CATHERINE KEENAN

Sydney Harbour has kept few secrets but Cockatoo Island is one of them.

the largest of Sydney’s islands stands at the confluence of the Parramatta and Lane Cove rivers, just 20 minutes’ ferry ride from Circular Quay. yet for most of the time since white people landed, it has been off limits.

First because it was a prison; then because it was controlled by the navy; later because it was a workplace, or too filthy to hazard setting foot on. for almost all the 1990s it was derelict: the buildings left to rot, the people gone, every last scrap of the original vegetation already a distant memory.

in one of the most determinedly ogled strips of water in the world, Cockatoo was one of the few places we couldn’t see.

the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust took stewardship of the island in 2001, tasked with bringing it to the public. After a $45-million clean-up operation, it was finally opened in April 2007.

Most of us have now heard of Cockatoo. many of us know, dimly, that it has been a place of both cruelty and triumph.

we might even have glimpsed it, mysteriously purposeful, from the safe shores of Woolwich, Balmain or Drummoyne. but how many Sydneysiders have actually been there? Last year just 275,000 people visited – about five per cent of us.

Cockatoo is a melancholy place, layered and sad and surprisingly beautiful. It’s one of the few places in Sydney where the past seems to genuinely inhabit the present.

when the Harbour Trust took over, it decided against turning Cockatoo into a museum. its obligations under the Act were to maximise public access and conserve its heritage, and it decided the best way to do this was through “adaptive re-use”: using the ruins of the past as settings for the new.

instead being cordoned off, old dockyard workshops and sandstone remnants have played host to cultural activities that the people who built them could never have imagined.

Half the people who visited Cockatoo last year went for the 17th Biennale of Sydney, when Cai Guo-Qiang memorably installed exploding cars above the heads of guests at the artists’ party in the Turbine Hall.

in a move to make most museum curators blanch, the World Heritage site is currently opened up to 150 street artists for Outpost Project. It’s spray cans next to shipyards; cuprocking next to convict cells.

the island has hosted everything from a music festival curated by Nick Cave to seven episodes of MasterChef. Most events are arts-related, although it was recently the site of the Red Bull X-Fighters World Tour Finale, a freestyle motocross competition.

this involved bringing in 6000 tonnes of red dirt to make a track, and constructing a grandstand with a capacity of 11,000 people and a magnificent view of the Harbour Bridge. It was used for a single day’s racing, then all trace of it disappeared.

the rocky outcrop of Cockatoo rose out of the harbour somewhere between 6000 and 10,000 years ago. for most of the time since, it lay quietly unmolested, save for the lapping of waves and the calls of the many sulphur-crested cockatoos that flocked there and gave it its name.

the Harbour Trust says, with some vagueness, that Aboriginal people may have used the island for fishing, but no physical evidence of indigenous occupation has been found. the site is now so thoroughly trammelled that it never will be. That history, too, has disappeared.

Like many islands, from Alcatraz to Tasmania, Cockatoo has seen terrible things. the first non-indigenous people to arrive, in 1839, were the criminal overflow from the prison on Norfolk Island, and their first job was building the walls to keep themselves in.

by 1858 there were up to 500 men there, sleeping in coffin-like bunks, with no facilities to wash themselves or their clothes. Rats were everywhere, and the stench was so overpowering that prisoners would stand gripping the bars, gulping in air from outside.

many tried to escape but only one is known to have succeeded: Frederick Ward, whose Aboriginal girlfriend braved the deep water to bring him the tools he needed to get away. the next night she waited on shore with a horse and the two of them rode to freedom. he survived for six years, despite a bounty on his head, becoming the infamous bushranger Captain Thunderbolt.

by the late 1860s, conditions had deteriorated to the point it was considered inhumane to keep men there. the prisoners were sent to Darlinghurst Gaol, and the place became – with pitifully few changes – a girls’ reformatory.

the girls had iron beds instead of wooden pallets, but they were still locked in from 6pm to 6am, and sent to the isolation cells for infractions of the rules. They were given no cutlery or drinking vessels, so had to eat and drink with their hands. many of the girls had committed no wrong. They were simply orphaned or abandoned, and thrown in with the rest.

If you stand on the site of the old reformatory now, hot wind whipping across this high point on the island, you get a million-dollar view of sparkling water and expensive units honeycombing the far shore. just to the right towers a darkly rusted crane, the door to its control room still half open, as if someone intended to come back.

It’s part of Slipway No. 1, and during World War I the many ships made on the island were launched here in blasts of pageantry and pride. After Singapore had fallen in 1942, Cockatoo Island was busy again, becoming the South Pacific base for the Allies in World War II. now the slipway is green with algae, its entrance cordoned off by a net that’s so deteriorated it will soon snap and float away.

the air of melancholy on Cockatoo derives not just from the cruelty of its history. It comes because the shards of the past that remain gesture towards so much more that has been lost forever. up to 4000 people were employed on the island during the wars, intent on work that seemed urgent then, and now is all but forgotten.

the island speaks of both man’s great industriousness and the futility of all this striving. in our digital age, there is a nostalgic beauty to the industrial equipment left behind: the beam benders lined up like Easter Island statues, and the cavernously high-ceilinged workshops. They come from a time when work caused hands to callus and brows to drip with sweat. That time, on the harbour at least, has also disappeared.

It was a stroke of brilliance to turn Cockatoo into a setting for art. It’s the perfect place for people to watch films, or dance to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, or gaze at Ken Unsworth’s suspended pianos, part of a sculptural tribute to Elisabeth, his wife of more than 50 years. Art has always been our greatest bulwark against time, and Cockatoo sharpens our need for that. Why not dance, the island seems to whisper. all this will disappear, too.

– Sydney Morning Herald

Sydney’s Treasure Island