Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The Royal Australian Navy in Vietnam 1965-1972. Second Edition. By John R. Carroll. First published in 2013, this second edition has been revised with ...
Naval Historical Review
Book Review: A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Games Helped Win World War Two
A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Games Helped Win World War Two. By Simon Parkin. Hardback and paperback, 329 pages, Hachette, 2019. From ...
The Solomon Islands and Bougainville Island
By Walter Burroughs Political upheaval After thirty five years of a political alignment between the Solomon Islands and the Republic of China (Taiwan), on 22 September 2019 it was announced ...
Training Ship Nepean and Australian Navy Cadets
Your Editor and Mrs. Burroughs were pleased to accept an invitation to attend the End of Year Parade held by TS Nepean on 30 November 2019. This is an unusual ...
Luzon: A 75th Anniversary Australian Battlefield Tour of the Philippines – Part 2
By Paul Baker On the morning of 15 December 2019, a small ceremony was held at the Australian War Memorial in the forecourt of the Maritime Academy of Asia and ...
Border and Resource Protection: Past Challenges and Future Opportunities for the Royal Australian Navy
This essay won the New Entry Officers Course 61 Naval Historical Society History Prize, awarded in December 2019. By Lieutenant Melissa Chen RAN1 Australia has unique problems and may thus ...
Appear where you are not expected
By Lieutenant Commander Chris Watson RAN1 This essay won the Smith Prize, which is open to all members of the Department of Defence in the Chief of Navy’s 2019 Essay ...
Last Voyage of the Ayesha
By A. C. B. Mercer Stranded on Direction Island, in the Cocos Keeling Group, 50 German sailors and their commander from the cruiser Emden, which had been engaged by HMAS ...
Warrant Officer of the Navy
Handover Ceremony On 22 November 2019 a ceremony was conducted in the courtyard outside Russell Offices in Canberra to mark the handover of the important position of Warrant Officer of ...
Letter: The 9/11 Boatlift
Almost coincidentally we recently received correspondence from two readers, Megan Hughes and Tony Maskell, asking if we had knowledge of the 9/11 Boatlift Memorial in New Jersey. We trust the ...
Australians in the Decisive Thrust KING II – The Leyte Landings
By Paul Baker Seventy-five years ago, on 18 October 1944, beaten only by the fast minesweepers and the attack forces securing the mouth of the Gulf, the crew of HMAS ...
Book Review: Lying for the Admiralty: Captain Cook’s Endeavour Voyage
The following review by Paul Brunton, the eminent curator of the State Library of New South Wales, first appeared in Cook’s Log Vol 42, No 2 (2019) the quarterly magazine ...
Book Review: Collins of the Sydney
By Tony Macdougall, published by Clarion Editions, 77 Lewis Street, Mudgee, NSW 2850. Tel: 02 6372 1387 or email: macdougallburns@bigpond.com.au. A quality paperback of 576 pages with many photographs ...
The White Ensign Club at Nowra
By Fred Dawson, with acknowledgement to Foster Emery (dec.), Albert Morrison (dec.), Len Seyffer, Robyn Florance, OAM, Alan Clark, AM and Dr John Haken. Following the commissioning in August 1949 ...
Possession Island
Possession Island is a small and now uninhabited island of 500 hectares lying 17 km to the southwest of Cape York, but it has great significance to our nation. Just ...
The Dominion Yachtsmen Scheme: Australian Volunteers in the Royal Navy 1940-45 – Part 1
By Janet Roberts Billett Following the outbreak of war with Germany on 9 September 1939, the losses for the Royal Navy in ships and men through repeated U-boat and air ...
Clearance of Contact Moored Mines by Wire Sweeps
By Mike Turner It is difficult to obtain accurate numbers for the total number of sea mines that have been laid, but the estimate is about 900,000, of which about ...
Timor Submarine Rescue Operations
One of the most significant rescue operations of Australian military forces occurred after the Japanese had overrun Dutch colonial western Timor in 1942. At this time Timor, seen as a ...
HMAS Sydney (III) and her Propellers
We recently became aware of two propellers from HMAS Sydney (III) not far away from one another in the Shoalhaven. One was at the recently named Jervis Bay Maritime Museum ...
The Pong Su Incident – April 2003
By Dennis J. Weatherall The end of the Vietnam War resulted in the arrival into Australia of Vietnamese refugees with the first, known as ‘Boat People’, arriving in Darwin on ...
A Christmas Story
The naval service of Temporary Lieutenant Ernest Joseph Huson Christmas RANVR was for a relatively short time and this was mostly overseas. His story is historically interesting but misfortune follows ...
The Admiral, the Ironmaster, the Timber Merchant and the Property Developer
This is a story of three men drawn together by the magnetism of a beautiful young artists’ model. Emma Hart, a country girl very much in the image of a ...
Early History of Somerset and Thursday Island
This paper by Mr C. G. Austin, Honorary Librarian, was read to The Historical Society of Queensland Inc. on Thursday 28 April 1949 and printed in the Journal of The ...
HMAS Kiama 1944 – 1946, HMNZS Kiama 1952 – 1976
By Dr J. K. Haken The development of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) was restricted by financial constraints, exaggerated by the onset of the Great Depression and Recovery Years. The ...
Radar in the South and Southwest Pacific as at Savo Island in August 1942
By R. W. Madsen This paper was prepared largely from notes made many years ago when I was at university and living with my grandparents. My grandfather, Sir John Madsen, ...