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Below the surface of Naval Reports of Proceedings

Meagan Nihill

02 October 2014

“On Saturday, 1 September, I was accorded the privilege of giving away the Bride at the marriage between Miss Caroline Elizabeth Edwards and ABUC Gordon Stephen Dempsey…A small wedding reception was held, after the ceremony, in my cabin.”

This anecdote appears as Paragraph 10 of the Report of Proceedings for HMAS Stuart in August 1968. Surrounded by perfunctory remarks on the ship’s movements, training regimes, and the health of the ship’s company, this charming story would be easy to overlook, but for the fact that it was also drawn to the attention of The Secretary of the Department of the Navy, when the report was forwarded to him:

Report

Extract from Reports of Proceedings from HMAS Stuart, August 1968 (RCDIG1074622).

Reports of Proceedings (ROPs) – held by the Memorial as the series AWM78 – are the official record of activities of the Royal Australian Navy’s commands, vessels, shore establishments, administrative authorities and installations. ROPs were normally submitted by a commanding officer to his superior, and then on to Navy Office. The series comprises almost 1,600 individual files, each being a Report of Proceedings. About one third of the series covers the years of the Second World War (1939-1945), with the remaining two-thirds covering subsequent decades.

Typically, these reports included things like dates of arrival at, and departure from places visited; events of `historical significance'; details of ships in company; visits and official calls; details of operations; and the state of the ship and its company. Some ROPs also include photographs.

With reporting required in both wartime and peacetime, these documents are invaluable for their historical content, but they also contain some hidden gems of human interest, like the story above, or this one from HMAS Barbette, in August 1968, reporting on an amusing result of defects in the ship’s fresh water service pump:

Water pump

Extract from Reports of Proceedings from HMAS Barbette, August 1968 (RCDIG1073127).

Several ROPs mention wildlife (in fact, for a time it seems 'Whale Sightings' was a required part of the reports), including animals taken on board to be released at sea, such as in this report from HMAS Stuart:

Report

Extract from Reports of Proceedings from HMAS Stuart, July 1977 (RCDIG1072744).

The Research Centre is progressively digitising this series. Currently the ROPs for over ships and establishments are available to view on the Memorial’s website.

Author

Meagan Nihill

Last updated: 30 March 2021

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