This just in: a copy of the November 1983 edition of The Duntroon Society care of a Crikey reader.
Newsletter 2 includes an update on “the advanced stage of construction of the Australian Defence Force Academy”, then due to be completed in January 1986. Reported The Society:
Times have changed. There are currently over 10,000 women enlisted in the ADF, either as full-time or part-time members. The ratio of women to men depends on the role of a particular unit – in some units, given the front line nature of its mission, there won’t be any women. The current percentages of women in the ADF by service are around 18% for Navy, about 12% for Army and around 17% for airforce.
And yet, in other ways, not so much has changed at all. Because intriguingly, this edition of The Duntroon Society also contains an address from the Commandant of RMC HM Coates, introduced with an editor’s note:
“Subsequent to the publication of an article in the Melbourne ‘Age’ in early April 1983 and the inquiry into its content which followed, the Commandant of RMC addressed the senior class of the Corps of Staff Cadets on 1 June 1983. The substance of the Commandant’s address is reproduced here.”
That’d be the same series of incidents that the Herald Sun‘s Andrew Rule has named Independent Andrew Wilkie in connection with.
The Commandant’s 1983 address to his senior class is illuminating and includes this order:
The Commandant was referring to cadets being harassed about their sex life. Presumably this instruction would still apply, nearly 30 years later, to the female cadets under the ADFA’s charge. Goodness knows what the Commandant would make of the Skype age, where interpersonal behaviour is most not “restricted to bathrooms.”
Whatever. No really, this is interpersonal stuff. If this small clique of mates can’t get it together to sort out their differences without having the Army, the State and the whole gawking general public advising and judging them, then let them fall apart with dignity. We are being sillier then they were.
Disagree.
Publicise, publicise, publicise !!
I’ve had it with this ‘culture’. A culture that necessitates the kind of comment this senior officer had to make.
1983 eh? Long enough to sort it. Like any other kind of bullying,-if you don’t deal with it, and leave its proponents in absolutely no doubt that they will be charged,-and if repeating;-discharged;-then it will continue. As it has. I care little if there are only one or two incidents-that’s one or two too many. It has been tolerated, that’s why it has continued.
As for Wilkie;-I care little that he has redeemed himself. By his own admission he was involved in this cr.ap. He should hang his head in bloody shame.
Ah but Elan, this is exactly the ‘culture’ of our schools (including Sunday schools), our churches, our sporting clubs and every other part of society you’d like to name. We are a culture of bullying, sexism and misogyny. It’s what we do and who we are. Are you in some kind of denial?
“Are you in some kind of denial? “
No. But you are.
I don’t give a monkey’s testi.cles for the rationale that says ‘it’s everywhere-so no problem’.
Do leave ‘orf.
Looking forward to chatting Charles.
Elan, when I suggest (with your paraphrase) “it’s everywhere-so no problem”, I’m asking you to think about the pointlessness of asking (or requiring) the Army or Duntroon or whoever to take a bunch of Australian teenage recruits and turn them, in a matter of months, into something that the outside society, their families, their parents, their schools and every other instrument of society, has not been able to make them.
If you want to discipline wayward, stupid, childish, misogynist teenagers by kicking them out of the institution they have joined, willingly, then you are wanting to perpetuate the bullying, the sexism and stupid intolerance that you are so complaining of. I think that is a particularly pointless exercise. That’s why I think…whatever.
Nothing that the government or the Army or Elan does or suggests be done will make a jot of difference to this ingrained societal flaw. Every day, by our own personal actions, no matter how hard we try to buck-pass it to otheres, we perpetuate it.