Shipping
Chapter 9
This chapter provides information on Australian ships, cargo, ports and fleet including mileage, tonnage and number of vessels. The data is sourced from BITRE’s Australian Sea Freight publication, BITRE’s Waterline publication and BITRE estimates based on Lloyds List Intelligence Data.
- There were 55 Australian registered vessels in the Australian trading fleet, including small vessels, and 73 overseas registered vessels in 2021-22.
- Queensland had the largest discharged volume with 40 million tonnes in 2020-21. Following Queensland, was New South Wales and Victoria with 33 million tonnes discharged each.
- Western Australian ports loaded 1 004 million tonnes of maritime cargo in 2020-21, the largest volume in Australia. Next, Queensland and New South Wales loaded 289 million tonnes and 176 million tonnes respectively. Together the ports in these three states loaded 94 per cent of Australia's maritime cargo by volume in 2020‑21.
- 8.6 million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) were exchanged at container terminals in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Fremantle and Adelaide in 2022-23.
Figure 1 Principal Australian ports, by commodity
Figure 2 Number of cargo ships involved in coastal or international voyages that made port calls, by state/territory
Figure 2 provides a state breakdown of the number of cargo ships on coastal or international voyages who made port calls, from 1999-00 to 2021-22. The majority of states saw increases during this time period. Queensland and Western Australia experienced the largest numerical increases and were consistently Australia’s two most visited states by cargo ships.