Hundreds of Australian families have been reunited just in time for Christmas. Navy ship HMAS Brisbane sailed back into Sydney today following a three-month deployment.
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00:00 About 500 Navy personnel have returned home to Australia just in time for the holidays
00:06 after spending almost three months at sea.
00:09 About half of them deboarded here at Garden Island this morning, welcomed by family members.
00:16 Three warships, HMAS Brisbane, HMAS Toowoomba and HMAS Stalwart, departed Australia back
00:22 in September.
00:23 The deployment was part of Australia's efforts to enforce UN sanctions on North Korea.
00:29 Warships and their crews participated in several exercises and activities with allied countries,
00:33 including the US, India, Japan, South Korea and the UK.
00:37 During the operation, HMAS Toowoomba had an encounter with the Chinese Navy and HMAS Brisbane,
00:44 which is the ship that returned here in Sydney today, evacuated Bureau of Meteorology researchers
00:49 from an island off Queensland to stop them being caught up in Cyclone Jasper.
00:54 We got everyone on board safe and sound.
00:55 As soon as they were all on, we turned and headed for home and spent two days evading
01:00 the cyclone and then got south of it just the other day.
01:05 And everyone has been returned back to Sydney and then they're on their way to Cairns now.
01:10 So look, the Bureau personnel had a great time on board.
01:14 We'll quite often come across other navies up there and PLAN are engaged up in that region.
01:22 We obviously had a number of encounters there with Toowoomba in terms of the diving incident
01:27 there where we had an unsafe, unprofessional act by a PLAN destroyer that closed Toowoomba
01:33 whilst it was conducting diving operations and radiated its sonar.
01:37 Hundreds of families turned out here to Sydney today to welcome the Navy personnel who had
01:43 returned after being aboard HMAS Brisbane.
01:46 It's great to see the family again.
01:48 Yeah, been away for a while.
01:51 It's really good.
01:52 We had a good deployment, pretty eventful.
01:55 It's amazing to be back home, get to see my girlfriend.
01:59 I'm super excited.
02:00 It was a well-awaited visit back home.
02:03 Personnel on HMAS Toowoomba and HMAS Stourwood were also reunited with their loved ones in
02:10 Perth earlier this week.
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