[1] Between 1969 and 1970 OCL took delivery of its first ships, a fleet of six vessels of 27,000 gross register tons (GRT) and 1,900 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) capacity for the UK/Europe to Australia route.

The service was inaugurated on 6 March 1969 by Encounter Bay undertaking her maiden voyage, and OCL overcame heavy losses in the first years of operations to become one of the world's leading container lines.

OCL played a leading role in the development of CAMEL - the standardised format for electronic manifests.

It served more than 50 major ports and, in 1980, transported more than a quarter of a million container loads of import and export cargo on a route network linking locations throughout four continents.

Subsidiary operations such as the Australia- Japan Container Line did not follow this trend, instead having names such as Arafura and Aotea.