‘Fortress’ Sydney – a Colonial Paradigm of Feeble Fortifications

Posted on April 23, 2016January 11, 2022 by E Curb Nottus

The founding of the British colony in Port Jackson in 1788, isolated from the mother country some ten-and-a-half thousand miles away, brought with it many anxieties for the new settlers. With French, Spanish, Dutch and Russian empires all vying with Britain for global supremacy, the security of Sydney was very much on the minds of Governor Phillip and his gubernatorial successors. Right from the get-go measures were put in place to shore up the vulnerable colony’s defences, both against potential external threats and internal rebellion. How secure and how effective these efforts were, we shall examine below.

⇧ What’s left of the Dawes Pt battery, these days with a pretty sizeable awning!

1790: “No frills” fortifications

In 1790 a battery was located in Sydney on a rocky bluff jutting out into the harbour on what was to become known as Dawes Point. The Dawes Point fortifications were chosen to be the first line of defence against enemy invaders because of its propitious location – a high, narrow, peninsula offering an excellent views straight out onto the harbour✱. Also, being very close to the main settlement at Sydney Cove, news of any sign of impending danger or threat could be quickly relayed to the townspeople. A battery was also installed on Windmill Hill (now Observatory Hill) in 1794. Ten years later work commenced on the construction of Fort Phillip on the same site, the fort was intended to be a citadel in the event of convict insurrection, however it was never completed. In the 1850s most of the fortified structure got dismantled to make way for the building of the Sydney Observatory¹.

Over the course of the first seventy years or so of settlement in Sydney the security focus gradually shifted from concentrating on the inner harbour (Dawes Point and Sydney Cove) to defending the Heads and Botany Bay. In 1801 the first gun emplacements were built in Middle Head (north of Obelisk Bay) as a response to the growing threat to Britain of France under Napoleon (in the 20th century these fortifications were overgrown by vegetation and more or less forgotten until rediscovered in the 1990s)².

The threat to New South Wales, so distant from the European theatres of the Napoleonic Wars, probably seems a remote one when seen through modern eyes, but it was taken seriously at the time. Sydney was perceived as a desirable prize because of several factors – it had a strategically important harbour, the envy of navies all over the world; there was only a small population in place to defend the settlement; and later on it had huge quantities of gold bullion acquired from the goldfields³.

It seems that the adequacy of the fortifications was being called into question constantly throughout the 19th century. Criticism from prominent citizens of the colony was common (the embrasures ineffective, fragility of the fortification as a whole, etc). One of the points made by Commissioner Bigge’s Report into the colony (1820) was that in the event of another conflict between Britain and the USA (following upon the recent War of 1812) Britain’s colonies, especially New South Wales, would be very susceptible to seizure by the US⁴. In addition, the prevalence of American whaling fleets in the South Pacific made many in the colony fearful of raids on Sydney Town by Yankee privateers.

Francis Greenway was the architect commissioned to strengthen the principal fort at Dawes Point in 1819, having described (with some exaggeration) the battery’s prior state as “perfectly useless … so that any speculator of any of the nations we were at war with, might have entered our harbour, destroyed our infant town, blowed up the stores, and left us in a woeful condition⁵. Greenway was also responsible for the construction of Fort Macquarie on the tip of Bennelong Point (smack-bang where the Sydney Opera House is today!).

The strengthening of Sydney’s defences have often occurred as a reaction to security scares in the colony. The decision in 1841 to convert a convict hold in the middle of the harbour (Pinchgut Island) into Fort Denison came about after two American warships were discovered having anchored themselves in the harbour without being detected. The fortifications of Fort Denison were in any case far from swiftly constructed, not being finished until 1857, by which time the perceived external threat had shifted to Russia after the Crimean War.

South Head was fortified in the 1840s – though not equipped with artillery until the 1870s! Possessing an ideal vantage point to view vessels approaching the harbour, it was also used as a lookout and a signal station. Today a naval base, HMAS Watson, is housed on the land it occupied⁶.

Not all plans for the reform of Sydney’s coastal defences got acted on. In 1848 Lt-Colonel James Gordon proposed a definitive, systematic plan to upgrade and improve both the inner (harbour) fortifications and the outer (heads) fortifications. Gordon’s plans only ever got partially implemented by the colonial authorities who were content to “cherry-pick” what they liked⁷.

Following the Crimean War conflict, a fear that the Russian Pacific Fleet might invade the colony prompted an upgrade in defence facilities. Some fortifications were added to Bradleys Head and South Head, although nothing much really happened until Britain’s Cardwell Army Reforms came into effect (1870). One consequence was that British ‘redcoats’ were withdrawn from Australia and the colony was required to raise local units to protect itself. This proved a spur to the authorities in Sydney to construct new fortifications further north-east in Port Jackson, around Mosman. Gun emplacements were built at Middle Head, Georges Head, Bradleys Head and Lower Georges Heights.

British fears that Tsarist Russia might try to extend its empire into India via Afghanistan led to a wave of ‘Russophobia’in the 1870s and 80s8, which spread eventually to the NSW colony. Already, in 1863 a Russian corvette (the Bogatyr) had visited Sydney and Melbourne, prompting the Sydney Morning Herald to allege that it was secretly conducting topographical surveys of Port Jackson and Botany Bay to ascertain the strength of the settlement’s fortifications⁹.

The Sydney authorities, fearing an attack from the Russian Navy and sensing that Sydney was vulnerable to an attack from its southern “back door”, built a fort in 1888 at Bare Island off La Perouse⊕ at the entrance to Botany Bay. The edifice unfortunately was composed of poor quality materials and began to crumble before completion. The islet fort was decommissioned in 1902 due in part to the state of its armaments. Though heavily-gunned its technology had quickly become outdated. The Russian Pacific Fleet never came to Bare Island but these days scuba divers flock to it as its waters are a prized diving site¹⁰.

The Jervois-Stratchley Reports (defence capability reviews) of the late 1870s emphasised the military importance of sea-ports and this led to a new phase of fort construction in Sydney and elsewhere in the Australasian colonies, eg, Bare Island, Fort Nepean (Port Phillip Bay, Victoria), Fort Lytton (Brisbane) and the eponymous Fort Scratchley in Newcastle. The fortifications designed by Lieutenant Scratchley, eg, Bare Island, the 1890s cliff-top forts manned with large, anti-bombardment guns around Sydney’s eastern seaboard to protect the suburbs of Vaucluse (Signal Hill Fort), Bondi (Ben Buckler) and Clovelly/Coogee (Shark Point), were outmoded and already basically obsolete when completed¹¹.

The development of Sydney’s coastal defences has followed an irregular course since 1788. Its decidedly desultory and piecemeal trajectory can be attributed to a number of factors, principal among which is cost. Funding defensive works with all the infrastructure required (then as well as now) is an expensive business. Unsurprisingly, the resort to cost-cutting as in the Dawes Point battery, led to the use of inferior materials and rapid disintegration of the construction. Procuring the artillery was neither cheap or easy to do, and in virtually no time the weaponry became out-of-date¹². Also at times, the “tyranny of distance” possibly breed in the local authorities a degree of complacency. Being so far away from where the international action was, meant that coastal fortification often ended up a lower priority that the other, immediate needs of the colony.

Postscript: Bare Is
Bare Island has functioned as a museum since the early 1960s, having never fired a shot in anger (fortunately so perhaps, as had it seen action, its location would have been terribly exposed to hostile fire). Its infrastructure remains largely intact although it’s disappearing guns have indeed ‘disappeared’ for good. The nearby but remote Henry Head is today overgrown to a large extent with vegetation and also sans guns.

Middle Harbour fortifications
Middle Head/Georges Head (Mosman) has probably the best kept fortifications on the Sydney coast, owing in large part to the fact that this part of Middle Harbour was under military jurisdiction for over a century. The area at various times has contained, et al, a naval hospital, army camp (barracks, quarters, etc), a gunnery school and a submarine miners’ depot.

Middle Head has two forts on the headland, the larger one, the Outer Fort, is perched up on sloping ground in front of a cleared area. The fort’s emplacements contain the notorious the “tiger cages”. During the Vietnam War the cages were used by the Australian Army to train soldiers to withstand torture and interrogation. On the iron grills of some of the cages rust marks are still visible, a remnant of the water entrapment ordeals that used to be meted out! Although no shots were ever fired in anger from the Head, in the middle of last century the battery’s gunners used to practice the accuracy of their 10 and 12 inch guns on a tiny, rocky outcrop of an island in Middle Harbour – which is now fully submerged (no surprise!)

A 1970s ‘Indie’ film set
The smaller Inner Fort with dense vegetation surrounding it has a very different claim to fame. It was used as the bikies’ hideout in the 1974 independent cult movie Stone. The emplacements have long entrance ramps leading to circular gun enclosures and the bikies on their Harleys would tear through the bush track and along the ramps into the enclosures. The two forts and the nearby fort at Georges Head all have the same design – circular gun mounts with ancillary rooms running off them and a vast network of connecting tunnels leading to other military instalments on the promontory.

The Dawes Point battery today is non-existent, the space merely one of the historic curios of the Rocks. All that remains is the symbolism of a couple of authentic looking canons, some information boards recounting the history and architecture, and an artist’s modern, interpretative representation of the former structure … and a nice park in the shadows of the steel undergirth of the harbour bridge.

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✱ Dawes Point functioned as the centrepiece of a system of signal stations. A series of strategically positioned signal posts stretching out to the Heads would relay information on marine activity such as the approach of foreign shipping

⊕ at the same gun emplacements (with disappearing guns) were constructed at Henry Head on the most easterly part of La Perouse

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¹ ‘Colonial Powder Magazines – Fort Phillip Powder Magazine’, www.users.tpg.com
²’Sydney’s lost fort declared open’, 23. July 2010, www.news.com.au
³ Dean Boyce, ‘Defending colonial Sydney” Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/defending_colonial_sydney, viewed 30 March 2016.
⁴ Boyce 2008; A Wayne Johnson, ‘Showdown in the Pacific: a Remote Response to European Power Struggles in the Pacific, Dawes Point Battery, Sydney, 1791-1925’, (Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority), www.sha.org/uploads/files/
⁵ F Greenway, Sydney Gazette and NSW Advertiser, 13 September 1834.
⁶ ‘Bridging the Gap’, Dictionary of Sydney,2011.
⁷ ‘Sydney’s Fortifications’ (2015), www.visitsydneyaustralia.com.au
⁸ ‘Russophobia’ was evident at the time in the popularity of “Invasion scare novels” (eg, The Invasion by WH Walker, published in Sydney in 1877, an account of a fictionalised attack on Sydney by the Russian navy, Boyce 2008.
⁹ A Massov, ‘The Russian Corvette “Bogatyr” in Melbourne and Sydney in 1863’, http://australiarussia.com.au
¹⁰ ‘Bare Island (New South Wales)’, Wikipedia, www.e.n.wikipedia.org
¹¹ Boyce 2008; ‘Sydney’s Fortifications’ 2015.
¹² ‘Sydney’s Colonial Fortifications’, Australian Society for the History of Engineering & Technology (ASHET, Self-guided Tour, nd)

Port Jackson and Dawes Point’s Role in an 18th Century Imperial Conflict in the Pacific

Posted on April 2, 2016January 11, 2022 by E Curb Nottus

Regional History

Not long ago I was doing an exploratory walk around “The Rocks” precinct, one of the first parts of Sydney Cove settled by the 1788 colonists and an area much changed since the PT (pre-tourism) days when it was a considerably less congenial and decidedly un-swanky part of town to dwell in. At Dawes Point, on the hill immediately under the southern pylons of the Harbour Bridge, I noticed an information stand next to the old battery site and erstwhile observatory which makes reference to an 18th century conflict between the empires of Britain and Spain that had an association with that very spot, Dawes Point.

The stand contains a timeline which includes the following short narrative:
1790 Britain fears an attack on the colony from Spain, which disputes Britain’s claim to New South Wales. Spain backs down in the dispute.

This curious snippet of information came as a surprise and prompted me to look further into this little known chapter in early Australian colonial history. I was aware of course of the French interest in New Holland (as it was known in the 18th century) with the explorations of Botany Bay by La Perouse in the 1780s, but the idea of a Spanish connection with the earliest days of European settlement in Australia was completely new to me.

(Former) Officers’ Quarters, Dawes Pt ⬇️

Dawes Point née Maskelyne

The Dawes Point story begins with the arrival of the First Fleet in Port Jackson in 1788. Naval engineer Lt William Dawes came on the Sirius as the colony’s astronomer with orders to construct an observatory, optimally located on a narrow promontory near Sydney Cove. Dawes named the point (which now bears his name) Point Maskelyne after the then Astronomer Royal at Greenwich, London. The peninsula Dawes chose in 1788 for the designated lookout had been home to the local, indigenous Cadigal clan for 1000s of years and known to them as Tar-ra.

http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/image-28.jpg”> Dawes Point, Sydney Cove[/caption

In addition to an observatory, Point Maskelyne/Dawes Point was soon put to use as a powder magazine✽, a cemetery and it’s most substantial role, as a defence battery – in fact the first line of defence for the colony against the enemies of the British Empire. The original battery was pretty rudimentary but the fortifications were strengthened in 1819 by Francis Greenway utilising the plentiful supply of local sandstone. Greenway’s formidable castle-like structure was actually more impressive in appearance than in reality … the famous colonial architect constructed a kind of faux castle that was mainly just facade! [Johnson 2003].

Anglo-Spanish flashpoint

The incident that triggered a new crisis in 18th century Anglo-Spanish relations with ramifications for the fledgling colony in Botany Bay is known as the Nootka Sound incident. Nootka Sound was an important Spanish trading base on Vancouver Island on the North American north-west coast. In 1789 the Spanish commander at Nootka seized two British merchantmen (ships) anchored in the Sound and arrested the crews for infringing the sovereign territory of Spain. As far as Spain was concerned the British ships had unlawfully transgressed upon its imperial sphere of influence. Madrid had long claimed the entire Pacific Ocean region as a Spanish mare clausum (Legal Latin = “closed sea”). This was a double source of annoyance to the Spanish Crown with the British already earning Spain’s ire by establishing the colony in Nueva Holanda two years earlier. The Spanish claim of the Pacific as its mare clausum was based on the 1494 Papal-sanctioned Treaty of Tordesillas which allocated everything west of a meridian point drawn through the Americas to the Spanish Crown. Madrid viewed the recent British foothold on the “Great Southern Land” as a potential and very real threat to Spain’s existing Pacific colonies (Philippines, Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Peru) [King 1986; Johnson 2003].

The British colony at Port Jackson at the time was far from securely rooted. On Malaspina’s visit to Sydney in 1793 (see below), the Spaniard noted the widespread opinion within the colony that it would be closed down. Displeasure among the early fleeters were rife, many were unhappy with the deprivations and daily struggle and wanted out. London newspapers were not optimistic about Sydney’s prospects. Until the colony got on its own two legs, it was quite a close-run thing [Hall 2000].

The 1494 treaty divvying up the Americas between Spain and Portugal ⬇️

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Spain had good reason to worry about the threat Britain posed to its diverse Pacific possessions, but it was also concerned about Tsarist Russia’s imperial ambitions in the region. Russia had established settlements in Alaska which had spread south as far as California (also in Hawaii) and it appeared likely to encroach on Spain’s American territories.

Britain at the time was determined to get in on the lucrative North American fur trade (seal and especially sea otter pelts). American fur traders (and sailors on Captain Cook’s 3rd Expedition) achieved very high prices for North Pacific otter pelts in Canton (Guangzhou)[Johnson 2003]. A British trading base on the north-west Pacific coast would obviate the need to make the long haul from Calcutta to reach these rich fishing waters. The recent, successful colonisation of both Botany Bay and Norfolk Island also encouraged Britain to establish a presence at Nootka Sound [King 2010]. Accordingly the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, realising that Britain had a pretty weak legal claim to the territory that was to become British Columbia, played the bluff card and belligerently demanded redress from the Spanish for ‘illegally’ holding the British crewmen and allegedly mistreating them. Parliament mobilised for war and made plans to attack the Spanish at Nootka Sound.

(Source: Pharmaceutical Journal)

The part of these developments which connected back to the Botany Bay colony is that Britain’s strategy involved using Port Jackson as a cog in the war operations. The Admiralty redirected frigates bound for New Holland to the conflict zone on the north-west coast. Governor Phillip was instructed to replenish supplies for the Nootka Sound military expedition from Sydney Cove [Gough 1980].

During the period of the war crisis there were also plans to have a small contingent of marines and convicts from Botany Bay travel to Nootka Sound on The Discovery to establish a settlement on the north-west coast [King 2010].

The recently independent United States also had commercial ships in and around Vancouver Island at the time of the Nootka Sound incident, and was an interested onlooker in the Spanish-British conflict. The American government expressed the view that in the event of war Britain would target Spanish ports on the Mississippi including New Orleans which would bring the conflict dangerously into the vicinity of US territory [Niles Weekly 1817].

Eventually, Spain backed down to the bellicose British. Negotiations followed resulting in a series of Nootka Sound Conventions. Spain acquiesced to British demands, conceding that all nations were free to navigate and fish in the Pacific, and to trade and settle on unoccupied land. The conflict’s resolution was a coup for British mercantilism and diplomacy.

There were several developments that affected the dissipation of Spain’s resolve to oppose the English incursion into the realm of “New Spain”. Madrid has anticipated support from Bourbon France, however this proved to be not forthcoming. The onset of the French Revolution in 1789 dissuaded France in its state of turbulence from embroiling itself in a war against Britain at the time. Spain found itself further isolated after Prussia and Portugal allied themselves with the British on the issue.

Dissipation of tensions

Ultimately, war between Spain and Britain was averted. By the late 1790s the growing threat to Europe was Napoléon…tensions between Britain and Spain dissolved when the two enemies became allies in the new, common fight against the über-ambitious French general.

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By 1795 a weakened Spain had completely abandoned its trading post at Nootka Sound, leaving Britain free to do business in the north Pacific. Vancouver Island and the whole territory (British Columbia) eventually became a crown colony of Britain (1849).

Malaspina scientific and spying mission

The averting of the war crisis over Nootka Sound did not remove Spanish anxieties over the British presence in the Pacific. In 1793 a large Spanish expedition undertaking maritime scientific exploration reached the shores of Sydney harbour. Funded by the Spanish crown, the expedition had set out from Cadiz in 1789 visiting South America, the Falkland Islands, Mexico, Alaska, the Philippines, Tonga and New Zealand, in addition to the infant New South Wales colony. The catalyst for the expedition, proposed and led by Alessandro Malaspina, was the knowledge that Russia was hatching similar plans for a scientific exploration of the Pacific. The Mulovsky Expedition, as it is known, was also intended to annex the North American littoral region from Vancouver to Alaska in the name of the Russian empress. The expedition however was cancelled due to the outbreak of the Second Russo-Turkish War in 1787.

The Spanish expedition carried with it an elite collection of scientists and artists but Malaspina’s mission had a secret, political purpose as well. Madrid was anxious to learn what Britain’s real purpose was in establishing the colony in New Holland. Malaspina’s instructions were to also ascertain how advanced the Port Jackson settlement was. Malaspina respectfully courted and charmed the authorities in Sydney (Lt Gov Grose) as a cover for his spying activities during the month the frigates were anchored in the harbour. His men collected botanical specimens and other scientific knowledge and sketched drawings of the scenery and the townsfolk including the local Eora (Aboriginal) people [King 1986].

Upon his return home Malaspina reported back to the Spanish government that the New South Wales settlement was well established and warned that it posed real dangers to Spain’s Pacific possessions. Malaspina noted that Port Jackson could be used as a base for privateers to cut the colonial lines of communication between Manila and Spanish America, and to launch raids on the Peru and Chile colonies from. He concluded that Spain had no real chance of supplanting the British in Port Jackson [Olcelli 2013].

Britain’s foothold in the western Pacific was an ongoing concern for the Spanish, so much so that they considered a pre-emptive strike on the NSW colony. Proposed by José de Bustamante (military governor of Paraguay and Montevideo) and approved by King Carlos IV in the early 1790s, the Spanish scheme was to launch an 100-boat assault on Port Jackson from its base in Uruguay. The armada, armed with the new, “hot shot” cannon, ultimately did not proceed [Pearlman 2015].

PostScript: British eyes switch from Spain to France
By around the turn-of-the-century, 1800, with Spanish imperial power on the wane, Britain had much more reason to be concerned about the aggression of Napoléon in Europe … France had supplanted Spain as the focus for British security at Dawes Point and the fledgling and distant New South Wales outpost.

Dawes Pt battery ca.1875 ⬇️

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✽ the storage room still exists, located under the Harbour Bridge southern pylon, where in the formative years of the colony a secret stock of explosives was kept for use in defending the town against enemy warships [Compagnoni 2015]

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References:

BM Gough, Distant Dominion: Britain and the Northwest Coast of North America, 1579-1809, (1980)
AW Johnson, ‘Showdown in the Pacific: a Remote Response to European Power Struggles in the Pacific, Dawes Point Battery, Sydney, 1791-1925’, (Sydney Harbour Authority 2003) www.sha.org/uploads/files/sha
RJ King, ‘Eora and English at Port Jackson: a Spanish View’, (1986), www.press.anu.edu.au/2016/02/articles054
RJ King, ‘George Vancouver and the Contemplated Settlement at Nootka Sound’, The Great Circle, 32(1), 2010
L Olcelli, ‘Alessandro Malaspina: an Italian-Spaniard at Port Jackson’, Sydney Journal, 4(1), 2013
J Pearlman, “Spanish plan to ‘invade’ the British colony in Australia in the 1790s with 100-vessel armada”, 26-Jan 2015, www.telegraph.co.uk
Niles Weekly Register, No 19 of Vol XII, 5 July 1817
T Compagnoni (video), ‘Gunpowder Magazine Hidden Beneath Sydney Harbour Bridge’, 07 September 2015, www.huffpost.com

Richard Hall, Sydney: An Oxford Anthology, 2000

Just blogging away … doing the hard blog

Continuing the search for signs of Intelligent Life in the University.

Dawes Point battery

‘Fortress’ Sydney – a Colonial Paradigm of Feeble Fortifications

Port Jackson and Dawes Point’s Role in an 18th Century Imperial Conflict in the Pacific