It has been a long time since urbexcentral visited this beauty, a famous abandoned icon of our city.
While the rest of the buildings fall further into despair the chapel remains mainly untouched, preserved and safe from graffiti for now – let’s hope it stays that way.
While in Sydney, after visiting cockatoo island, I made a beeline up the harbour bridge to take some photos. There are guided tours where you can walk over the bridge (seen in one of my photos) however they don’t allow cameras on these, so I was forced to climb one of the towers in order to make the most of the view.
These huge abandoned warehouses still contain a plethora of heavy machinery including huge lathes and industrial sized milling machines.
The power station which at one point powered the island, from what I can tell the facilities now on the island are now powered in part by solar panel arrays affixed to the defunct industrial warehouses.
The islands prison, and the garrison to guard them were a readily available source of workers for the islands shipyard and to quarry the sandstone of which the island is comprised.
Underneath the Island, in the areas not hewn away to make room for heavy industry, Cockatoo island is criss-crossed with a myriad of tunnels, facilitating the movement of people, materials and equipment across the island. These also served a dual purpose as an air-raid shelter for use in the Second World War: one was even kitted out with an infirmary located in an annex to the main tunnel. Another tunnel has an elevator running right down into it from the buildings atop the island, down through the rock.
Littering the Cockatoo Island landscape, these sentinels are an imposing sight on the skyline. Many of the cranes have fallen into incredible states of disrepair, with some of the booms having become completely detached from the body of the crane.
These cranes are the subject of my first post on Cockatoo Island, one is even a familiar reminder of home. Stothert and Pitt cranes are familiar to us from our explorations in Wellington, and are also a common sight on the Island.
This is the first in a new series of posts focusing on Cockatoo Island, situated in Sydney harbour, with each of these instalments focusing on a different aspect of what cockatoo island has to offer in the way of urban exploration, the video here is a general overview of some of the different features of the island.
During it’s colourful history it has been used as a Military Barracks, Prison/Gaol, Shipyard and Naval Dockyard amongst other things. As a result the island is teeming with reminders of it’s history and is a plethora of abandoned buildings, tunnels, cranes and other structures including a beautiful old power station.
For more information about Cockatoo Island see:
http://www.cockatooisland.gov.au/about/history.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockatoo_Island,_New_South_Wales
U R B E X C E N T R A L 