The ‘Yachties’

Janet Roberts Billett MA (Hons) BA Dip. Ed. is an historian specialising in Commemorations and Oral History relating to veterans. Her background has been in teaching, specifically history and politics, at secondary and tertiary levels. In 2004 she wrote Memories of War: Members of The Naval and Military Club recall World War II, which included over fifty interviews. As the Club’s Honorary Archivist she also researched the catalogue for the auction of the Club in 2010. Her Master of Arts thesis, The Yachties: Australian Volunteers in the Royal Navy 1940–45: A Study of Memory and Identity, was completed in 2007. In 2017 she organised, with the assistance of the RAN, a plaque at the Australian War Memorial to commemorate the approximately fifteen hundred Australians who served with the Royal Navy during World War II, of whom the Yachties made up a third.