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Australian Shipbuilding History

As well as commercial wharves, Australia's major ports - and some very minor ones too - also developed ship-building and repair facilities. The minor ship-building ports, located all over the country, but especially in New South Wales with its rich timber resources, built small and medium-sized timber vessels for various owners right up until the 1940s when the last such business, at Tuncurry on the New South Wales lower north coast, went out of business. A small place like Huskisson on Jervis Bay even built ferries for Sydney Harbour in the first decades of the twentieth century. World War II, in fact, saw a brief revival of timber ship construction, since there were so many Japanese mines and torpedoes about, to which timber was relatively immune unless there was a direct hit.

The big ship building and repair businesses, though, were of course in the big ports such as Melbourne, Hobart, Brisbane, Adelaide, Newcastle and, above all, Sydney. Australia had never been a builder of very large or sophisticated vessels, except for the navy and then almost entirely for political reasons. Large shipowners nearly always turned to Scottish or Ulster yards for their best vessels in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nonetheless, Australia's ports were the homes to a considerable shipbuilding industry.

The primacy of Sydney in this industry was uncontested. Even the bulk of the pearling luggers for service in far-away Broome and Thursday Island were built on the shores of Berry's Bay and Lavender Bay in North Sydney, although some were also built in Fremantle (where there were also good timber supplies nearby) and even on Thursday Island itself. The reasons for Sydney's primacy are easy to explain. It was the first port, with easily the best natural harbour, so developed the industry first and always had superior facilities as a result. Second, some of the world's finest shipbuilding timbers grew nearby.

During the first fifty years of the nineteenth century, nearly all Australian ships were built of timber, most of them in small yards in Sydney and Hobart, and repairs were carried out by careening vessels. After iron vessels, especially auxiliary steamers, became more common from the 1840s, these rudimentary practices were inadequate. The first iron foundry in Australia was opened in Sydney in 1821 (on the corner of George and Market Streets!) and by 1831 another foundry was able to undertake work as significant as rebuilding the steam engine of the William the Fourth.

By the 1840s there was a number of marine engineering works in Sydney, each capable of maintaining large early marine steam engines. The largest and most important was P. N. Russell's at the foot of Bathurst Street, and one of his main rivals, confusingly, was John Russell in Pyrmont, who completed a steamship with a locally made engine as early as 1838. In 1855 Australia's first dry dock, Mort's Dock at Balmain, was opened; followed in 1857 by the government-owned Fitzroy Dock on Cockatoo Island, initally intended for naval use. Both these were in Sydney, and by 1870 there were dry docks in most of Australia's major ports. Brisbane's Government Dock at South Brisbane opened in 1881.32 Dry docks were essential to repair iron vessels and their machinery, especially steamers' screws. Fitzroy Dock is still intact, and so is Mort's Dock, although it is now filled in and the former shipyard is a public park, with the stone capping of this most historic dock marking out where it lies beneath the lawn.

The most surprisingly located shipbuilder in Australia perhaps was Walkers Limited, who set up their dockyard some 20 miles (33km) upstream on the Mary River near Maryborough, Queensland as early as 1868. It built 13 vessels in the 1870s and 1880s, before ceasing shipbuilding until a revival brought on by the decision of the Hughes Government to establish the Commonwealth Line in 1917. By 1923 Walker's had completed two of the four 6,600-ton ships, far larger than anything they had built before or since. The government was less than impressed by the slow progress on the order, which really was a case of the builders having bitten off more than they could chew.

The docking and repair of naval vessels at Australian dockyards pre-dates federation. In the 1850s, the Williamstown dockyard on the southern shore of Port Phillip Bay was established as a base for the Victorian Navy — the first navy established on the Australian continent. Australia's first dry dock was opened in 1855 at Mort's Dock in Balmain. In 1856, the New South Wales government reserved Garden Island in Sydney Harbor as a base for the Royal Navy and a ship repair site. In 1857, Fitzroy Dock was constructed at Cockatoo Island at Potts Point to service visiting vessels of the Royal Navy.

The Cockatoo Island dockyard assembled the first Australian-built warship for the RAN — HMAS Warrego — in June 1912, a year after the official establishment of the RAN. HMAS Warrego had been built in Scotland and dismantled for reassembly at Cockatoo Island. The same year, the Commonwealth government purchased the dockyard from the New South Wales government. It remained in Commonwealth ownership until 1933, when it was leased to the Cockatoo Docks and Engineering Co. Pty Ltd. The Commonwealth had an active record of naval vessel construction at Cockatoo Island between 1912 and 1933, highlighted by the commissioning of three River class torpedo boat destroyers in 1916. After 1933, the Cockatoo Docks and Engineering Company maintained a high rate of naval vessel construction with the building of two Sloop vessels (frigates) in the mid-1930s ands everal Bathurst class minesweepers, Tribal class destroyers and River class frigates during the war years.

Naval orders always played a large role in sustaining a heavy iron (and after World War I) steel shipbuilding industry in Australia. This was because Australian builders were never big enough to compete with the yards of Glasgow and Belfast in particular. During the early 1920s, for instance, the Royal Australian Navy ordered 22 steel ships from the six builders the government judged best able to produce large vessels in Australia. These were Cockatoo Island Works in Sydney; the New South Wales State Dockyard at Walsh Island in Newcastle; the Williamstown Dockyard in Melbourne; Poole and Steel in Adelaide; and Walkers Limited in Maryborough, Queensland. However, when the orders were complete, most had to close, or confine themselves to repairs. Only Cockatoo Island remained a significant builder, eventually building more than thirty ships between 1912 and its closure in 1990. There was also a brief revival of Williamstown's fortunes as a naval builder after World War II.

Easily the most important ship repair facility in Australia, like the major shipbuilding facility at Cockatoo Island, was a naval initiative. Unsurprisingly, it was also built in Sydney. Garden Island in Sydney had been home to the Royal Navy's Australia Station since 1857, when it was transferred to the new Royal Australian Navy in 1911. It was already a well-equipped naval dockyard by 1896, and was indeed the major Royal Navy base east of Trincomalee in Ceylon. At that time there was no base in Singapore, that particular facility being completed just in time to be captured by the Japanese in 1942.

In the inter-war years, Australia's naval shipbuilding companies were not large enough to compete with the yards in Glasgow and Belfast and relied on substantive foreign orders. The 1930s were particularly lean for the Williamstown dockyard, which produced only three vessels. Even in the 1920s, however, when the RAN ordered production of 22 steel ships from Australian shipbuilding companies, 'most had to close, or confine themselves to repairs'.

Anticipating war with Japan, and concerned about the ability to hold Singapore, the British and Australian governments decided in 1939 to build a dry dock at Garden Island capable of taking the largest ships afloat. Built between 1941 and 1945, the Captain Cook Dock, as it was known, was 1,000 feet long and 34 feet deep. Associated with it was an enormous lathe capable of machining the largest ships' screw shafts, and an enormous 250-ton crane. The whole project cost 10.5 million, or a little more than the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the only comparable engineering project in Australia to that date. Although intended primarily for naval use (the first vessel docked was HMS Illustrious in February 1945), it has also been used for repairs to many civilian vessels, and so is a crucial part of commercial maritime enterprise in Australia.

The war years also saw the construction of the Cairncross Dry Dock in Brisbane, which, although not on anything like the scale of the Captain Cook Dock, was still an impressive piece of engineering. At the same time, Brisbane began a new venture in shipbuilding, with the establishment of Evans Deakin at Kangaroo Point using redundant equipment and personnel from the construction of the Storey Bridge. Unsurprisingly, the RAN's demands during World War II were a fillip for Australia's naval shipbuilding and repair industry. The majority of naval vessels built at the Cockatoo Island and Williamstown dockyards were completed during the early to mid-1940s. In total, 113 RAN naval vessels were built at ten Australian dockyards during the Second World War, in addition to the repair of over 4000 RAN ships, over 500 United States Navy ships and 391 Royal Navy Ships.

The repair of naval vessels at Australian dockyards continued in the immediate post-war years, albeit at a lesser rate. The RAN continued to purchase naval vessels from the UK and by 1964 had ordered the three Perth-class guided missile destroyers from the U.S. Dr Paul Earnshaw has noted that 'from about 1960…Australia had become a more discriminating customer, obtaining its naval requirements from the most appropriate source'.

However, Australia’s increasing resort over the 1960s and 1970s to purchasing foreign naval vessels for the RAN reflected the poor performance of domestic naval shipbuilding projects. The construction of the Daring and River class destroyers at the government-owned Williamstown and Cockatoo dockyards in the 1950s and 1960s ran well over cost and schedule. The Daring class ships were delivered years late, and cost twice as much as the same class of ships built in Britain. The River Class suffered three-fold cost escalation during the project.

The difficulties plaguing local construction and the preference for foreign acquisition continued in the 1970s, leaving Australian dockyards to focus primarily on repair work. Apart from the two oceanographic vessels, HMAS Cook (1973) and HMAS Flinders (1981), the Williamstown dockyard did not commission a naval vessel between 1971 and 1991. After the commissioning of HMAS Torrens in 1971, the Cockatoo Island dockyard did not commission another vessel until the underway replenishment ship HMAS Success in 1986.

The Department of Defence experienced problems with both local construction and foreign acquisition projects. Problems were associated with the three major warship decisions of the 1970s — the locally designed DDL (light) destroyers; the acquisition of four frigates from the U.S. Navy (USN); and the foreign design and local construction of HMAS Success.

By the year 2000 Australia was geared to build ships the size of frigates like the Anzac class, which have a displacement of about 3,600 tonnes. The country could handle more, and had done so in projects like Success, a Durance Class oiler at just under 18,000 dead weight tons. She was launched in 1984 and was long the biggest naval ship ever built in Australia. But when it came to building something 25,000 tons or more, Australia just didn’t have capacity to move the requiredamount of steel.

In the case of bigger ships many felt Australia would be better off going offshore to get the platform constructed and then turn to Australian industry do the higher technology part of it — the higher value part of it. The view was that Australia needed to ensure industry could cultivate skills and capabilities that could be sustained, and fabricating large steel structures was not necessarily where industry needed to go. The Australian Navy and Australian industry have been able to move from an arrangement where nearly all Australian naval warships were built overseas, to one where nearly all were built in Australia.

Austal and Incat have both had success adapting their commercial designs for military use. Unlike the three main primes, these companies specialise in fast, lightweight aluminium vessels designed for versatility and manoeuvrability in a military support role. Both companies have been assisted by partnerships with U.S. companies. In terms of business strategy, however, the companies are quite different. Incat adapts its commercial vessels for lease to the U.S. Army as a way to keep its ships in use. It has no plans to establish a foreign shipyard. Austal has operated a U.S. shipyard and anticipates most business growth in its defence/patrol sales.