Cockatoo Island - Port Jackson - Sydney - New South Wales

Cockatoo Island — Wareamah in Dharug language, a place tied to women’s business and the waterways of the Wallumedegal, Wangal, Cammeraygal and Gadigal peoples — is the largest island in Sydney Harbour, parked where the Parramatta and Lane Cove Rivers meet. From 1839 to 1869 it ran as a convict penal establishment for secondary punishment under Governor Sir George Gipps. Convicts quarried sandstone, raised prison buildings and dug Fitzroy Dock (opened 1857): Australia’s earliest commenced graving dock and the only surviving dry dock built by convict labour in the country.

Shipbuilding and repair grew from that dockyard seed — industrial use roughly 1857 to 1991/92, including a Commonwealth naval dockyard phase supporting the RAN. Between the convict and industrial peaks the island also housed reformatory and nautical-school institutions for young people (c.18711911). Remnant convict fabric forms part of the Australian Convict Sites serial property inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2010.

Since 2001 the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust has managed remediation and public visiting — camping, events, and interpretation of convict, dockyard and residential precincts including Biloela House.

Atalante in Fitzroy Dock, Cockatoo Island, 1873 — State Library of NSW.

The Amazing Islands of Sydney Harbour - Sydney - New South Wales

Call it nine if you like — the harbour does not care. Port Jackson began as a drowned valley with something like fourteen sandstone knobs still showing when the water stopped rising. Five of those knobs have since been stapled to the shore (Garden, Bennelong, Darling, Glebe, Berry). Two more were joined to make Spectacle. What you can still row around, depending who is counting, is about eight: Shark, Clark, Fort Denison (Pinchgut), Goat, Cockatoo, Snapper, Rodd, and Spectacle as the joined pair. The live list on this page mixes the real harbour with three extras that belong to other water.

Start with the ones that are actually in the harbour. Shark and Clark are picnic islands in Sydney Harbour National Park. Pinchgut is Fort Denison — a Martello on a cut-down rock, finished 1857, not a starvation cage you swim from. Goat sits in the western harbour as a powder-magazine and water-police island; Cockatoo is the big convict-and-dockyard island, now Harbour Trust. Snapper and Spectacle are the navy pair off Drummoyne. Rodd is the little Iron Cove reserve that once hosted Pasteur's rabbit laboratory. Garden Island was an island until the Captain Cook Graving Dock joined it to Potts Point; Glebe Island has been a causeway-and-abattoir peninsula since the mid-nineteenth century.

Then the three that do not belong on a Sydney Harbour list. Scotland Island is in Pittwater. Bare Island is the 1880s fort off La Perouse, Botany Bay. Wedding Cake Island is the ocean rock off Coogee. Keep them if you want a scrapbook of islands photographed; do not file them as harbour geology. The Pinchgut line about convicts starving and becoming shark food is folklore. Use this page as the index, and read the individual island posts for the buildings.

Islands still in Sydney Harbour

• Shark Island (Boambilly)
• Clark Island (Billong-olola)
• Fort Denison, formerly Pinchgut
• Goat Island (Me-mel)
• Cockatoo Island (Wareamah)
• Snapper Island
• Rodd Island
• Spectacle Island, the joined pair

Former islands joined to the shore

Garden Island, Bennelong Point, Darling Island, Glebe Island and Berry Island are former islands now connected to the mainland or nearby shore.

Not Port Jackson

• Scotland Island - Pittwater
• Bare Island - Botany Bay, at La Perouse
• Wedding Cake Island - off Coogee