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NSW gifted Adelaide


Volume 50, No.2, February 22, 2007
 

TOURIST ATTRACTION: HMAS Adelaide is set to be given to NSW to be used as a dive wreck off the central coast.
Photo: ABPH Justin Brown
 
The RAN’s long-serving Guided Missile Frigate, HMAS Adelaide, is to be gifted to NSW and sunk as a dive wreck.

Adelaide (CMDR R.B. Slaven) will decommission late in 2007 at her home port in Rockingham, Western Australia with handover to the NSW Government expected in early-to- mid-2008.

Adelaide, which carries the motto “United For the Common Good”, was built in the United States and commissioned in the Royal Australian Navy on November 15, 1980 and is the second ship to carry this name, the first was a light cruiser that served from 1922 to 1945.

Adelaide was the first guided missile frigate to be home-ported in Western Australia and is one of six FFGs acquired by the RAN, four of which are being upgraded with an air warfare capability.

Adelaide participated in the 1990/91 Gulf War as part of Operation Damask, Australia’s participation in the international coalition against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

More recently, the ship was deployed for peacekeeping operations in East Timor in 1999 and to the Persian Gulf as part of the International Coalition against Terrorism in 2001 and 2004.

Adelaide is 138-metres long, displaces 4,100 tonnes and has a crew of 184 as well as helicopter aircrew and maintainers.

The NSW Government has indicated that the preferred location for Adelaide is off the Central Coast, near Terrigal.

Tourism projects which have previously used former RAN warships to establish dive wrecks have reportedly accrued annual revenues ranging from $2.4 million to $23 million to the significant benefit of local communities.