The British agreement of 1909 that made the RAN possible was conditional upon the Australian Fleet being made available to the Admiralty in time of war as part of a worldwide Imperial naval force. When the First World War broke out in August 1914, the Australian Fleet came under the overall command of the British Admiralty, first deployed to frustrate the actions of the German East Asiatic Squadron in the Pacific, and then dispersed across the globe to whatever theatre of operations the British deemed appropriate. At war’s end, few major units had spent any time at all on the Australia Station after early 1915. Ironically, threats to Australia’s territorial security posed by German commerce raiders had been countered by cruisers of the IJN.

In 1939, this time with some reluctance, the Australian government again honoured the agreement but with qualifications. It was to be consulted before the ships it dispatched to foreign stations were deployed, and RAN units were put under British operational command only on a case-by-case basis. Nevertheless, by mid-1941 Australian warships had been engaged in operations in the North Sea, North Atlantic, Caribbean, Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean and, particularly, in the Mediterranean. This was all valuable experience for the ships’ companies in coping with the kind of state-of-the art threat posed by the Germans and Italians, which they could not have gained had they been kept in Australian waters: the corollary being that few had any experience of operations in Australian waters and, more importantly, in the complicated and largely unfamiliar waters to Australia’s north and east.