Sydney boasts “the finest and most extensive harbour in the universe” – or so the first fleet chief surgeon, John White, rhapsodised in 1790.
Less trumpeted, though, have been the harbour’s islands. Once numbering 14, there are now only eight. Five (Garden, Bennelong, Darling, Glebe and Berry) were connected to the surrounding shores by the European colonisers, while two were joined to form what is now Spectacle Island.
Many might be familiar with Cockatoo Island, known to First Nations people as Wareamah. Regular services now ferry visitors to tour the substantial remains of what was once a convict jail and then a shipyard, now often the site for art exhibits. Camping is available for overnight stays.
The other seven islands are more obscure but offer their own attractions – even if the closest you’ll get is by paddling or sailing or (more rarely) swimming by.
In their 2000 book The Islands of Sydney Harbour (a key source for this summary), Mary Shelley Clark and Jack Clark note that their beauty and appeal was recognised as early as 1878, with the legislative assembly of New South Wales proclaiming Clark, Rodd and Snapper islands places of public recreation.
Here is what you may find on the seven islands, moving roughly from east to west down the harbour.
Shark Island/Boowambillee
Shark Island has long been popular for picnics, not least for its clear views of the Harbour Bridge and Opera House – and New Year’s Eve fireworks.
A few thousand people land each year, the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service says.
At least two middens are on the island, demonstrating its importance as a source of oysters and other shellfish for Indigenous people, the Clarks note.
Named more for its shape than a surfeit of sharks, the 1.5-hectare island is served by regular ferries from Circular Quay. It also has small stretches of beach suitable for kayakers paddling out from Rose Bay (where kayaks can be rented) or elsewhere.
In the 19th century the island served as a quarantine station. From 1832 ships anchored nearby until they could be cleared of cholera to enter Sydney Cove. From 1871 stock and dogs were held there for quarantine.
The island reopened for public recreation by 1905 and an Edwardian pavilion was added. It is still standing, although it’s in need of a paint job.
Many of the island’s plants are exotics, such as hoop pines and Canary Island date palms.
A set of rusty pipes leads from a brick shed on the island’s eastern edge, taking cables to Neilsen Park about 800m away across what official charts list as naval waters, off limits to anchoring.
The cables “degauss” ships by sending electric currents to wipe their magnetic signature and make them less likely to activate mines.
A $7 fee applies to daily visitors – unless the island has been exclusively booked. Shark Island’s wharf is expected to be closed temporarily in early 2024 once work on Clark Island is complete.
Clark Island/Billong-olola
Clark Island, just 350m from Darling Point and a short paddle from Shark Island, is one of the harbour’s smallest isles at about 0.9 hectares, but the prettiest.
Visitors can steal glimpses of the bridge and the harbour surrounds from a short hill. Beautiful sandstone formations, Port Jackson figs, scribbly gums and other native vegetation offer a sense of what greeted the first fleet.
The island’s European name recalls Ralph Clark, a marine, whose efforts to grow potatoes, onion and corn during the colony’s struggling early years were regularly foiled by thieves.
“Whoever they are, I wish they were in hell for their kindness,” he wrote to his wife, Betsy Alicia. (Since possums are known to swim from Clark to Shark, perhaps the thieves were not all humans.)
Land reclamation in the late 19th century added English-style lawns, allowing for picnics and, for a while, performances of plays such as Treasure Island.
During the second world war, Clark was used to store spare warship gun barrels, each weighing 100 tonnes. It was also the site of a gruesome event in 1942, when the remains of the Japanese mini-submarines that penetrated the harbour were brought for examination, and their dead crew members removed.
Work on the island’s wharf means it won’t reopen to the public until at least early February.
Fort Denison/Muddawahnyah
Originally named Pinchgut by the British – probably because the harbour narrows just here – the island was used in 1796 to gibbet the body of the executed murderer Francis Morgan. Residents endured the memento mori for three years.
The pyramid-shaped island was levelled in 1840 to construct a fort after two US navy warships arrived in the harbour unannounced the previous year, exposing Sydney’s weak defences.
Ian Hoskins, in his book Sydney Harbour: a History, cites the civic reformer Dr John Dunmore Lang’s description of Pinchgut as “rising perpendicularly from the deep water … This natural ornament of the harbour [which] no art could have equalled … was at length destroyed by the folly of man”.
The folly including building a Martello-style fort, based on designs used decades earlier for coastal defences around the British Isles, initially to guard against an invasion by Napoleon’s France.
Alas, the three guns placed in the renamed Fort Denison were too large to be loaded simultaneously, let alone fired and were also obsolete by the time construction ended in 1856.
The only shot fired at Fort Denison was launched in 1942 by USS Chicago, aimed at one of the Japanese mini-submarines. The 3in shell richocheted off the water, hitting the tower and causing minor damage.
The fort has also hosted a tide gauge since 1866, becoming NSW’s primary reference point in 1953. A 2008 government study identified the fort, sitting at just over 1.4m above sea level, as vulnerable to climate change.
It can be hired for grand events but is likely to be closed for visitors for a couple of years for conservation and wharf work.
Goat Island/Me-Mel
Those catching a ferry between Balmain East and McMahons Point, or looking west as they travel across the Harbour Bridge, can hardly miss this 5.4-hectare island at the head of the Parramatta River.
Landing on it, though, may be years off.
In 2022 the Coalition state government promised to hand the island back to its Indigenous owners. Their Labor successors signed a memorandum of understanding in July 2023, including a pledge to spend $43m to help restore the island.
The First Nations’ name meant “eye”, a reference to the island’s clear views of the harbour to the east. (Parks staff running the four islands in their care have also enjoyed the vistas, with one ranger based on Me-Mel for the past 19 years.)
The chief executive of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, Nathan Moran, hopes the transfer of full control will be completed by March 2025.
Me-Mel has three registered cultural sites but work to rehabilitate them won’t be easy, he says. “They decimated the island, they stripped the majority of the vegetation and they stole a lot of the stone.”
Goats brought on the first fleet from South Africa may explain its European name, or it may refer to the island’s original shape.
Bennelong, adopted by the first governor, Arthur Phillip, claimed the island as part of his family estate, the Clarks note. He also spent time there with his wife, Barangaroo.
As Hoskins notes, Indigenous people from all around the harbour were moved to a reserve at La Perouse in the late 19th century: “They were literally exiled to Botany Bay.”
The settlers used the island as a sandstone quarry, a gunpowder store and shipyard.
One insubordinate convict, Charles “Bony” Anderson, was chained to a rock cavity on the island’s south, uncharitably dubbed “Anderson’s couch”. Legend has it that Anderson was stranded for two years, with passersby throwing him food, but the Clarks estimate his unusual punishment lasted “only several weeks”.
Spectacle and Snapper islands
West of Cockatoo Island, which is easily accessible by ferry, lie two military-owned islands near Drummoyne, Spectacle and Snapper, that are off limits to the public.
The former was once two islands, later joined by a 50m isthmus using fill from the nearby Balmain coalmine.
From 1865 Spectacle Island became Australia’s first explosives manufacturing and storage site. Workers used wooden wagons and rails to reduce the risk of sparks. Those found with gunpowder on their clothes or body had to take a dip in a tidal pool.
With explosives moved elsewhere from the 1960s, Spectacle became home to the navy’s historical collection. Relics include uniforms and straw hats from the 1850s, rum-ration equipment and a gun captured from Boxer rebels in China in 1900.
The island has also served as a headquarters for naval reserve cadets, as did nearby Snapper Island.
Initially opened for recreation, Snapper was taken over by the navy in 1913.
Originally a rock pinnacle, it was levelled and expanded. It now hosts colonies of rather defensive birds and several rusting, collapsing structures. Signs warn of asbestos and other dangers.
Rodd Island
The last of the isles is tucked away beyond the Iron Cove Bridge in Shell Cove, between Lilyfield and Drummoyne. At dawn, the usually calm waters are popular with rowers.
Described by the British travel writer Jan Morris as an “exotic-looking islet”, Rodd was once popular for “Gypsy Teas”, or dance picnics. The Clarks describe Rodd as drawing 20,000 visitors a year in the 1960s, some attending “strip-tease parties” and earning the island “a reputation for being a rowdy place”.
Its name is ironic. Brent Clement Rodd, a successful lawyer and merchant, wanted to buy the island to add to extensive local landholdings, and apparently to conserve its nature. He stumped up a £17 deposit in 1858, but was still fighting for its return decades later after his bid was rejected.
Today, the public can enter for $7 but you’ll have to find your own way.
Rodd is perhaps best known as one of Australia’s first biological control sites. The colonial NSW government offered the huge sum of £25,000 in 1887 to anyone able to devise a way to contain a rabbit plague then devastating much of the nation.
The famed French scientist Louis Pasteur dispatched his nephew Adrien Loir to conduct experiments using a chicken cholera microbe, hoping to snare the prize.
Dave Thompson, coordinator of the park service’s discovery team, says the rabbit commission rejected their claim. The microbe needed to be fed to rabbits, rather than naturally spreading, and had the unfortunate side-effect of killing native creatures eating the carcasses.
It would take the release of the myxomatosis virus in 1950 to effectively shrink rabbit numbers but Thompson says work at Rodd contributed to fighting anthrax and pleuropneumonia among cattle and sheep.
The island returned to being a public reserve in 1894. The virus laboratory building now be hired for weddings and other events.
