Australia Lays the Keel of Its First Hunter Frigate as the Type 26 Reaches 34 Hulls in Four Navies

Shipbuilders at BAE Systems Maritime Australia laid the keel of NUSHIP Hunter at the Osborne Naval Shipyard in South Australia on 24 August 2026, formally starting hull assembly on the first of the Royal Australian Navy's new anti-submarine frigates. The Minister for Defence Industry and the Chief of Navy placed a coin beneath two ship blocks, the customary marker of the milestone.

The ceremony follows the first steel cut in June 2024. Defence said more than 60 percent of the ship was in fabrication or construction as of June 2026, with 20 of the first hull's 22 blocks under way. The first Hunter is due to enter service in the early 2030s, replacing the oldest of the eight Anzac-class frigates that have carried the fleet's escort work since 1996.

Six ships are now planned, down from the nine originally contracted in December 2018. The reduction came out of the February 2024 surface fleet review, which redirected money toward a larger force of smaller combatants while lifting the Navy's overall warship count. The two ships behind Hunter, Flinders and Tasman, are already on order.

The design itself is not Australian. The Hunter is a heavily modified version of BAE Systems' Type 26 Global Combat Ship, and the Australian variant has drawn criticism for weight growth: Australia has fitted a different radar and combat system to a hull already displacing around 8,000 tonnes in its British form, more than twice the 3,600 tonnes of the Anzac it replaces. Navy Lookout reported continued concerns over margins on the Australian ships as construction begins.

What the keel laying underlines is how far the Type 26 has travelled as an export. Counting every hull ordered or planned, GlobalMilitary.net's fleet records now show 34 ships in four navies built on the design:

• Royal Navy — 8 City-class Type 26, two of them fitting out
• Royal Canadian Navy — 15 River-class destroyers, the first three under an C$8 billion construction contract signed in March 2025
• Royal Australian Navy — 6 Hunter-class
• Royal Norwegian Navy — 5 frigates, selected in September 2025 under a deal worth about £10 billion, the largest British warship export since the Second World War

That makes it the most widely adopted Western surface-combatant design of the decade, and it explains why the Canadian and Norwegian programs are watched in Canberra: the three export operators share a hull whose growth in weight and cost has drawn recurring criticism, notably in Australian National Audit Office reviews of the program.

For Australia, the Hunters are the anti-submarine half of a fleet whose surface strike now rests on three Hobart-class destroyers. Australia sits in the upper tier of the world's frigate fleets ranking largely on Anzac numbers, and the transition between the two classes will be the tightest point of the program: the Anzacs age out through the 2030s while Hunter deliveries have yet to demonstrate their pace.