Calendar of Events

Over 2500 AFL/VFL players served from 1897 until the end of National Service in 1972. Of these men, 22 players from various VFL/AFL football clubs served in Greece and Crete during WW2 and sadly five of those players died on active service. Three in Greece or Crete and the other two in New Guinea and […]

Australia's military history predates Federation. Hear one of our historians speak about colonial Australian military commitments. In this month’s Museum At Home webinar we take a closer look at three wars that Australian troops participated in before the Australian colonies federated in 1901. In 1885, New South Wales sent a contingent to Sudan in support […]

Women Work for Victory in World War II tells the story of women on the home front during the Second World War. It is an online exhibition for now, while the Old Treasury Building is closed for the COVID 19 pandemic. But the exhibition is in place in the galleries and will be available just […]

The speed of Imperial Japan's occupation of British Malaya in 1941–42 caught the Allies off-guard and without substantial intelligence assets. The Allied Intelligence Bureau (AIB) was formed to mitigate the intelligence shortfalls. The Australian section of the AIB may also have been used by its MI6 representative to support Britain’s position in the region after […]

In late 1918, thousands of Australian soldiers, exhausted and scarred from the conflict in Europe, began to head home to loved ones down under. However, one ANZAC headed the wrong way, toward more conflict and risk in vast and frozen Siberia. This is the story of Ernest Latchford, told through his articulate, observant letters home […]

Wednesday 8 September 2021 @ 7:00pm to 8:00pm (Australian Eastern Standard Time)   The presentation March 1945. A handful of young Allied operatives are parachuted into the remote jungled heart of the Japanese-occupied island of Borneo, east of Singapore, there to recruit the island’s indigenous Dayak peoples to fight the Japanese. Yet most have barely […]

This webinar explores the psychological, emotional, and moral dimensions of aggression, violence, and coercive behaviour in the post-war lives of former Australian airmen prisoners of war (POWs). It indicates that, in some cases, physical and emotional abuse were expressions of captivity trauma. Former POWs rarely articulated narratives of perpetration. Accordingly, this webinar also explores the […]

The Military History Society of NSW presents: An online presentation by Phillip Bradley 11:00AM AEST Saturday 2 October 2021 via Google Meet Philip Bradley’s latest book tells the extraordinary story of the Australian campaign against the Japanese in New Guinea's Finisterre mountains in 1943-44. One of Australia’s leading battlefield historians, he has written an enlightening […]

The Military History & Heritage Victoria Annual General Meeting will be held online, via Zoom, on 13 October 2021. For AGM Documents, Committee Nomination Forms, Agenda and Zoom meeting link please contact MHH Secretary, Jason McGregor, via info@mhhv.org.au or call on 0419 256 681.   Election of Office Bearers and Ordinary Committee Members for 2021/22 […]

The RAAF base at Point Cook has been the site of many of Australia’s aviation ‘firsts’. It was the birthplace our county’s military aviation in 1914 and the first operational base of the Royal Australian Air Force when it was founded a century ago in 1921. Cultural historian Dr Steve Campbell-Wright will give us a […]

Military hygiene is an essential component of any war effort. In the severe tropical climate of the Second World War’s Pacific theatre, disease disabled and killed more Australian troops than the enemy did. Dr Cecil Evelyn Aufrere Cook (1897-1985) CBE, MD, DTMH, DPH, RACGP, ACMA joined the Commonwealth’s Military Reserve as an honorary captain in […]

In March 1946, the war was over. The Italian prisoners of war who had been captured several years earlier in northern Africa were interned in camps around Australia and were waiting to be returned home. One Saturday evening, the commandant of the Rowville internment camp, Captain Waterston, shot and killed a prisoner, Rodolfo Bartoli, who […]