Yarra was laid down by the Williamstown Naval Dockyard at Melbourne, Victoria on 9 April 1957.

[1] An enhanced derivative of the Royal Navy's Type 12 frigate, Yarra was one of four ships constructed to provide an anti-submarine warfare capability for the RAN.

[2] She was launched on 30 September 1958 by Lady McBride, wife of the Minister for Defence and commissioned into the RAN on 27 July 1961.

[1] Yarra operated during the Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation; during a three-week patrol in June 1965, the ship fired on an Indonesian incursion force near Sabah.

[4][5] In 1983, Yarra was accompanied by the patrol boats Warrnambool and Ipswich on a deployment to South-East Asia for the multinational Exercise Starfish.