Australia's largest port for containers and general cargo, the Port of Melbourne is a set of man-made docks at the mouth of the Yarra River, where it enters Port Phillip in Victoria, just west of Melbourne's city centre. It has 31 berths and handled 3.39 million TEU of containers in 2024, more than a third of the nation's container trade; in 2006–07 it became the first Australian port to pass two million TEU in a year. The modern port dates from the harbour works that began after the Melbourne Harbor Trust was set up in 1877, and it matters because it is the nation's busiest seaport, Victoria's container gateway and the base for regular cargo links to Tasmania. Understanding it means starting with the machinery: a dangerous sea entrance, a long dredged channel, and a cluster of docks on reclaimed swamp.
The Rip: A One-Kilometre Door From Bass Strait
Every ship bound for Melbourne, and for Geelong on the western arm of the bay, has to pass through the Rip, the only sea entrance to Port Phillip. The gap between Point Lonsdale on the Bellarine Peninsula and Point Nepean on the Mornington Peninsula is 3.5 km wide, but reefs running out from both points cut the navigable width to about 1 km. Just outside the Heads lies a shallow rocky flat, the Rip Bank; beyond it the water deepens to 30 metres, and inside the Heads it plunges to as much as 90 metres.
That uneven floor, combined with tidal streams of up to 6 knots squeezed through a narrow gap, produces the dangerous standing waves that have wrecked many ships over the years. The system that manages it is old-fashioned and strict. Large ships may enter only with a licensed pilot on board. They follow a precise S-shaped course, lined up on two lighthouses at Queenscliff, the white Low Light and the black High Light, which form a leading line, together with the Hume and Murray towers showing red and green lights. Traffic through the Heads is controlled from the Point Lonsdale Signal Station.
Port Phillip's 100 Nautical Miles of Shipping Channel
Once inside, a ship still has most of its journey ahead. Port Phillip covers 1,930 km², but it is remarkably shallow for its size: the deepest point is only 24 metres, and the average depth is about 8 metres. Modern container ships draw far more than that average, so the port depends on more than 100 nautical miles of shipping channels and fairways between the Heads and the berths on the Yarra, at Williamstown and at Station Pier.
Those channels were deepened in the Port Phillip Channel Deepening Project, which began on 8 February 2008 and was completed in November 2009. Working almost around the clock, the Dutch contractor Boskalis removed about 22.9 million m³ of sand and silt, including about 3 million m³ of contaminated sediment, to give a minimum 14-metre draught at all times. The project was budgeted at an estimated A$969 million. It was bitterly opposed by scientists, divers and the community group Blue Wedges, whose kayakers and boats placed themselves in the path of the dredger Queen of the Netherlands and briefly won a reprieve in the Federal Court before their case was dismissed in March 2008.
Coode's Canal and the Swanson Dock Basins
The inner port is a piece of 19th-century civil engineering. In Melbourne's early years large ships could not get up the winding Yarra, so cargo was landed at Williamstown or at Sandridge (now Port Melbourne) and carried to the city by rail or by lighter. In 1877 the colonial government engaged the British harbour engineer Sir John Coode, whose answer was to cut a new, straighter and wider course for the river south of the old one, shortening it by about a mile. The Coode Canal was dug in 1886, cutting off Coode Island, which rejoined the mainland in the 1930s as the old river bed was filled in.
On that reclaimed ground stands the heart of the modern port, Swanson Dock, built by the Melbourne Harbor Trust off the north bank of the Yarra between 1966 and 1972 as Melbourne's first all-container terminal. It was officially opened on 7 March 1969 by the Governor of Victoria, Sir Rohan Delacombe, and the first international ship to berth, at No 1 West, was the Encounter Bay. It is really two basins. Swanson Dock East, operated by Patrick, has four berths along 884 metres of quay, six container cranes and 40 hectares of storage; Swanson Dock West, run by DP World, has four berths along 944 metres, seven cranes and 34 hectares. Both can take the largest container ships that trade with Australia.
The docks have moved steadily downstream as ships grew and bridges closed the river behind them. The Spencer Street Bridge of 1929 cut off the upper wharves and led to Appleton Dock; the Charles Grimes Bridge of 1975 closed more; and in 1999 the Bolte Bridge, part of CityLink, sealed the entrance of Coode's old Victoria Dock, which became the centrepiece of the Docklands redevelopment. The port's formal upstream limit is now the Bolte Bridge.
Appleton Dock and the Coode Island Chemical Tanks
Around the container basins sits a ring of berths, each built for one type of cargo. Appleton Dock, finished in about 1956 after delays caused by the Second World War, handles general cargo at berths B to D, Tasmanian cargo at E and dry bulk such as grain at F. Coode Island itself holds bulk liquid chemicals, a use that began in 1960 and has been contested since 21 August 1991, when a storage tank caught fire and exploded and about 8.5 million litres of chemicals, including acrylonitrile and benzene, burned and sent a toxic cloud over nearby residential suburbs. Relocation to Point Lillias near Geelong was studied but dropped because of the cost and local opposition. Holden Dock takes refined petroleum, and Gellibrand Pier, run by ExxonMobil, has a pipeline to the Altona refinery.
Webb Dock and Station Pier at the River Mouth
At the river mouth, Webb Dock at Fishermans Bend was built progressively from 1960 on dredged land; its No 1 roll-on roll-off berth, opened in 1959 for the Princess of Tasmania ferry, was the first of its kind in Australia. Webb Dock West is the country's main terminal for car imports and exports, handling more than 370,000 new vehicles in 2012–13 on a 19-hectare site with room for 7,000 cars. At Webb Dock East, the Philippine operator ICTSI won a 40-year concession in May 2014 to run a new container terminal, Victoria International Container Terminal, part of an expansion meant to lift the dock's capacity to one million standard containers a year. Station Pier, opened in 1854 and rebuilt between 1922 and 1930 as Australia's largest timber-piled wharf, remains Melbourne's main passenger terminal for cruise ships, able to berth ships 305 metres long.
Rail Sidings at Swanson Dock and the Freight Links Inland
The last part of the system moves boxes away from the quay. Rail sidings serve both halves of Swanson Dock, so containers can move straight between ship and train. The original 1960s sidings were later removed and not restored until 2002–03, when a new 1,500-metre siding was built with overpasses to separate trains from road traffic. Appleton Dock's sidings reopened in 2000 to serve a new export grain terminal, and most of the network is dual gauge, allowing both standard and broad gauge trains. The dedicated Webb Dock railway, built in 1984–86, fell out of use in 1992 because of its sharp curves and to make way for Docklands.
What the Port Means for Victoria, From the 1998 Dispute to the 2016 Lease
All this machinery serves a bay ringed entirely by Victoria's two largest cities, Greater Melbourne and Greater Geelong. More than 40 shipping lines make around 3,100 calls a year, linking Melbourne to more than 300 ports, and the traffic has grown steadily. Between May 2003 and May 2004 about 3,400 ships called, and the port handled 64.4 million tonnes of cargo and 1.9 million TEU.
The port has also been a stage for national arguments. In 1998 Swanson Dock East was the centre of the Australian waterfront dispute, when Patrick Stevedores locked out members of the Maritime Union of Australia and replaced them with non-union labour. Ownership changed in September 2016, when the state leased the port's commercial operations for 50 years to the Lonsdale Consortium for more than A$9.7 billion; its members include Global Infrastructure Partners, the Future Fund, the Queensland Investment Corporation and Ontario's OMERS pension fund. The Port of Melbourne Corporation, the statutory body created in 2003 to administer the river below the Bolte Bridge, was replaced as regulator after the lease by the Victorian Ports Corporation, itself merged into Ports Victoria in 2021.
The limits are already visible. Infrastructure Victoria has estimated that the port will reach its capacity in 2055. In the meantime the Webb Dock expansion has added container space, and Footscray Road is planned to be raised to improve access to the rail facilities at South Dynon. For the city that grew around these docks, see our guide to Melbourne's geography; for the strait every ship crosses before reaching the Rip, read our Bass Strait guide; and for the trade the port supports, our overview of the economy of Australia.