5th/7th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment
military unit
The 5th/7th Battalion, The Royal Australian Regiment (5/7 RAR) is a regular littoral infantry battalion of the Australian Army. The battalion is based at Robertson Barracks in Holtze, Northern Territory and forms part of the 1st Brigade. It was originally formed in 1973 by the linking of the 5th and 7th Battalions of the Royal Australian Regiment together. It was de-linked on 3 December 2006, as part of the expansion of the Australian Army whereby the 5th and 7th Battalions of the Royal Australian Regiment were re-established as separate battalions. As part of the 2023 Defence Strategic Review, the 5th/7th Battalion were to be relinked which occurred on 3 December 2024 and raised as a littoral light infantry battalion.
History
5/7 RAR was formed on 3 December 1973 at Holsworthy Barracks in Sydney by the amalgamation of the 5th and 7th Battalions of the Royal Australian Regiment to form a single light infantry battalion. This was the result of reductions in the size of the Australian Army following the Vietnam War. Throughout the battalion's history 5/7 RAR formed part of the 1st Brigade.
In January 1975 the battalion deployed to Darwin as part of the clean-up following Cyclone Tracy. Between 1976 and 1978 5/7 RAR trialed a mechanised infantry organisation using M113 armoured personnel carriers.
The public source identifies “5th/7th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment” as military unit. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Battalion, Royal and Australian.
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This entry incorporates text from “5th/7th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.