My name's Lieutenant Commander Mick Devine, I'm the Executive Officer on HMAS Ballarat. My background, I guess, or my specialization, I'm a Warfare Officer by trade, Principal Warfare Officer... so basically I am responsible for the fighting of the ship's weapons and sensors to achieve whatever the operational outcome is, so basically... in charge of the ship during a wartime or an operational environment.
There's 183 bunks onboard HMAS Ballarat, they're split up amongst officers and sailors, and general terms we have one captain, 30 odd officers, have probably about 20 senior sailors and the rest are junior sailors, and basically how it's divided up, there's a myriad of categories and ranks. So essentially the ship's a small city, we have electricians, we have mechanical engineers, we have cooks, we have medical sailors, we have combat system operators, the list goes on. Basically every type of activity you might get from a civilian city type perspective, so in terms of providing essential services, we have that, but we also have the operations side of the house as well. So it's basically a whole series of these small teams, I guess, coming together to achieve the one outcome which is getting the ship to sea and doing whatever that operation might be.
They went in 2006, the ship deployed to the North Arabian Gulf, for about six months as part of a multi-national interception force. So doing multi-national interditcional, maritime interdiction operations. So basically went up there for six months, did a lot of security operations to maintain the integrity of Iraq, and also monitor their trade and make sure that basically the country or the people around the country were complying with the U..N. resolutions.
Basically they do a lot of border patrol type activities, so basically not just monitoring immigration type stuff but also fisheries, so basically that a focus for a lot of the ADF, I guess, to the north. And it's typically a joint environment where the Air Force, Navy and Army are working together to protect the maritime approaches to the north.
I was the operations officer in HMAS Melbourne which is an Adelaide-class frigate, it's a little bit older than Ballarat. I was there for two years so I had a lot of time to sort of bed myself down and hone my skills, I guess, as a warfare officer. I was fortunate enough to deploy to the Arabian Gulf as well for six months, so in terms of the hardest training environment that I've been exposed to I guess to date, that was really rewarding to get through that in one sense, but it was also rewarding to come back at the end of that six month deployment having achieved something pretty significant in your life, and basically that's something that I'll take with me, I guess, for the rest of my career.