HMAS Leeuwin: when service was close to home

By Commander Paul D Pelczar OAM, RAN*

The recent public release of the Defence Estate review, and the announcement that a number of long-held establishments will be divested as part of that process, prompted me to reflect on places that once anchored naval service in the everyday lives of certain Australians. Among those identified is Leeuwin Barracks in Fremantle, formerly HMAS Leeuwin — a name that, depending on one’s service experience, carries different connotations.

For me, Leeuwin is inseparable from my father’s service, my childhood, and my own decision to enlist in the Navy. That perspective is obviously personal. It does not define Leeuwin’s history in its entirety, but it does shape how I reflect on what such places once enabled.

Commissioned in 1940 as the naval depot for Fremantle, HMAS Leeuwin supported a wide range of naval activity over its life. Known widely as the Royal Australian Navy’s principal junior recruit training establishment from 1960 until the early 1980s, it occupies a prominent place in Australia’s naval memory. Less prominent in public recollection, but central to its character, was its role as home to the Fremantle Port Division—one node in a national network of Reserve formations embedded in capital cities and major ports.

These Port Divisions provided a framework through which civilian Australians could serve at sea while remaining grounded in their families, professions, and communities. Their value was not measured in estate utilisation or infrastructure efficiency, but in continuity—of people, skillsets, and commitment.

— My father was part of that era.

He arrived in Australia in 1950 as a refugee from Europe, shaped by the experience of war and displacement. Once he became an Australian citizen, he sought to serve his adopted country through the Royal Australian Naval Reserve. HMAS Leeuwin became the physical anchor for that service.

Like many Reservists of his generation, he lived two lives in parallel. By day, a civilian professional. By night and on weekends, a naval officer. Every Tuesday night he made his way to Leeuwin. Many weekends, and often for weeks at a time, he went to sea. The Fremantle Port Division made this possible—not just administratively, but practically.

— Proximity mattered.

From those metropolitan, proximal bases, Reservists crewed and commanded small vessels that undertook fisheries patrols, offshore infrastructure protection, hydrographic tasks, security duties, and a range of other maritime roles off the Australian coast. Civilian skills flowed naturally into naval tasks. Men and later women, who could never have committed to continuous full-time service nonetheless made sustained and tangible contributions—regularly, and sometimes exceptionally.

Among those vessels was HMAS Acute, an Attack-class patrol boat that would loom large in my father’s naval service and, by extension, in our family’s life. He first took command of Acute in the mid-1970s as part of the rotational Reserve command model that characterised the Port Divisions of that era.

Under that model, Acute was routinely commanded and crewed solely by Reservists. Homeported adjacent to Leeuwin, at times, it was the only minor war vessel available on the western seaboard. Her tasking was broad and understated: patrols, surveys, security tasks, and the embarkation of specialist organisations as required. On one such patrol, my father returned to the Monte Bello Islands—nearly two decades after first seeing them as a junior sailor embarked in a Second World War-era corvette during the British atomic testings—this time in command, conducting routine security duties. For him, it was simply another task. In hindsight, it spoke to the continuity of service that places like Leeuwinquietly enabled.

For our family, Acute represented absence, routine, and continuity in equal measure. Departures were familiar. Returns were expected. Service was something that occurred as part of life, not apart from it.

Leeuwin was also woven into our family life in more subtle ways.

I recall being dropped off outside the base on Tuesday nights by my father, a senior member of the Division, expected to make my own way in as an enlisted new recruit, and collected again at the end of parade in the dimly lit car park opposite the gangway. I also remember one of his departures to sea when my appendix was close to rupture and the hospital required both parents’ authorisation to operate. As he sailed north through ‘Gage Roads’, my mother could literally see him from our house, yet was told that approval to contact him had to come from Canberra—some four thousand kilometres away. From that time, she would remark “Typical Navy,” with resignation; and sometimes bemusement.

Those moments were small, but formative. They taught us that service was not abstract. It had routines. It had a place.

— It was visible.

When HMAS Leeuwin was eventually decommissioned as a naval establishment, and later continued under Army stewardship as Leeuwin Barracks, it marked the passing of a particular model of service. The reasons were understandable. Defence must adapt to changing strategic and organisational realities. Yet with the gradual disappearance of such inner-city establishments, something less tangible also began to recede.

What was lost was not simply infrastructure. Also gone was an avenue to lowering the threshold to serve. A way of allowing Australians to contribute without significantly displacing their lives. A way of making naval service familiar rather than remote.

In time, my own service would follow a different path, shaped by a changing Navy and an evolving strategic environment. Yet it was clearly a continuation rather than a departure. The values and expectations I absorbed growing up around Leeuwin—and watching warships like Acute sail from Fremantle—did not come from doctrine or recruiting material. They came from watching service lived, regularly and close to home.

As Defence reshapes its estate for the future, decisions will rightly be guided by capability needs, efficiency, and sustainability. In marking the transition of places like Leeuwin, it is also worth acknowledging what they represented to those who served through them. Some forms of value are not easily captured in audits or balance sheets, yet they endure in the people shaped by them and in the service they carried forward.

That legacy is not diminished by change. It is honoured by remembering what was made possible, when service was close to home.

Commander Paul Pelczar’s service is closely linked to HMAS Leeuwin, including his enlistment as a Quartermaster Gunner in the Fremantle Port Division in 1986, the preceding five years as a Naval Reserve Cadet training opposite the establishment; and notably, his parents’ refusal of his desire to enlist as a junior recruit, preferring his completion of secondary school until matriculation.