Happy Birthday to the Royal Military College, Duntroon, which turns 115 years old on 27 June. Established in 1911, in a homestead on the edge of what is now Canberra (Duntroon being the name of the old Campbell family homestead, now the officers’ mess), it has been producing junior army officers ever since, though not always at Duntroon. In the 1930s, dire budgets meant it relocated to Victoria Barracks in Sydney for a time. For generations of officers, predominantly regular ones, it has been the training institution that introduced them to military service and began their training as leaders and commanders. Not everyone found the experience pleasant, and ‘bastardisation’ (that is, bullying, or hazing, to use the American term) scandals dogged it for many years, and did worse to the cadets who endured it. As a military college geared for producing officers, the place could, possibly with some unfairness, be characterised as inherently conservative, but this week’s newsletter aims to highlight its creation more than a century ago and its links to one of the most radical reforms ever visited upon the Australian military — Universal Training.