Captain Justin Jones of the RAN addressed an interested crowd at Glover Cottages on Monday evening, 22 June. Justin had just returned to Garden Island from the Arabian Gulf with his ship, HMAS Success, an 18,000 tonne oiler and fleet logistics supply ship, the 59th rotation of a RAN vessel through the region since 1990. It was unusual for Navy to send a support vessel to this war zone, but Success was involved in counter-terrorism as well as supply. Hers was the first assignment to the NATO alliance and the first by a RAN ship to be integrated into a French battle group. During the tour, Success had taken part in many boardings and replenishments of allied vessels, and provided medical and mechanical assistance to numerous ships and small craft in the region. The region she covered had been vast – from Djibouti in the west to Pakistan in the north east, from the Somalian coast in the south to Oman and the Gulf in the north. She had taken down drug smugglers and acted at one stage as escort for a US nuclear submarine. Was the deployment worthwhile from the perspective of the Australian tax-payer? That ultimately depended on whether the Australian public supported the government’s military commitments in the Middle East, but Justin thought so. A navy had three basic roles – military, constabulary and diplomatic. Success performed all these roles during its cruise, with the emphasis on constabulary. As one unit among many in a multi-national task force in this troubled region, it had deterred piracy, interdicted drugs upon which insurgent groups depended for their revenue to purchase arms and supplies, and earned goodwill from the crews of vessels in distress or those, mainly fishing boats, with mechanical problems. It fulfilled these roles as other RAN ships deployed to the region had since the original Operation Desert Shield in 1990. Indeed, said Justin, the RAN had been performing similar tasks in the Middle East since Operation Countenance in 1941 during the Second World War. The range of activities had broadened with time, but the essentials remained the same. The government of the day determined where RAN ships should go, but the Navy’s job was to do whatever tasks were set for it in the most professional manner possible.

Report by Richard Broinowski