Abstract
Over the course of 170 years, few locations in Sydney have changed as dramatically as Cockatoo Island. Its size, shape and texture today bear little resemblance to the uninhabited, rocky, treecovered island it was in 1839, when the British decided to build a prison on it.As Sydney grew from a colonial settlement into a city, Cockatoo Island changed inexorably. Its wooded slopes were cleared, its upper parts were levelled for the construction of prison barracks, and its sandstone foreshores were blasted with gunpowder to construct a dry dock.The island's size actually increased when cutting and filling formed extensive aprons to accommodate shipbuilding. Once 12.9 hectares, the largest island in Sydney Harbour, today Cockatoo Island is 17.9 hectares, a magnificent artefact of nineteenth-and twentieth-century penal and industrial development.
Highlights
Patrick FletcherOver the course of 170 years, few locations in Sydney have changed as dramatically as Cockatoo Island
As Sydney grew from a colonial settlement into a city, Cockatoo Island changed inexorably
Cockatoo Island is in the country of the Wangal clan, whose territory extended from Darling Harbour to Parramatta on the harbour's southern shore
Summary
Over the course of 170 years, few locations in Sydney have changed as dramatically as Cockatoo Island. As Sydney grew from a colonial settlement into a city, Cockatoo Island changed inexorably. The Aboriginal name for Cockatoo Island is Wareamah. Both names are found in a list of place names compiled by Governor Arthur Phillip and others in 1791.1. Little is known of the use made of the island by the Wangal clan or other indigenous people of the Sydney region. In 1839, Governor Gipps chose Cockatoo Island to build a new prison for secondary offenders, transported convicts who had re-offended in the colony. Gipps considered it less expensive to build a new prison close to home than to expand the overcrowded penal settlement on faraway Norfolk Island where secondary offenders were customarily sent. Cockatoo Island appealed to him, 'surrounded as it is by deep water, and yet under the very eye of Authority'.2
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