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Electronics, Defence contractor, Equipment maker · Sydney, New South Wales, Australia · from 1988

AWA Defence Industries

Australia's largest defence electronics company of the early 1990s, formed in 1988 from the defence arms of AWA, Thorn EMI Electronics Australia and Fairey Australasia. AWADI developed the Army's Parakeet deployable trunk communications system under project JP65 — the shelters that turned standard Perentie 6x6 Land Rovers into mobile signal nodes.

History

AWA Defence Industries was created in October 1988 by merging the defence electronics business of Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia) — the Sydney company formed on 11 July 1913 out of the Australasian interests of Marconi and Telefunken — with those of Thorn EMI Electronics Australia and Fairey Australasia. Restructured again in 1990 as AWA Defence Industries Pty Ltd, it worked closely with the Defence Science and Technology Organisation and had a hand in much of Australia's home-grown military electronics: the Ikara anti-submarine missile, the Nulka electronic-warfare rocket decoy, sonobuoys and radar warning receivers among them.

Its Land Rover connection is Parakeet, the Australian Defence Force's deployable battlefield trunk communications system, developed by AWADI under project JP65 and fielded from the mid-1990s as the Battlespace Communications System (Land). Parakeet provided secure voice, data, facsimile and messaging to a deployed force, scaling from around thirty subscribers to more than three hundred, and its assemblage was designed to sit on the tray of a standard Australian Army Land Rover 6x6 Perentie — a boxed electronics module, a folding satellite terminal on a pivoting mast frame with ground anchors, and cable runs to a separate generator. Because it was a bolt-on module rather than a factory variant, Parakeet vehicles are ordinary Perenties converted to the role, and REMLR notes there appears to be no Army record of a distinct 'Parakeet' model. The system's best-known outing was the 2000 peacekeeping deployment to East Timor, where it carried the link between the mainland and the deployed force.

British Aerospace Australia bought AWADI in April 1996 for a reported A$50 million, doubling its size; the business was renamed British Aerospace Defence Industries and became part of BAE Systems Australia after the 1999 merger that created BAE Systems. Parakeet phases 4.1 and 4.2 were AWADI's; the 4.3 satellite and trunk assemblage was delivered under the new ownership.

Vehicles in this registry (1)

Sources & citations

Maker record updated 2026-09-10T05:40:28.273Z · status: researched