In the early years of the Second World War, Australian women began lobbying to contribute to the nation’s wartime effort. From 1940, women were signing up to serve in the Royal Australian Nursing Service, and in 1941, an Auxiliary arm of the Royal Australian Air Force was established, allowing women to join on a temporary basis to enhance the organisation’s ability to fight. In the decades since, Australian women have continued to contribute significantly to the operational capability of the world’s second oldest air force. They have done so regardless of the social norms of the time, or the perceived limits of their abilities, always showing their detractors that they are capable of great things. ‘Changing Altitudes: The Stories of Australian Air Force Women’ includes the personal stories of some of these women, recounting in their own words their experiences while proudly wearing the uniform of the Service. This is the second volume of the Royal Australian Air Force Oral Histories series, aiming to capture the one capability that the RAAF cannot operate without - its people.

Like all crime and punishment, military detention in the Australian Army has a long and fraught history. Accommodating The King’s Hard Bargain tells the gritty story of military detention and punishment dating from colonial times with a focus on the system rather than the individual soldier. World War I was Australia’s first experience of a mass army and the detention experience was complex, encompassing short and long-term detention, from punishment in the field to incarceration in British and Australian military detention facilities. The World War II experience was similarly complex, with detention facilities in England, Palestine and Malaya, mainland Australia and New Guinea. Eventually the management of army detention would become the purview of an independent, specialist service. With the end of the war, the army reconsidered detention and, based on lessons learned, established a single ‘corrective establishment’, its emphasis on rehabilitation. As Accommodating The King’s Hard Bargain graphically illustrates, the road from colonial experience to today’s tri-service corrective establishment was long and rocky. Armies are powerful instruments, but also fragile entities, their capability resting on discipline. It is in pursuit of this war-winning intangible that detention facilities are considered necessary — a necessity that continues in the modern army.