Exploring Goat Island (Me-mel) - with a link to Pentridge Prison
Dec 4, 2025
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I spent the weekend in Sydney, and after my last visit to Cockatoo Island, I was curious to keep exploring the harbour’s convict places. This time I booked a guided tour of Goat Island (Me-mel) — a rare chance, as the island is normally closed to the public except by tour booking only. I wanted to share some images and history from the visit, especially for those interested in stories of early punishment, labour and sandstone architecture.
Goat Island sits near Balmain, close to the mouth of Darling Harbour. Its history spans thousands of years, beginning with its deep connection to the Wangal people, to whom it is known as Me-mel. For many Aboriginal people it remains a place of cultural significance, linked to Bennelong and generations of traditional custodians.
In future years the island is planned to be returned to Indigenous ownership — a process already in motion. Several areas are currently fenced off and inaccessible as part of ongoing conservation and cultural protection
Convicts & Construction
From the 1830s Goat Island became a place of hard labour. Convicts quarried sandstone directly from the island — cutting it, shaping it, and building with it — leaving behind scars in the rock still visible today. Here grew an entire complex: the Queen’s Magazine for gunpowder (completed 1837), a cooperage, kitchen, barracks and the great perimeter wall with loopholes and sentry points. These are some of the earliest surviving ordnance structures in Australia, built to hold thousands of barrels of explosive powder.
Key Historic Buildings Still Standing
The fortified wall and sentry box surrounding the magazine is a largely intact coursed sandstone perimeter running along the north, east and south of the site, built on the edge of the quarry with loop-holes, a gateway and a single sentry box on the southern line. Finely dressed and evenly coursed, it features a plain sandstone finish with a curved coping, rising high at the western end and lowering where it meets the quarry face. Constructed by convicts using locally quarried stone, the wall reflects standard British Imperial magazine design of the early to mid-19th century — a security compound wall rather than a blast wall — yet its material makes it specific to Goat Island and colonial Sydney. Carved regimental numbers left by British infantry and artillery stationed there between the 1830s and 1870 remain visible, marking nearly uninterrupted garrison occupation. The sentry box and a short adjoining wall section appear to be later additions, built in a different sandstone, possibly from Barney’s Cut (1837–38).
The Barracks is a largely intact sandstone building with a hipped slate roof and a loggia carried by paired Ionic stone columns. Originally built to house the garrison, it was altered in the late 1850s–60s to accommodate a Foreman of Magazine, two labourers and a military detachment of thirteen, including the removal of a wall to create a larger barrack room and refurbishment of central rooms featuring three chimneys. In 1924 the Sydney Harbour Trust converted the structure into two residences, adding timber extensions, altering openings and removing internal walls; many of these changes were later reversed during 1978 works for museum use, restoring the building to its approximate mid-19th-century layout. Some 1924 modifications remain, including pressed-metal ceilings, blocked doorways and added fireplaces.
The Cooperage is a largely intact sandstone structure built of coursed dressed stone with small corner buttresses, stone gable ends and parapets capped with stone copings. Originally serving as the cooperage, it was soon adapted for other functions and has mainly been used for storage. The building features a slate roof matching the magazine, timber joinery doors and windows, and a timber-framed roof and floor. Symmetrical in design, it was once connected to adjoining buildings by covered ways now removed, and a rear doorway has since been infilled. It is currently fitted with storage racks associated with later shipyard use.
The Queen’s Magazine is a largely intact rectangular sandstone powder store with a gabled slate roof, strengthened by massive buttresses that support its internal stone vault. The north elevation retains original timber entrance doors sheeted in copper, above which sit a carved hood mould, paired sloping chases with sockets, an upper opening with copper-wire grill, and a date plaque near the gable apex. Ventilation openings — hexagonal and slit-type with hood moulds — appear symmetrically on this face and are repeated along the east and west walls between evenly spaced buttresses, each bay also containing a small lower-level opening. The south elevation features matching upper ventilation details, now partly obscured by a later corrugated-iron shed. The roof is clad in weathered Welsh slate with lead ridge capping, and the stone copings at the gable ends and buttresses show some wear. Small openings near ground level, surface conduit and corroded metal fixings remain visible additions from later use.
The Scow Shed is a long, single-storey timber-framed structure with a galvanised iron roof, located between the Queen’s Magazine and the quarry face. It features an overhead moveable crane running on a steel girder track, with bitumen-finished ground and a corrugated-iron rear wall. Recent works saw the western side excavated and the roof partially removed to improve drainage to the magazine.
Anderson’s Couch
One convict story often associated with the island is that of Charles “Bony” Anderson — tattooed, punished repeatedly, and said to have been chained for long periods to a stone shelf now known as Anderson’s Couch. While the evidence is largely anecdotal, the feature still sits above the sandstone slope with high archaeological potential.
Price' Stone at Pentridge Gaol
A comparable example exists at Pentridge Prison in Victoria, where Price’s Stone was used as a form of restraint and endurance-based punishment, with men chained directly to a large bluestone rock for varying periods of time.
“Whenever any of the prisoners became refractory and unmanageable, Mr, Price would chain them either to a large stone or to the wheels of the huts. With reference to this stone, in the year 1882 it was still to be seen, with a large bolt in the centre, at the quarries in the reserve, which caused me to write at the time the following account for one of the daily papers:—“There is a remarkable relic in the form of a stone at the Pentridge Stockade, which has an important historical significance in connection with the early days of the department, not only from the fact that it was at one time used as an instrument of punishment for refractory convicts, but because it was connected with the administration of the late Mr. John Price, over a quarter of a century ago. This stone is nearly a ton weight, flat on one side, and with a bolt in the centre about 18 inches in length. Although of unsightly appearance, it will long remain an interesting relic of bygone days, and will also illustrate the revolution that has taken place in the discipline of convicts since that period. The stone was first used at the old ‘Crystal Palace,’ where the worst class of convicts were confined, and it was intended to subdue some of the more insubordinate when other means had failed. The mode of punishment was as follows (1):
“The stone was placed close to one of the wooden huts, the prisoner being chained to one of the wheels and fastened behind to the bolt. In this position he was kept until he promised to conform to the rules of the establishment, and whenever this promise was made the prisoner was at once released. There is one prisoner at Pentridge at the present time (1882) who, it is said, sat upon the stone during the greater part of nine months, and is the last of that class of prisoners in the department (2).’'
1) Documented in Henry A. White, Crime and Criminals, or Reminiscences of the Penal Department in Victoria, 1890. White worked as a warder at Ballarat Gaol and Pentridge Gaol.
2) A REMARKABLE RELIC. (1882, July 15). The Ballarat Courier, p. 3.
On the way back to Campbell’s Cove, we passed Fort Denison — Muddawahnyuh. Once a penal site known as Pinchgut Island, the rocky outcrop was later fortified as a military defence point in the 1840s and was added to Sydney Harbour National Park in 1995.
When it reopens in early 2026, it’s next on my list.
Anyone want to explore it with me?
Let’s share, learn and discover!
The history of Goat Island and its buildings is well documented, and there is so much still to explore. For anyone keen to dig deeper, I’ve gathered some great sources below.
GOAT ISLAND Conservation Management Plan Volume 2
GOAT ISLAND Conservation Management Plan Volume 1
