On 18 December 1943, the ship was part of a convoy that ran aground on Bougainville Reef; the corvette was able to refloat herself and sail back to Brisbane, but remained in port for repairs until January 1944.

After World War II, Gladstone was involved in the Japanese surrender of Timor at Koepang, performed surveillance in the Lesser Sunda Islands, and transported Netherlands East Indies soldiers from Darwin to Timor, then spent the next ten years attached to Flinders Naval Depot as a training ship.

Conflicting reports mark the next few years of the ship's operation, until she was sold in 1978 to a new owner, who used her to rescue Vietnamese refugees in the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand under the auspices of Food for the Hungry International.

In 1938, the Australian Commonwealth Naval Board (ACNB) identified the need for a general purpose 'local defence vessel' capable of both anti-submarine and mine-warfare duties, while easy to construct and operate.

[6] The need for locally built 'all-rounder' vessels at the start of World War II saw the "Australian Minesweepers" (designated as such to hide their anti-submarine capability, but popularly referred to as "corvettes") approved in September 1939, with 60 constructed during the course of the war: 36 (including Gladstone) ordered by the RAN, 20 ordered by the British Admiralty but manned and commissioned as RAN vessels, and 4 for the Royal Indian Navy.

[1][13] Reports of the ship's operations in the next few years are conflicting: Akuna may have been used for charter cruises in Port Phillip, or sailed to Brisbane via Sydney for an aborted youth training scheme.

[16] After a boiler refit, the ship relocated to Singapore and began operating in the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand, rescuing Vietnamese refugees from boats and transporting them to shore.

[16] Around this time, a former United States Air Force pilot claimed to have purchased the ship from Food for the Hungry, and that he was using it to rescue US prisoners-of-war that were still interred in Vietnam.

[17] The pilot mass-mailed letters to families of missing-in-action soldiers asking for money to fund the rescue operations, but was later determined to be a money-making scam.

[17] Around the same time as the mass-mailing, the US government was informed that Akuna II was moored in Songkhla, having been there for about two years, with a two-man skeleton crew who lived aboard but knew nothing about how to operate or maintain the ship.