HMAS Uralba
auxiliary minefield tender
HMAS Uralba was an auxiliary minefield tender and armament stores carrier operated by the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) during World War II. She was launched in 1942 by Ernest Wright, Tuncurry, New South Wales as Uralba (presumably named after the North Coast of NSW locality) for the North Coast Steam Navigation Company. Requisitioned by the RAN while under construction on 13 July 1942 and commissioned on 22 November 1942. After being returned to her owners and being sold and used for a number of purposes she was sunk on 4 November 1971 to create an artificial reef off Carrum Creek, in Port Phillip Bay.
Career
Her engines came from the Sydney Ferries Limited steamer, Kuramia, made redundant by the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
While she was under construction in 1942 for the North Coast Steam Navigation Company, she was requisitioned by the RAN. She was based in Brisbane as a minefield tender for a couple of years before moving to Milne Bay, New Guinea as a stores and armaments carrier. Uralba was paid off in August 1945 and returned to her owners.
For the next few years she transported timber between Melbourne and Tasmania. Uralba was sold in 1948 to the State Electricity Commission of Victoria carrying construction materials across Bass Strait for the Latrobe Valley power stations. On her return voyages she carried cars and general cargo to Tasmania.
Sold in September 1953 to the A & A Steamship Trading Syndicate of NSW and was subject to High Court of Australia seizure in 1958.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “HMAS Uralba” is auxiliary minefield tender. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through HMAS, Uralba and auxiliary, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5630637. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1942, 1971, 1945 and 1948.
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This entry incorporates text from “HMAS Uralba” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.