Singleton Military Area

Ranges and Barracks

The Singleton Military Area spreads across the farmland, scrub, and low hills of the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, south of the town of Singleton. At its heart is Lone Pine Barracks, named for the Gallipoli battle, and around it lie the ranges, field training areas, and dirt tracks where soldiers learn their trade in all weathers, by day and by night.

The barracks grew in stages from a wartime camp of huts into a sprawling permanent establishment. By 2018 it had three main precincts: the Training Precinct, with its lecture blocks and parade ground; the Lines, where trainees and staff were quartered; and the Eastern Stores compound, a cluster of numbered warehouses, motor pools, and workshops on the far side of the base, closest to the perimeter fence and furthest from anyone's attention.

The School of Infantry

Lone Pine Barracks is the home of the Army's School of Infantry. New soldiers arrive from basic training for twelve weeks on the ranges and in the field before being posted to battalions across the country, and staff courses train section commanders, platoon sergeants, and weapons specialists. Trainees know the school for its long nights in the Cockburn Hills training area to the south-west and for the steep climb known on the base as Heartbreak Ridge, which every intake runs in full kit in its final week.

The barracks also houses specialist training cells, a logistics battalion detachment, the base's own support staff, and the Infantry Museum, whose collection includes a Vietnam-era Land Rover that every new intake is photographed in front of.

The Town and the Base

For Singleton the barracks has always meant jobs, trade, and families settled in the district, and a constant flow of young soldiers through the town's streets and pubs, above all the Royal Hotel on John Street, where generations of trainees have marked the end of their course. The town granted the base its Freedom of Entry in 1966, and the relationship has been warm on the whole, though not without its frictions: night firing that rattles windows in Glendon, and the occasional Saturday night when the military police are called to John Street.

The Q14 Theft

In the early hours of 18 August 2018, Building Q14 in the Eastern Stores compound, a general stores warehouse holding field shelter, was entered through its small eastern side door and emptied of almost all its stock: military-grade tents enough for at least 250 people, with their cots, poles, pegs, and stores. A six-wheeled cargo truck that had been parked inside Q14 for loading the following week disappeared with them.

Private Daniel Okafor, on night picket in the compound, heard a truck engine start inside Q14 at about 2.55 and raised the alarm. By the time he and the duty sergeant reached the building, the floor was nearly bare, the lights were on, and nobody was inside. The side door had been opened from within, and the only way in or out of the compound that had been used was a gap in the perimeter wire behind a stand of bottlebrush, which no one on the base would admit to having known about.

The investigation by the Military Police, under Major Chris Ellery, ran until February 2019. It established that no vehicle had passed any gate that night and that nothing larger than a man on foot could have left through the gap in the fence. It could not explain how a cargo truck and several tonnes of stores had left a compound with no exit. A civilian storeman with keys to Q14 was questioned at length and later dismissed for unrelated irregularities, but no charges were ever laid, and the file was closed as unresolved. Neither the truck nor any of the stock was ever recovered.

After 2018

The gap in the wire was closed within days, the Eastern Stores compound was given camera coverage and an alarmed fence by the end of 2018, and Q14 itself was demolished in 2020 to make way for a new stores building as part of a wider upgrade of the barracks. A Freedom of Entry parade planned for 2021 was postponed during the pandemic and finally held in 2023, when more than two hundred soldiers marched down John Street to mark half a century of infantry training in Singleton.

The theft outlived the building. Within a year of the inquiry it had become barracks folklore, and by 2026 instructors were still telling new intakes about the night a truck drove into Q14 and never came out, usually on their first night in the field, and usually with the claim that on still nights in the Eastern Stores you could hear an engine turning over where Q14 used to stand.