Consistent with RAAF apprentice traditions and somewhere towards the end of 1957, the first-year RAAF Apprentice and Junior Equipment and Administrative Trainee (JEAT) course of the day, the ‘Tadpoles’, chose the name ‘Wombats’ for the course commencing in January 1958. In originating that name, they could not have known that they had christened an intake which, in the annals of apprentice and JEAT traditions, would become the epitome of the apprentice spirit. Customarily, the name endowed to an apprentice course was intended to convey the utmost sense of derision, ridicule and, if possible, profanity. In the case of the ‘Wombats’, the intention was to describe an animal that simply ‘eats, roots and leaves’

Wombats 50 Years On