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. Three islands that often turn up on Sydney Harbour lists actually 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. The Pinchgut line about convicts starving and becoming shark food is folklore. The islands follow one by one below.
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
The Islands One by One
Wedding Cake Island
Wedding Cake Island is a small rocky island located in the eastern part of Sydney Harbour, off the coast of Coogee Beach in New South Wales, Australia. Here's some information about Wedding Cake Island:
1. Name: Wedding Cake Island gets its name due to its distinctive shape, which is said to resemble a tiered wedding cake. The name is derived from its appearance when viewed from a distance, particularly from Coogee Beach or other vantage points along the coast.
2. Geological Formation: The island is a rocky outcrop that emerged due to geological processes over millions of years. It is composed of sandstone, which is a common rock type in the Sydney region.
3. Marine Life and Surrounding Area: The island is part of a marine reserve and is known for its diverse marine ecosystem. The surrounding waters are popular for snorkeling and diving due to the presence of coral reefs and a variety of fish and other marine creatures.
4. Access and Conservation: Wedding Cake Island is located offshore and can be seen from various coastal viewpoints. Access to the island itself is restricted to protect the local environment and wildlife. Visitors are not permitted to land on the island.
5. Importance to the Local Community: Wedding Cake Island is a significant landmark for the local community, particularly for residents and visitors of Coogee Beach. It adds to the natural beauty of the area and is often featured in photographs and artwork depicting the Sydney coastline.
6. Music Connection: Wedding Cake Island gained additional recognition through its association with the Australian rock band Midnight Oil. The band released a song titled "Wedding Cake Island" in 1979, which contributed to the island's cultural significance.
Wedding Cake Island is a distinctive geological feature and a notable landmark in Sydney Harbour. Its unique shape, marine biodiversity, and connection to the local community make it a memorable part of the coastal landscape.
Glebe Island
Glebe Island sits between White Bay, Johnstons Bay and Rozelle Bay — the inner western harbour’s working knuckle that most people now clock under the Anzac Bridge cables. The name “glebe” recalls an early church land grant to First Fleet chaplain Richard Johnson; the rocky outcrop was later swapped and the name travelled with colonial church-land patterns. Aboriginal people of the western foreshores used these bays long before reclamation glued the former island to the Rozelle shoreline.
From the 1850s the place went industrial hard. Colonial Architect Edmund Blacket designed stone buildings for a public abattoir (opened around 1860), and a timber bridge soon linked the island to Pyrmont so meat could reach the city. The smells and effluent made it a notorious noxious trade; slaughtering later moved to Homebush. In the early twentieth century the Sydney Harbour Trust levelled and wharfed the rock. From 1921 tall concrete grain elevators and silos dominated the skyline as a bulk wheat terminal; later decades brought dry bulk cargoes and vehicle imports beside neighbouring White Bay.
Percy Allan’s 1903 Glebe Island swing bridge remains a landmark beside the later Anzac Bridge (opened 1995, renamed 1998). Though still called an “island,” the site has long been continuous with the mainland. It is a rare inner-harbour working-port landscape whose silos and wharves sit at the centre of Bays West / Bays Precinct fights over heritage, housing and public waterfront.
Glebe Island abattoirs, Sydney Harbour — historic photograph; State Library of NSW.
Snapper Island
Snapper is the smallest island in Sydney Harbour — a ship-shaped scrap off Drummoyne and Birkenhead Point, sitting with Cockatoo and Spectacle in the western harbour. Early colonial wordlists record an Aboriginal name Ar-ra-re-agon. For most of the nineteenth century the rocky islet saw little permanent building; it was declared a public recreation reserve in the late 1870s and then barely visited.
World War I leased it for storage tied to Cockatoo Island Dockyard. The silhouette everyone notices today dates from 1931–32, when Leonard (Len) Forsythe of the Navy League had the rock blasted, levelled and expanded by reclamation into Training Depot “Sydney” (TS Sydney) for naval cadets. TS Sydney opened in November 1932. Seawalls were cut to suggest a ship’s bow and stern; buildings followed a deck-like plan a land-locked training ship pointed at Drummoyne. Parts salvaged from HMAS Sydney I when she was stripped at Cockatoo helped furnish the memorial idea.
TS Sydney ran as headquarters for Sydney Navy League units for decades. The island is on the Commonwealth Heritage List for Forsythe, the cadets, and that odd harbour skyline contribution. Structures have weathered; the museum collection moved (including to Spectacle and Garden Island) around 2006. Unlike Spectacle’s explosives complex, Snapper’s significance is cadet training, not magazines; access stays tightly managed.
Navy League / Sea Cadets at Snapper Island, Sydney (historical photograph).
Spectacle Island
Off Drummoyne, tucked with Cockatoo and Snapper in the old “Hen and Chickens” group, Spectacle Island is the harbour’s quiet explosives cousin — the one most Sydneysiders only clock from a ferry or the Anzac Bridge approach. An Aboriginal name recorded in early colonial wordlists is Gong-ul. The European story is almost entirely powder and armament: Australia’s oldest naval explosives manufacturing and storage complex, with fabric from the 1860s still sitting on the rock.
From the early 1860s the colonial government put a gunpowder magazine here. Victorian Georgian buildings associated with Colonial Architect James Barnet — magazine, laboratory, cooperage, guard and residential structures — form the nineteenth-century core. In 1884 the island went to the Royal Navy as an ordnance depot for the Australia Squadron; in 1913 it passed to the new Royal Australian Navy and kept feeding ammunition lighters through both world wars and into the late twentieth century.
Spectacle Island is a Commonwealth Heritage place. It is no longer an operational ammunition pipeline and remains largely closed to the general public. A Naval Repository of RAN relics sits among the buildings. Together with Cockatoo and Snapper it reads as a tight brick-and-sandstone industrial pocket that never became a picnic lawn — and that is the point.
Garden Island
Stand on the Potts Point side of Woolloomooloo Bay and Garden Island still reads as a low green hump under the navy’s cranes — except it stopped being a true island generations ago. Aboriginal names recorded in early sources include Ba-ing-hoe / Booroowang (Navy histories also cite Bayingawuwa). Within weeks of the First Fleet’s arrival in 1788 the rock was cleared as a vegetable garden for HMS Sirius — standard Royal Navy anti-scurvy practice. The ship’s log for 11 February 1788 already calls it “the garden island,” and the English name stuck. Sandstone initials dated 1788 survive as rare physical scraps of that first year.
After decades of ships’ gardens and intermittent official use, the mid-1850s turned the place into a serious Royal Navy depot on the Australia Station. In 1913, when the first Royal Australian Navy fleet unit arrived, Admiralty control passed to the Commonwealth. Two world wars thickened the yards into Australia’s principal fleet base and ship-refitting centre. The Captain Cook Graving Dock, built in the Second World War, joined the former island permanently to the Potts Point mainland — the land bridge you still see when a ferry rounds Garden Island ferry wharf.
Today the precinct is Fleet Base East / HMAS Kuttabul: a working naval establishment with nationally significant heritage fabric, not a picnic island. Public access is restricted; heritage interpretation runs through Navy and related historical societies rather than a casual landing.
Clark Island
Clark Island is the tiny bush knuckle off Darling Point — less than a hectare, close enough to Double Bay that you feel you could almost swim the gap on a calm day. Early colonial sources record Aboriginal names including Billong-olola / Be-lang-le-wool; modern visitor material also uses Billong-Olo-Lah. It sits on Gadigal Country and was used for hunting and gathering shellfish along the eastern harbour foreshores.
In 1789 First Fleet officer Lieutenant Ralph Clark tried growing vegetables here. In a hungry colony, theft of the crop became a running joke — and a headache — but the name “Clark Island” stuck. Later in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, like neighbouring Shark Island, it was pulled into public recreation planning: trusts and harbour authorities laid paths and picnic amenity without sanding off the rocky bush character.
Today NPWS runs it as a day-use picnic and event site with a ridiculous view west to the Opera House and Harbour Bridge. There’s no public ferry timetable. You arrive by water taxi, private boat or cultural tour — Tribal Warrior Aboriginal cultural cruises are among the groups that land here. Landing fees and group caps apply; sunrise to sunset is the usual window. Pair it with Shark and Goat (Me-mel) if you’re doing the harbour islands as a set.
A day’s picnic on Clark Island, 1870 — Montagu Scott; State Library of NSW (ML 3).
Shark Island
Shark Island is the long, low green strip you notice when the ferry swings into Rose Bay — about a kilometre from the bay’s mouth, and small enough that a picnic rug can feel like half the island. NPWS spells the Aboriginal name Boowambillee (older records also use Boambilly). It sits on Gadigal Country as part of the harbour’s fishing and foreshore cultural landscape.
The English name is usually tied to the island’s shark-like outline. Yarns about sharks drawn to slaughtering waste still circulate — colourful, but treat them as popular lore, not gospel. Colonial and Federation governments bounced the place between quarantine and public recreation until public pressure helped lock it in as a reserve around 1900. Under the Clark Island Trust and later the Sydney Harbour Trust, Edwardian picnic kit arrived: paths, seats, shelters, and those sandstone foreshore grottos that still look like someone planned a holiday for the tide.
Shark Island joined Sydney Harbour National Park in 1975. It’s still one of the best 360-degree lunch spots on the harbour, and a favourite perch for watching the Sydney to Hobart fleet leave (the 1945 first race is linked with a start off this stretch of water). No scheduled ferry — private boat, water taxi or selected cruises, and a landing fee applies, same regime as Clark and Rodd.
Goat Island
Most harbour ferries slide past Me-mel — Goat Island — without stopping. That’s half the point of the place. It sits almost in the middle of Port Jackson, a sandstone knuckle of magazines, barracks, wharves and quiet bush that never became a picnic lawn like Shark or Clark.
Aboriginal people have known it as Me-mel (also written Milmil and similar forms in early records). Colonial writers linked it with the family of Woollawarre Bennelong; today’s NPWS material keeps Me-mel front and centre. From the 1830s the colonial government took over in earnest: water police, convict labour along the shoreline, then magazines and workshops that kept the island a working harbour machine well into the twentieth century. The State Heritage Register listing covers that whole layered mess — Aboriginal, historic and natural — not just a pretty outline on the water.
What’s left is denser than most visitors expect: buildings and structures from the 1830s through to the 1960s, including a Harbour Master’s residence from 1902. NPWS manages the island inside Sydney Harbour National Park while a government-backed process works toward Aboriginal ownership and governance of Me-mel. Remediation and conservation are underway; public access has always been tighter here than on the picnic islands. Check NPWS before you assume you can land.
Pinchgut Island – Fort Denison
That stubby Martello tower off the Botanic Garden isn’t a postcard prop — it’s Fort Denison, still better known to many Sydneysiders as Pinchgut. Colonial sources record Aboriginal names Mat-te-wan-ye / Muttewai and related spellings; NPWS today also uses Muddawahnyuh. Governor Phillip called the rock Rock Island soon after 1788, but “Pinchgut” won: usually tied to convicts left out here on bread and water, and sometimes to the harbour’s narrow pinch itself.
American warships sailed into the harbour unchallenged in 1839, which concentrated minds. Levelling for a fort began in 1841, then stalled. Crimean War jitters about a Russian attack restarted the work in the mid-1850s. Colonial engineer George Barney oversaw the battery and Australia’s only Martello tower, finished in 1857 with stone from Neutral Bay and named for Governor Sir William Denison. It never fired in anger. The design was already half out of date when the paint was still wet.
From the late nineteenth century the island earned its keep as a light and tide station. A time gun — moved from Dawes Point in 1906 — fired daily at 1 pm so ships could set chronometers; tide measurement has run from here for well over a century. In World War II a shell from USS Chicago, firing during the Japanese midget-submarine attack, damaged the tower. Since 1995 the fort has sat in Sydney Harbour National Park. Check NPWS alerts before you plan lunch on the bastion — conservation closures are not rare.
Fort Denison (Pinchgut) from the water, c.1885 Martello tower and battery already a harbour landmark.
Pinchgut – From John Dunmore Lang
Reverend John Dunmore Lang Remembered As He Said -
"An Island Called Pinchgut, Consisting Of One SolitAry
Governor Phillip Island at farm Cove, a conical peak on a perfect stunted bush have one function – as a dump until he had time to build a jail for convicts who committed crimes after reaching the colony. Maroon convicts who is Russian of bread and water was Road to them once a week changed its name from rock island to pinch gap.
Sometimes the hangman went out on the third boat for years the remnants of a man’s bones hung in chains on a giblet on the island Francis Morgan convicted with others of the murder of a man on the North Shore, with strung up as a warning. There’s a legend I asked if he wished to make any last remark he looked about him and said well you have yeah indeed a beautiful harbour
Early 1940 after two American warships had sneaked into the harbour at night without a pilot Governor gipps decided to rets how many gipps decided to arrange a battery on the island
He said gangs of convicts to level the rock and almost had the job done when he ran out of funds. The ruining of what had once been a lovely if sinister spot sent Dr Dunmore Lang into a rage and he denounce the official golf or Hun.
Military minds however could not resist the law of the island. When there was a Russian invasion scared during the Crimean war I thought was built on it – a Martello tower without buildings for power to magazines and quarters for a small permanent garrison foundations were quarry deep into the island rock. Stone for the 12 foot thick walls was brought from Carrabba point. The fort completed in 1957 was named after the governor so William Denison. The island is now used to the tide gauge in light and fog signal station. It’s 1 o’clock gun was discontinued in 1942
FRANCIS MORGAN. Was Strung Up on A Gibbet
Garden Island, Pinchgut and Clark Island from Rose Bay
From Rose Bay the harbour still reads as a set of rocks in a drowned valley, even though one of them has been stapled to the mainland. Garden Island was the First Fleet’s kitchen garden for HMS Sirius in 1788, which is the whole of the English name. The navy never really left. By the 1850s it was a Royal Navy yard; the RAN took it in 1913; in the 1940s the Captain Cook Graving Dock filled the channel to Potts Point, and the island became a peninsula. What you photograph from Rose Bay is a working dockyard pretending to be a headland.
The little fortified stack closer in is Pinchgut, officially Fort Denison. Governor Phillip’s Rock Island became a convict isolation rock — the “pinchgut” ration story is folklore with a nautical rival, a pinch in the harbour. George Barney had the old pyramid cut down and raised a Martello tower, finished in 1857. John Dunmore Lang called the levelling vandalism against a work of God. He had a point; the silhouette is now all gun and garrison.
Clark Island sits off Darling Point, named for Lieutenant Ralph Clark of the First Fleet, who ran a convict-tended vegetable garden there. It is a pocket of Sydney Harbour National Park: picnic tables, no ferry, bookings for weddings. Three different fates in one view — dockyard, fort, picnic — which is the harbour in miniature.
