Bare Island - La Perouse - Botany Bay - New South Wales

First geography check: Bare Island is not in Sydney Harbour. It is a low sandstone islet off the La Perouse headland on the northern shore of Botany Bay, linked to the mainland by a timber bridge — even though the blog’s harbour-islands title pattern put “Port Jackson” in the URL. Captain Cook’s 1770 journal noted “a small bare island” here as a navigational marker, and the English name stuck. The wider headland is part of the Gooriwal cultural landscape, with deep continuing connections for the La Perouse Aboriginal community (including Gweagal and Kameygal associations at European contact) to land and sea for food, work and recreation.

In the 1880s, colonial nerves about foreign naval attack fortified the rock. The fort was designed under imperial defence advice from Sir Peter Scratchley (with Gustave Morell) for the NSW Department of Public Works; Colonial Architect James Barnet is also associated with the works. Construction ran through the 1880s (commonly summarised 1881–1889). Decommissioned in the early twentieth century, from 1912 the fort served for decades as a war veterans’ home, with brief military reuse in the Second World War period.

Bare Island Fort is State Heritage listed and managed inside Kamay Botany Bay National Park / the La Perouse headland precinct by NPWS. It matters both as a near-intact late-nineteenth-century coastal defence work and as part of the living Aboriginal cultural landscape of La Perouse. Guided tours and headland walks are the usual way in — not a Port Jackson ferry hop.

Bare Island fort, La Perouse, Botany Bay.

Birth Of Captain Cook

Born on this day 

Wednesday, October 27, 1728. :   Captain James Cook, who charted Australia's eastern coastline, is born. 

     James Cook was born at Marton in North Yorkshire, on 27 October 1728. He was the son of a farm labourer, and held no great ambitions, being apprenticed in a grocer/haberdashery when he was 16. Lack of aptitude in the trade led his employer to introduce Cook to local shipowners, who took him on as a merchant navy apprentice. Here he was educated in algebra, trigonometry, navigation, and astronomy, which later set Cook up to command his own ship.

After working his way up to positions of greater responsibility and experience, Cook was hired in 1766 by the Royal Society to travel to the Pacific Ocean to observe and record the transit of Venus across the Sun. Following this, Cook's next orders were to search the south Pacific for Terra Australis Incognita, the great southern continent that many believed must extend around the southern pole. He came across New Zealand, which Abel Tasman had discovered in 1642, and spent some months there, charting the coastline. Nearly a year later, Cook set sail west for New Holland, which was later to become Australia

Botany Bay

Garewell To Old Enfland Forver 

Farewell To The Well known Old Baileu 

Where I Used To Cut Such. A Fine Sqekl 

Too - Ra - Li -

Singing 

Too - Ra - Li - Ur - A - Lie Aye 

We're Bound For Botany Bay 

Taint leaving Old England we Cares a About 

We Mispells What awe Kbow 

Cos We're All Light Fingered Gentry 

Now The Captain Is Our Commander 

The First And Second Class Passengers 

Knows What Us  Convicts 

Had I The Wings Of A a turtle 

And In Her Sweet Breasts I'd Die