History
In the early years following the establishment of the colony of New South Wales, ships based in Australian waters came under the control of the East Indies Squadron of the Royal Navy and from the 1820s, a ship was sent annually to New South Wales, and occasionally to New Zealand.
In 1848, an Australian Division of the East Indies Station was established. However in 1859 the British Admiralty established an independent command, the Australia Station, under the command of a commodore who was assigned as Commander-in-Chief, Australia Station. This decision was partially in recognition of the fact that a large part of the East Indies Station had been detached to Australian waters, while also reflecting growing concern for the strategic situation in the western Pacific in general, and in Tahiti and New Zealand in particular. Ships serving on the Station were assigned to the Australian Squadron. In 1884 the station was upgraded to a rear admiral's command.
At its establishment, the Australia Station encompassed Australia and New Zealand, with its eastern boundary including Samoa and Tonga, its western edge in the Indian Ocean, south of India and its southern edge defined by the Antarctic Circle. The boundaries were modified in 1864, 1872, 1893, and 1908. At its largest, the Australia Station reached from the Equator to the Antarctic in its greatest north-south axis, and covered one quarter of the Southern Hemisphere in its extreme east-west dimension, including Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Melanesia and Polynesia.
In 1913, the Australian Squadron was disbanded, and responsibility for the Station was handed over to the new Royal Australian Navy, at which time it covered Australia and its island dependencies to the north and east. At the same time it was reduced to exclude New Zealand and from then until 1921, when a separate New Zealand Station was established, New Zealand and its surrounds were part of the China Station. In 1958 the Australia Station was redrawn again, now including Papua New Guinea.
Read more about this topic: Australia Station
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“These anyway might think it was important
That human history should not be shortened.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)