Cockatoo Island

Since it was such a stunning day today, and we'll be out of Sydney soon, today we did our ferry trip to Cockatoo Island. I read about it ages ago and thought it sounded interesting, and we've meant to do it many times since then but never quite got there, so it was good to check it out finally today.

After grappling with the ferry ticketing/scheduling system (you can tell we're real Sydney-siders now cos we're bitching about the public transport all the time...), we eventually got out there, to discover that it was basically an empty old manufacturing island - not really what we were expecting somehow. In a way, it reminded us of Junee/Albury, I think just because it's so rare to be anywhere empty and a bit run down in the centre of Sydney! Here's Mark standing within the blue lines on the other side of the island on these railway lines that they used to use to move the ship-lifting cranes along the dry docks.

The top bit of the island had all these old sandstone buildings that were originally convict buildings. There were all of these bizarre installation artworks in the different rooms - we didn't know there was an exhibition on, so we were a bit confused by the first one we saw, which was a big stone closet in the middle of this roofless old sandstone room, with a mirror just visible through the slightly ajar doors of the closet. I was baffled until we saw a skeleton climbing into some boxes in the next room, when I assumed was way out enough that it could only be an artwork... Here's me near the closet room - you can just see it inside the room behind me.

Then we went back over to darling harbour and had some drinks before we went home a bit tipsy (I was anyway...). What a great day!