A ship said by some to be more important than the Cutty Sark is returning to Australia after a tug of love between the country and Britain.

The City of Adelaide, briefly enjoying a berth close to her more famous successor, the Cutty Sark, on the Thames at Greenwich, spent 23 years making 10,000-mile (16,090 km) journeys to and from south Australia, with passengers and general cargo.

Over the last 120 years, she has served as a hospital ship at Southampton and a training ship at Irvine, in Ayrshire, Scotland, where she was renamed HMS Carrick. More recently, she has spent decades moored on the Clyde in Scotland.

Neither ship could now take to the high seas under their own power, but while the Cutty Sark has flourished as an icon from the days when Britain did rule the waves, - undergoing a £50m renovation after a fire in 2007 - the only other surviving sailing clipper the City of Adelaide, five years older, has been less fortunate, and sank in 1991.

The Scottish Maritime Museum raised the ship from the Clyde and she returned to Irvine, but as the costs of maintaining her soared, the museum applied to end her official status as a historic ship so she could be dismantled.

International condemnation followed and in 2001 Prince Phillip joined a conference in Glasgow in an attempt to find a better solution.

In 2010 the Scottish government and Historic Scotland backed the Australian proposals. Last month she was towed to Chatham dockyard in Kent. She is meant to be in her new home on Port river, South Australia, by May next year.

The ship, the first composite vessel of wood over a wrought iron frame, starts for Australia in a few weeks, after a ceremony on Friday led by Prince Philip to formally give the hulk back her first name.

But enthusiasts from Sunderland, where the ship was launched in 1864, who have been engaged for years in trying to keep the ship from going to Adelaide are still hoping they can make a late legal challenge to stop her departure.

Peter Maddison, a former electrician and engineer in the shipbuilding industry on Wearside and chairman of the group that had hoped to raise £2m to bring the ship to Sunderland, said: "We're fighting for more than a ship. The clipper will restore pride and ambition back to the town and create desperately needed training and apprenticeship opportunities for our young people."

But David Mann, director of the Scottish Maritime Museum, said the Australian project team and engineers had been "incredibly professional and passionate".

Martyn Heighton, director of National Historic Ships UK, said neither Sunderland campaigners nor the local council had made a firm offer of a site for the ship or provided sufficient plans for saving her.

"They had no less help than the Australians," he insisted. "I am not trying to make any judgment on them. They just were not able to put it together."