We didn't make a particularly early start today - nobody was flogging us to get on a tour bus or an airport shuttle - and we took a ride on the monorail round Sydney. Unfortunately, there are no pictures. Not only is it too fast for pictures, the window surface is covered with some material that's full of little holes; your eyes can cope with this but the camera lens can't. We got off in the city, and walked to Circular Key, where we caught a ferry to Cockatoo Island, the largest island in Sydney Harbour.
We enjoyed the ride there very much, we had wonderful views of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, as well as having some magnificent panoramas of the harbour and the boats with the city as the backdrop.
Cockatoo Island was originally used as a prison from 1839 and the prisoners quarried the sandstone on the island and used it to build a dock and a workshop to service Royal Navy and other ships. The dock work continued once the prison was relocated in 1870, though the island was used as a reformatory for boys and an industrial school for girls (girls were not thought capable of reform once they had 'gone bad', apparently). These were housed elsewhere when the island went back to being a gaol for a few years after 1888, but the shipbuilding and ship repair continued and expanded and in 1900 Cockatoo Island became the Commonwealth Naval Dockyard. It was the major shipbuilding and dockyard facility for the South West Pacific in World War II, and after the war, additional buildings were constructed as the island continued to be used to build and refit warships and submarines. The dockyard was eventually closed in 1992.
There wasn't a lot of the prison left, though what there was was suitably grim. The few prison buildings were mostly ruins. The island is very bare, there is no shade at all and it is very hot indeed. One can't imagine how awful it must have been being crammed into tiny bunks and shut up inside buildings with few windows in all the heat.
The Superintendent's House was spacious, but everything is still being renovated so none of the staff houses were open.
There were some wonderful views from the superintendent's lawn.
There are more remains from the time as a dockyard. There are still the slipways where ships were built,
and lots of now rickety metal workshops. This is the drawing office on the left, and the workshop where the drawings were turned into templates on the right; there was heavy traffic between these offices - hence the wonderful bridge between them!
After lunch, we felt we had had a good flavour of the place, and caught a ferry back to Circular Quay.
We went looking for a chemists to buy some decongestant - I am starting a nasty cold - then we went off to the Powerhouse Museum. This is built in what used to be the power house for the trams, so there is a considerable transport section, and I concentrated on that. I did find it not convenient to view the labels though - the museum is child-friendly, so all the labels inside the cases are very placed low and written in quite small print; it may be child-friendly, but it certainly isn't older person friendly! I concentrated on some of the bigger things. This is locomotive No. 1, the first locomotive to be used in New South Wales. It arrived in 1855, as did the first class carriage it is pulling.
I was much amused by the horse bus - when Paul's father was alive, he was always reminiscing about horse buses, though I am sure he must have been so young when they were widely used I wonder he could remember them.
There was also a tram. It looks somewhat different from today's trams!
I went to look at the section on space travel, which had a space shuttle nose cone,
as well as sections from the inside of the space station. Those things hanging above it are various satellites. You can go through the nose cone to an exhibition of the space station. You can see how they slept, showered, ate and exercised. There was also a section which claimed to let you experience weightlessness. It did this by moving the outside walls, and it made me feel quite dizzy and disorientated. It was all very fascinating and they had to throw us both out at closing time.
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