Past speakers

Rear Admiral Guy R Griffiths AO DSO DSC RAN (Ret) is one of Australia’s most distinguished military leaders, having served in the Royal Australian Navy – with stints in the Royal Navy – from enlistment as a Cadet Midshipman in 1937, aged 13, to retirement as Rear Admiral in 1980.

WARSAW UPRISING 1944: A conversation with Les Gade on his role as a Polish youth in the revolt against German occupation

Between 1962 and 1966, Indonesia under the aggressive leadership of Sukarno ‘confronted’ the new state of Malaysia, labelling it a cloak for British imperial interests in south-east Asia.

The Military History Society of New South Wales Incorporated presents LOCOMOTIVE OF WAR: CRIMEA 1855. How Britain built a railway to besiege Sevastopol, by Colin Kay.

The Somme campaign between July and November 1916 is widely regarded as one of the greatest tragedies in British and Imperial military history.

Captain Albert Poland of the Royal Navy recorded his Second World War service in daily notebooks including the eight-month Siege of Tobruk by Rommel’s Afrika Korps, from April to November 1941.

Denis Smith's talk tells the largely unknown story of HMS Argus, the aircraft carrier which transported 24 RAF Hurricane fighter planes to Russia in 1941.

This lecture is the Society’s contribution to 75th anniversary commemorations of D-Day. By end June 1944 the word most feared by Allied senior commanders and politicians was “stalemate”. US First Army and British Second Army units made few inroads into Normandy since the D-Day landings on 6 June.

At the battles of Mission Ridge and Brigade Hill, 7-8 September 1942, in the legendary Kokoda Trail Campaign, three sister battalions of the AIF were together for the first time.

Over three decades from 1976 to 2007 the Leopard 1 Tank was the work horse of the Australian Army’s 1st Armoured Regiment. In 2015 the Australian Army History Unit (AAHU) received support for a project to section or “cut-in-half” a Leopard Tank so that students in armoured vehicle courses could see the interior of a main battle tank.