Why Australian naval infrastructure arrived too late

The Captain Cook graving dock shows that Australia possessed the ambition to service carriers and battleships locally. Legislation and funding were in place by early 1940, so the problem was not a total absence of planning or resources. Thirty acres of land reclamation preceded construction of the dock itself and contributed to a completion date in early 1945. The strategic failure was schedule: the facility became available only after the period when expanded Australian repair capacity would have mattered most to Allied naval operations.