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.”