Browse Descriptions for: Cockatoo Island

Order By:

Mac

Rating: 5 | Votes: 1 | Date: 04/06/2026 14:03:00

The largest island in Sydney Harbour has worn many guises, and Cockatoo Island, known to its traditional owners as Wareamah, carries the layered scars of all of them. From the 1830s it held a convict prison whose inmates quarried the sandstone and dug grain silos by hand; later it became a reformatory and industrial school for girls; and for much of the twentieth century it was one of Australia's most important shipyards, building and repairing naval vessels through two world wars. That unusual ...