Australia's greatest engineering feat," Captain Irwin said.

"(Taking charge of the facility) makes you pretty humble because you realise just how little you know and it just leaves you amazed at the skills that were brought to built that, and during the war period.

"There were many thousands of worker and it was built in less than four years, and it's unimaginable that you could achieve that today. It was an incredible engineering feat."

Captain Irwin's Order of Australia medal was given in recognition of the $250 million improvement and remediation project he oversaw at the heritage-listed facility, which involved extensive maintenance to the existing dock and the construction of a new wharf on the western side of Garden Island.

After eight years of hard work seeing the project through to completion, Captain Irwin said his inclusion on the Queen's Birthday honours list was "a good excuse for a party" celebrating his achievements at home with family and friends, as well as his wife Sally who he said was the "greatest contributor" to his career.

"She's supported me these last 44 years, wherever I've been, and of course when I've been away for months at a time at sea, raising our children. I absolutely couldn't do any of it without her," Captain Irwin said.

"Our family travelled around a fair bit and has always been a strong unit together and I guess that's what makes it all possible."