Oakey began as a wartime industrial site rather than a flying base. In 1943 the RAAF bought a 934-acre block about two miles north of the town to set up No. 6 Aircraft Depot, one of the depots that kept the air force’s growing fleet serviceable. According to the Wikipedia history of the town, the depot assembled, serviced and test-flew Bristol Beauforts, P-51 Mustangs, Noorduyn Norsemen, CAC Wirraways and Supermarine Spitfires, and housed almost 2,000 people at its height, a large population for a Darling Downs farming town.

When the war ended the depot ran down and the airfield passed to civil use. Fourays, the Army aviation veterans’ association, describes it as the civil airport serving Toowoomba by the 1960s, and Wikipedia records it as a Department of Civil Aviation aerodrome. That civil interlude mattered later: it left Oakey with sealed runways and taxiways that the Army could take over without building a new airfield from scratch.

Army aviation in the 1960s lived as a lodger on RAAF bases. 16 Army Light Aircraft Squadron formed at RAAF Amberley on 1 December 1960 with Cessna 180s and Bell 47G-2 Sioux, and 161 Reconnaissance Flight was raised there in July 1965 before it left for Vietnam. When the Australian Army Aviation Corps was formed on 1 July 1968, the Army wanted a base of its own.

Fourays says sites at Wagga Wagga and Uranquinty in New South Wales were examined, but Oakey won because it already had established runways and taxiways. The aerodrome passed to Army control on 1 July 1969. The 1st Aviation Regiment moved in and, according to Wikipedia, was fully there by the end of 1973, at first in temporary buildings that Fourays says were nicknamed "Silver City". The School of Army Aviation, formed at Amberley in 1972, moved to Oakey too. With Kiowas, Porters and later Nomads on the flight line, the base became the centre of a small but complete army air arm.

Over the following decades the operational regiments left one by one, while Oakey became ever more of a school. In 1998 the Army Aviation Training Centre was formed there. In 2001 the Army Helicopter School, formerly the ADF Helicopter School, moved in from RAAF Fairbairn in Canberra. In 2004 the 1st Aviation Regiment’s Iroquois went to the 5th Aviation Regiment in Townsville, and the regiment itself left for Robertson Barracks in Darwin; Wikipedia dates the headquarters move to 2005–06, Fourays to 2007.

Training has been increasingly delivered with industry. Wikipedia records a contract for Army Aviation Training and Training Support awarded to Boeing Australia in 2007 and expanded in 2010. On 15 December 2004 the first two Tiger armed reconnaissance helicopters were handed over at Oakey, and Tigers stayed on the training line here until the type was retired in September 2026. In 2021 the Training Centre was transferred to the new Army Aviation Command.

The 2023 grounding of the MRH 90 Taipan left a gap in the training system. To bridge it the Army leased five H135T3 helicopters from the UK Ministry of Defence in 2024 for five years and based them at Oakey, where they are known as the Juno. Basic helicopter flying for both the Army and the Navy is otherwise taught at the joint school in 723 Squadron at HMAS Albatross, Nowra, on EC135T2+ helicopters.

Oakey is also one of three Australian communities at the centre of the Defence PFAS story. Firefighting foams containing perfluorooctane sulphonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) were used at the base from 1970 to 2008, and the contamination of groundwater around the town was investigated from 2014, according to the Wikipedia article on Oakey.

In 2020 residents of Oakey, Katherine and Williamtown succeeded in a class action arguing that news of the contamination had driven down their property values; the settlement figure was not confirmed in a source reached for this dataset and is not given here. In December 2021 a study by the Australian National University found, in Wikipedia’s summary, no conclusive evidence of an increased risk of cancer or other disease from the contamination.

Defence says it is finalising a detailed environmental investigation and turning to management and remediation within a defined Management Area: a water treatment plant to filter the aquifer, alternative water and town-water connections for eligible households, excavation and containment of open drains, and removal of PFAS source zones on the base.