The Dark Story of Cockatoo Island: How Australia's Largest Dockyard Was Abandoned

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]In May of 1989, a fire is burning on Cockatu Island. You can see it from Balain. You can see it from Drammon.

[00:00:11]400 men are sleeping on the island. They have taken the upper plateau, the lower workshops, two submarines, and HMAS Jervis Bay.

[00:00:22]300 armed forces personnel have been forced to evacuate. The first time in Australian history, a defense installation has been abandoned to its own workers on Australian soil.

[00:00:35]On the warf stands Claude Sandalgian, an Armenian Australian boiler maker, AMW convenor, shop committee chairman.

[00:00:44]The Department of Defense has just advertised the island in the Sydney Morning Herald as the jewel in the crown for real estate in Sydney Harbor.

[00:00:54]How did the dockyard that built HMS Brisbane repaired four American cruisers and refitted every Australian submarine become a camp at $55 a night? If you care about the Australia we used to build, please subscribe to keep these stories alive. Every video on this channel honors one place we lost.

[00:01:17]Chapter one, the engineer in the cliff.

[00:01:21]Try and name him. Go on, try and name the man who designed the first dry dock in Australia. You can't. Nobody can. His name was Gothic man. Civil engineer. He was appointed to Cockatu Island in 1847 and he served as superintendent of works from 1859.

[00:01:43]He spent 25 years on a sandstone null in Sydney Harour, designing every civil and corrective building on the island and the dry dock that would carry the governor's name instead of his. Before him there was Waryama.

[00:01:58]60,000 years of Aora meeting place, the Wuagal, the Wangal, the Camaragal, and the Gatagal. four clans gathering on a 12.9 hectare sandstone island that controlled the confluence of the Paramea and Lane Cove rivers. The first European sighting of the island came with the first fleet in January 1788.

[00:02:21]Within a generation, the trees that had given the cockatos a home were stripped for ship building and firewood. The birds left. The name stayed. In July of 1839, Governor Sir George Gibs wrote to London. The colony needed a place for secondary punishment. Convicts who had reaffended in New South Wales itself.

[00:02:42]Norfolk Island was closing. Gibs recommended cockatu. The island, he wrote, was ideal because it was surrounded by deep water and under the very eye of authority.

[00:02:56]Then man arrived. He worked under three corrupt superintendants.

[00:03:00]The worst was Charles Ormsby, an Irish disciplinarian who ran the island for 18 years and was removed in 1859 after an inquiry exposed contraband alcohol smuggling and convict bare knuckle prize fighting matches he had personally been running on the upper plateau.

[00:03:19]The champion was a man named Patty Sinclair, the Enfield general. Ormsby took the gate money.

[00:03:28]150 years later, a boiler maker named Claude Sandulgen would walk into the same dockyard for the first time.

[00:03:36]Armenian Australian, future AMW convenor.

[00:03:42]He didn't know it at the time, but his trade descended in an unbroken line from the convict stonemasons man had directed in 1847.

[00:03:52]Same island, same cliff, same rock. They handed man a cliff, 500 convicts, and a brief. 10 years later, he gave them the dry dock that would build the Royal Australian Navy. By the end of this video, we'll watch them sell it for parking spots.

[00:04:08]Chapter 2.

[00:04:10]580,000 cubic feet.

[00:04:14]Hand excavation began in 1847.

[00:04:17]The cliff face on the southeastern point of the island was 45 ft high. The British plan was to cut a dry dock straight into solid sandstone. The labor was prisoners. The method was iron hammers, wedges, picks, and gunpowder.

[00:04:36]Some of the blasting was fired by electric detonation. One of the earliest applications of electric detonation in any Australian engineering project.

[00:04:45]Here's the impossible number.

[00:04:48]580,000 cubic feet of sandstone hand cut block by block from a cliff face that men in irons climbed each morning before dawn.

[00:05:00]On the 5th of June 1854, Governor Sir Charles Augustus Fitzroy laid the foundation stone of the Ashlar lining. The dock was named for him.

[00:05:12]Man's name appears nowhere on the masonry.

[00:05:16]The original dimensions 316 ft long, 76 ft wide, 60 ft entrance. By 1870, it had been extended to 420 ft. By 1880, it was 643 ft.

[00:05:33]While they cut the dock, another set of convicts cut the grain silos.

[00:05:39]20 bottles-shaped chambers handwed through solid rock 19 ft deep and 20 ft across.

[00:05:47]The chambers held 140 tons of wheat, emergency colonial reserves after the 1837 drought that had nearly broken the colony. The silos were filled with sandstone dust from the dock excavation.

[00:06:02]They are still down there.

[00:06:04]Conditions on the island were brutal.

[00:06:07]Cells designed for 300 men routinely held nearly 500.

[00:06:13]The sanitation was communal tub. The bedding was infested with bed bugs and fleas.

[00:06:20]First Nations prisoners died disproportionately in the first 10 years of the establishment. The records of the colony's first decade on the island remain a quiet documented atrocity that no plaque commemorates.

[00:06:34]In 1856, a horse thief from Matland named Frederick Werdsworth Ward was sentenced to 10 years hard labor and shipped to Cockatu.

[00:06:45]On the 11th of September 1863, Ward and a fellow convict named Frederick Britain slipped away from a work gang on the foreshore, hid for 2 days in a quarry, and swam not south to Balman, as the legend has it, but north across the channel to Wulitch. Ward became Captain Thunderbolt, Australia's longest roaming bush ranger. He was shot dead near Urala on the 25th of May, 1870.

[00:07:15]He is the only convict whose name we know.

[00:07:19]There are an estimated 500 others whose hands cut Fitzroy Dock. None of them have a plaque. None of them have a street. None of them have a record beyond the convict manifests in the Mitchell Library.

[00:07:35]1847.

[00:07:37]The men who cut this dock weren't engineers. They were prisoners. and the dock they built outlasted the empire that built them.

[00:07:47]Chapter 3.

[00:07:49]The 1st of December 1857.

[00:07:53]On the 1st of December 1857, Her Majesty's surveying Brig her Herald docked at the new Fitzroy dock. 10 years of convict labor.

[00:08:04]580,000 cubic feet of stone. The first dry dock in Australia was operational.

[00:08:11]For the next 13 years, it served as a Royal Navy repair facility.

[00:08:17]Then in 1870, the New South Wales public works department began building ships there. Tugs, barges, dredges for the colonial government. In 1886, the yard launched the Tug Hinton, the first mild steel ship built in Australia.

[00:08:35]Across the harbor at Balain, Thomas Mort had completed a commercial dry dock a year before Fitzroy with free labor and private capital. Mort's dock would feed Cockatu with skilled labor for the next 80 years. Eventually, it would feed Cockatu's funeral, too. But that's another video. In 1882, the Department of Public Works began work on a second dock. Edward Moriati, engineer and chief of harbors and rivers, designed it with JB McKenzie.

[00:09:09]Excavation took two years. The construction contract went to a 23-year-old civil engineer named Louis Samuel. He won it on price. He died of acute peritonitis aged 26 on the 29th of November 1889.

[00:09:26]6 months short of seeing his dock finished, his younger brother Edward completed the work. The total cost was 267,825.

[00:09:39]The dock was named for John Sutherland, the New South Wales Secretary for Public Works. When Southerntherland Dock opened in March of 1890, it was 635 ft long, 84 ft wide, with 9.75 m of water over the sill at high tide.

[00:09:59]The Naval Historical Society of Australia states that on completion, Southerntherland Dock was then said to be the biggest dry dock in the world.

[00:10:10]Sydney had two of them, both on the same island.

[00:10:15]In January of 1913, the Commonwealth purchased Cockatu Island and Spectacle Island from New South Wales for 867,716.19 shillings. The Royal Australian Navy was now a customer, an owner, and an employer in one.

[00:10:36]The dockyard became the Commonwealth Naval Dockyard, Cockatu Island.

[00:10:41]Within 12 months, it would lay down the first warship Australia had ever built for itself. They built two of the largest dry docks in the British Empire on an island the size of a schoolyard.

[00:10:54]And then a world war arrived. Chapter 4.

[00:10:59]4,085.

[00:11:01]The first major warship laid down under Commonwealth control was HMAS Brisbane, a townclass light cruiser. It was laid down on the 25th of January 1913, almost the same day the Commonwealth took ownership. It was launched on the 30th of September 1915 by Mrs. Andrew Fischer, wife of the Prime Minister. It was completed 12 months later.

[00:11:29]Final cost 746,624 Australian.

[00:11:37]She was the first ran ship to launch an aircraft from her deck. The yard ran night and day.

[00:11:44]By February of 1916, they had finished HMASS Huan, a riverclass destroyer and the first steel warship to be fully built in Australia. Hmass Adelaide was laid down in November of 1915 and not completed until July of 1922.

[00:12:04]The dockyard nicknamed her hmass long delayed. The numbers in those years are difficult to absorb.

[00:12:11]By December of 1919, the workforce had risen to 4,085 men. One island, one employer, the Commonwealth's largest single workforce, 21 different trades.

[00:12:25]Boiler makers from Footsgray to Drammon.

[00:12:28]Riveters, coppermiths, plumbers, pattern makers, shipwrites, foundrymen, electrical fitters, riggers.

[00:12:38]21 trades represented by 13 separate unions, which between them negotiated a federal award so complicated it became the model for many of the federal awards that came after it.

[00:12:50]The general manager who held this together was a former Chattam dockyard ship builder named Captain Julian James King Salter.

[00:12:59]Multigenerational families filled the workforce.

[00:13:03]Some men in the 1989 occupation would be fifth generation cockatu shipyard workers.

[00:13:10]The grandfather who riveted Brisbane in 1915 had a greatgrandson who refitted Enslow in 1989.

[00:13:17]By the time the First World War ended, Cockatu had built over 50 ships, repaired or converted more than 150, fitted out transports carrying over 120,000 officers and men, and 17,000 horses to Gallipoli and France, and conducted nearly 2,000 dockings.

[00:13:37]the cruiser warf, the bolt workshop, the brass foundry, the ship fitting workshop, the new powerhouse in 1918 with its red brick chimney and the July 1918 plaque. You can still see today all of it built during the war. That's the cathedral they made. 4,085 men on one island speaking 21 trades.

[00:14:01]and every one of them knew their grandfather had worked the next slipway over.

[00:14:07]Chapter 5. The aircraft and the albatross.

[00:14:11]Then the war ended and the work dried up. A royal commission in 1921 recommended cockatu cease ship building and reduced to a repair yard. The recommendation was ignored. In June of 1921, the island was transferred from the Navy to the ship construction branch of the Prime Minister's Department. Two years later, it became the Australian Commonwealth Shipping Board. The dockyard was now competing for commercial contracts against private firms. The general manager who ran the diversification was Jack Payne. Cockatu built marine engines for the Australian merchant fleet, turbines, sugar mill equipment, mining gear. In 1927, the High Court of Australia ruled that the Commonwealth could not compete for open contracts against private enterprise.

[00:15:04]Cockatu lost the Bunnerong power station contract overnight. Commercial diversification was effectively strangled. The Navy still ordered. HMS Albatross was laid down on the 16th of April 1926.

[00:15:19]Australia's first purposebuilt aviation ship, a sea plane carrier for nine Supermarine Seagull amphibians. Launched on the 23rd of February 1928 by Lady Stone Haven, wife of the Governor General. Commissioned January 1929.

[00:15:38]Cost 1.2 million.

[00:15:42]Then came the Wackett period. Wing commander Lawrence Wackett, later Sir Lawrence, was the most important early figure in Australian aviation engineering.

[00:15:53]Between 1930 and 1934, he ran the aircraft department at Cockatu. He had arrived from the closed RAAF experimental station at Randwick, bringing his Warbler, Wijon, and Waragle designs with him as proven aircraft already in service. But only one Wacket aircraft was actually built on Cockatu Island. In 1934, Wackett built Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, a twin engineed high-wing monoplane maiden flight. The 6th of March 1934.

[00:16:25]It was named the Kodok, short for Cockatu Dock. Years later, abandoned by Kingsford Smith, the Kodok ended up as a roadside advertisement for Penfold's wines at Menbury.

[00:16:38]Vandals burnt it.

[00:16:41]There is no surviving Wacket aircraft from this era. The drawings are in the National Archives. The aircraft are ash.

[00:16:50]The depression hit the yard hard. The workforce fell from 1,300 in 1928 to 560 in 1932.

[00:17:00]On the 1st of March 1933, the Commonwealth signed a 21-year lease with a new private operator, Cockatu Docks and Engineering Company. The yard would never again be Commonwealth owned and operated. From this point onwards, it was a private firm operating on Commonwealth land, holding Commonwealth contracts, paying Commonwealth wages, but ultimately answerable to shareholders. By the late 1930s, the workforce numbered around 1,200 again.

[00:17:31]Cockatu had survived the depression, but only just. The lease arrangement with the private operator had stabilized the books, but the world was about to require everything the yard could deliver from every welder on the island to the last apprentice in the brass foundry.

[00:17:49]They built planes for Kingsford Smith.

[00:17:53]They built warships for the Navy.

[00:17:55]And in 1939, the Second World War turned this dockyard into the most important industrial site in the Pacific.

[00:18:05]Chapter 6. The only dockyard in the Southwest Pacific. The 15th of February, 1942.

[00:18:13]Singapore Falls to the Japanese.

[00:18:17]Within a fortnight, the Department of the Navy in Melbourne issues an internal memorandum that becomes the operational basis for the next 3 years of the Pacific War.

[00:18:28]Cockatu Island dockyard is now the only dockyard in the Southwest Pacific where naval construction, turbine work, and major ship repairs can be carried out.

[00:18:40]The only one. Here's what that meant.

[00:18:44]Eight Ba'athist class corvettes built on the island.

[00:18:48]HMAS Ba'athist the lead ship of the class. Keel laid on the 10th of February 1940.

[00:18:55]Then Gulbin, Bendigo, Cessnok, Wulingong, Glennel and two more after them. By mid 1942, the yard was launching one new corvette every 26 days.

[00:19:09]The Ba'ist class was the largest single ship building program in Australian history. 60 ships across eight Australian yards. Cockatu built eight of them. Williamstown in Victoria built another eight. The rest was scattered across Mortstock, Walkers Limited in Mborough, BHP Wya and Evans Deacon in Brisbane.

[00:19:35]HMAS Hobart, a rain cruiser, took a Japanese torpedo near a Spiritu Santo in July of 1943.

[00:19:43]They sailed her back to Sydney and the dockyard cut her in half in Southerntherland Dock, cut her in half, rebuilt her, sent her back to sea.

[00:19:56]Between August of 1942 and March of 1943, the United States Navy delivered four heavy cruisers to Cockatu for repair.

[00:20:05]USS Chicago torpedoed at the Battle of Tsavo Island in August. USS Chester, USS Portland, USS New Orleans. All four had been hit in the Solomon's campaign. All four were repaired here. The first two were worked on at anchor in Athalbite just east of the Sydney Harbor Bridge because there wasn't space at the warves. Cockatu welders were fed out to them on workboats every morning before dawn. On the night of the 31st of May 1942, three Japanese typea submarines penetrated Sydney harour. The crew of M24 sublutenant Katsuhisa Ban and Petty Officer Mamoru Ashibbe fired two torpedoes at USS Chicago as she lay at anchor near the harbor bridge. Her silhouette lit by the dockyard flood lights at Garden Island. The torpedoes missed Chicago. One ran ashore. The other exploded beneath the depot ship HMAS Coutul. 21 Allied sailors were killed. The M24's wreck was found on the 12th of November, 2006 by recreational divers from a group called No Frills Divers, 5 km off Bangan Head in over 50 m of water, nine networks 60 minutes broadcast the discovery on the 26th of November.

[00:21:33]By the end of the war, the dockyard had built 19 new ships, repaired 40 Allied warships, converted RMS Queen Mary into a troop ship in 14 days, and rebuilt the entire Southeastern Apron at a cost of £400,000.

[00:21:51]3,000 workers were on the books in 1942.

[00:21:55]Women joined the workforce for the first time, riveting, welding, machining, working the cranes in shifts that ran 24 hours a day for the duration of the war.

[00:22:07]In 1942, this island repaired four American cruisers torpedoed at Guadal Canal. In 1989, the government called it real estate.

[00:22:20]Chapter 7. The Empress and the Submarines.

[00:22:24]After the war, Vickers Limited acquired majority control of the operating company. In 1948, it became Vicar's cockatu docks and engineering proprietary limited.

[00:22:36]The British engineering giant now had a controlling interest in Australia's only major naval dockyard.

[00:22:43]In 1952, the dockyard launched HMAS Voyager from Slipway number one, the first all-welded warship built in Australia. Then six Riverclass anti-ubmarine frigots split with Williamstown Naval Dockyard in Victoria.

[00:23:00]Then HMAS Sydney refitted as a fast troop transport for the Korean and Vietnam Wars, fing Australian soldiers north every 6 weeks through the late 1960s.

[00:23:12]Then came the last great commercial ship, the Australian National Line ordered a bass straight passenger and vehicle ferry. Keel laid on the 11th of September 1962.

[00:23:24]Launched on the 18th of January 1964 by Lady Sydney Dile, daughter of the Governor General.

[00:23:32]12,037 tons, 250 passengers, 91 cars, 16 trucks, 2.6 million.

[00:23:43]The British path a newsreel described her as the largest passenger ferry of her type then built in the world. She was christened MS Empress of Australia.

[00:23:53]She was the 53rd ship built at the dockyard. She was the last great commercial contract the yard ever signed.

[00:24:02]In 1971, a new submarine slave dock opened on the Eastern Apron.

[00:24:08]Purpose-built for the Royal Australian Navy's six Oberon class submarines.

[00:24:14]HMAS Oxley, Otwway, Ovens, Enslow, Orion, Otama.

[00:24:23]Between 1971 and 1991, the dockyard completed 14 full refits, 15 midcycle dockings, and 39 intermediate dockings of those six boats.

[00:24:36]Every Oberon refit in the Royal Australian Navy was done here. Every submarine weapons update program was done here. The yard had become the sole maintainer of Australia's submarine arm.

[00:24:49]In October of 1979, the Commonwealth awarded Vicar's Cockatu a $68.4 million contract for a new fleet replenishment tanker. Ke laid on the 9th of August 1980. Launched on the 3rd of March 1984 by Lady Valerie Steven, wife of the Governor General Sir Ninian Steven. She was called HMS Success.

[00:25:15]157 m long, 21 m wide, 18,221 tons at full load. She remains the largest naval vessel ever built in Australia. She would serve in the first Gulf War in East Teeour in the search for MH370 in the Middle East and would not decommission until the 29th of June 2019, the RN's longest serving major warship.

[00:25:45]While success was on the slipway, a thousand Cockatu workers marched on Parliament House in Canberra. Within a few months of the Hawker government's 1983 election win, the workforce had learned that a promised second supply ship would not be built at Cockatu. The federal secretary of the ship painters and dockers union, Bob Gallaghan, climbed onto a flatbed truck outside Parliament and told the crowd, "There won't be a second ship built unless you're going to do something about it."

[00:26:15]There wasn't a second ship. Bob Hawk promised the second supply ship. He delivered an evictton notice instead.

[00:26:24]Chapter 8 to Ocean Navy.

[00:26:29]In March of 1987, the defense minister Kim Beasley released a white paper titled the defense of Australia. The paper announced a strategic reorientation of the Royal Australian Navy known as the two ocean navy policy.

[00:26:46]Half the fleet would be permanently based at HMAS Sterling in Western Australia to cover the Indian Ocean approaches.

[00:26:54]The dockyard work would follow it. The submarines would follow it. The strategic argument was real. Sterling had deeper water than Sydney Harbor.

[00:27:05]There was room to expand. The Indian Ocean was emerging as a security priority. But none of those arguments answered the question of what was going to happen to 134 years of accumulated trade knowledge on a sandstone island in Sydney harour. In April of 1987, Beasley announced that Cockatu's lease would not be renewed beyond the 1st of January 1993.

[00:27:32]The site would be sold.

[00:27:35]Two years later, the Department of Defense placed a paid advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald. The headline described the island as the jewel in the crown for real estate in Sydney Harbor.

[00:27:47]Expressions of interest were invited from property developers, hotel operators, and resort consorcia. The men who had cut Southerntherland dock, who had repaired USS Chicago, who had built HMAS success, were being told their workplace was about to become a marketing prospectus. The Australian Council of Trade Unions advised the Cockatu Island Shop Committee through back channels that the federal government would no longer be providing the dockyard with work. Without work, the lease was unsustainable.

[00:28:20]Without the lease, the yard was finished.

[00:28:24]The ACTU was not advocating for the workers. The ACTU was advising them to accept it. The man delivering the message was George Campbell, AMWU national secretary, later an ALP senator.

[00:28:39]He spoke with Claude Sandulgen directly.

[00:28:43]Every week it was the same, Sandulgen recalled in a speech years later. Call it off, Claude. Call it off.

[00:28:52]The threat looming over the shop committee was section 45D of the Trade Practices Act, which had been used since the 1977 Mudenberry Abattoire dispute to impose enormous fines on unions engaged in secondary boycots. Section 45D fines could run to $250,000 a day. Cockatu workers were being told that if they resisted, their own unions would be financially destroyed. Bob Hawk had been the president of the ACTU before he was prime minister. He knew exactly which levers to pull. He had spent the previous 5 years negotiating the accord between Labor and the ACTU, a wage restraint agreement sold as the foundation of the country's economic recovery. The accord required union compliance. Compliance required leverage. The dockyards were the leverage. The cracks were everywhere.

[00:29:49]The dockyard was being sold. The unions were splitting. And in May of 1989, 400 men decided they weren't going home.

[00:29:59]Chapter 9. 14 weeks.

[00:30:03]On the 10th of May 1989, the Cockatu Island Dockyard Shop Committee declared an open-ended strike and physical occupation of the island. The men did not go home that night. They did not go home the next night. They did not go home for 98 nights. 300 to 400 workers slept on the island for 3 months. They held the upper plateau and the lower workshops. They held the two Oberon submarines birthed in the slave dock.

[00:30:32]They held HMAS Jervis Bay. The 300 armed forces personnel on the island were instructed to leave. They left. For the first time in Australian history, a defense installation had been evacuated to its own workers on Australian soil. A fire burned on the upper plateau. You could see it from Drammon. You could see it from Balain. The orange glow above the sandstone was visible after dark from across the harbor for weeks. The dispute lasted 14 weeks. We needed $20,000 a week to support the occupation. Sandalgian later recalled, "The Communist Party of Australia raised funds. Local unions raised funds.

[00:31:15]Sympathetic trade union branches across Sydney and Melbourne sent contributions every week. Workers slept in shifts. The on island shop committee organized food rosters, mail rosters, message rosters to families on the mainland. Older cockatu veterans turned up at the ferry warf at Balain with hot meals.

[00:31:36]Bob Gallagghan of the ship painters and dockers led the frontline resistance.

[00:31:42]Pat Johnston of the AMW shuttled between the island and the union officers, but the union movement above them was already turning. The ACTU and the Nisslav Labor Council had withdrawn open support. George Campbell continued the calls. The submarines birthed in the slave dock were a particular problem for the Department of Defense. They could not be removed without the workers cooperation. They could not be guarded by force without escalating to a state of conflict on Australian soil.

[00:32:16]The federal government was in effect locked out of its own defense asset.

[00:32:22]By August, the section 45D threats were explicit.

[00:32:27]$250,000 a day.

[00:32:31]The AMWU could not absorb that. The ship painters and dockers could not absorb that. Six workers were arrested in a scuffle outside the near south labor council headquarters in Sussex Street.

[00:32:45]Gallagan, defiant to the end, told a Sydney Morning Herald reporter, "Anyone with a 45D fine could stand on the end of the line with the other creditors to the union." That same month, the shop committee took the fies from the island and marched on the New South Wales Parliament in Mcquary Street. The Grryer Coalition state government heard them.

[00:33:07]The federal government did not. The fire on the plateau burned out. The negotiations went on for weeks. In the end, the workers were offered a redundancy package and a promise that the yard would continue to operate to the end of the existing lease. They accepted it because the alternative was financial destruction of every union that represented them. The men went back to work. They held the island for 14 weeks. They lost it to their own union leadership and the wreckers were already on the ferry. Chapter 10. The jewel for sale.

[00:33:46]In July of 1990, the federal government awarded a $100 million refit contract for HMA submarines Enslow and Otama to Australian Defense Industries at Garden Island.

[00:34:00]The work that had sustained Cockatu for 20 years was now going to a competitor 7 km away.

[00:34:08]The Garden Island workforce had not built it. The Garden Island workforce had not refitted it for 20 years.

[00:34:16]But the Garden Island workforce was about to inherit the slave dock.

[00:34:21]That November, Cockatu's purpose-built submarine slave dock, every piece of it, was physically dismantled and shipped across the harbor to ADI.

[00:34:31]Cranes were craned. Lifting frames were craned. Hydraulic rams that had cradled six Australian submarines were unbolted from the sandstone and loaded onto barges. Cockatu workers watched their own infrastructure leave the island in pieces. Australia's first dry dock, Fitzroy Dock, was about to be left with nothing to refit.

[00:34:55]The final dockyard job was the refit of HMS Orion, which was handed back to the Commonwealth on the 4th of June 1991.

[00:35:05]On the 31st of December 1991, operations ceased.

[00:35:12]134 years of continuous naval construction and repair ended at a/4 on a Tuesday afternoon when the last shift clocked out through the muster station.

[00:35:24]The men walked the gangway. The ferry crossed to Balain. The lights went out behind them.

[00:35:32]The auction ran for 3 days.

[00:35:35]4,000 lots. welders, chain blocks, vices, machine tools, six safes, an old steam train, hundreds of meters of rope, lockers, gauges, patterns, drawings, cast iron lathes that had turned propeller shafts for HMAS Brisbane in 1915 were knocked down for scrap value.

[00:35:58]The National Trust's conservation director, Steven Davies, told the Sydney Morning Herald, "The sale of irreplaceable industrial heritage was, in his words, a travesty."

[00:36:09]Australian National Industries collected on the lease. Vicers had already pulled out. The buyers came from interstate, from overseas, from any private engineering firm that could fit a cockatu lathe into their works. Some equipment went to Newcastle Steelworks.

[00:36:26]Some went to BHP Wya. Some went to scrap merchants who melted it down for the steel. The accumulated capital of 134 years of Australian naval engineering was dispersed in 3 days.

[00:36:42]The lease officially expired on the 31st of December 1992.

[00:36:48]Then the demolition started.

[00:36:51]In 1999, the cruiser warf number two and the destroyer warf, both built during the First World War, were demolished.

[00:36:59]The steel framed workshop buildings ringing Fitzroy dock came down.

[00:37:04]Most of the original industrial artifacts were gone. None of the cranes that remained was operational. None of the docks, none of the quesons.

[00:37:15]The Sydney Harbor Federation Trust report from 2001 would later note that the remaining buildings contained few of their original industrial artifacts.

[00:37:25]Australian National Industries and the Commonwealth went into commercial arbitration in 1994.

[00:37:33]The arbitrator was John West QC, later a NSW District Court Judge. He sat for 2 years. In August of 1996, West ruled that by tendering submarine refits to other companies, the Commonwealth had been in breach of contract with Cockatu Dockyard Proprietary Limited.

[00:37:55]$17.3 million was awarded to the company.

[00:38:00]The workers were not party to the action.

[00:38:03]None of them received a scent. The compensation went to the shareholders of the operating company that had pulled out of the lease. They won the legal battle. They lost the yard and the auction ran for 3 days.

[00:38:18]Chapter 11. What Australia lost.

[00:38:22]Stand on the eastern apron of Cockatu Island today. The F8 ferry from Circular Key takes about 30 minutes. There is no admission charge. Fitzroy dock is empty.

[00:38:33]Dry. 12 of its original 15 bolards are still in place. The granite asha lining laid by convicts in 1854 still grips the rock. Southerntherland dock is empty too. The queson and drive chain mechanism are still extent, but neither do has been operational since 1991.

[00:38:53]The 1918 powerhouse still stands, brick chimney intact, July 1918 plaque still visible on the south wall.

[00:39:02]The turbine shop, the great cathedral-like building, has been restored for art installations.

[00:39:09]The underground grain silos that the convicts cut by hand are now accessible by audio tour.

[00:39:16]The bottle-shaped chambers are lit with electric bulbs now. The acoustics are remarkable.

[00:39:23]Walk north along the apron.

[00:39:26]There are camping tents pitched on the rock. Basic tents start at $55 a night.

[00:39:33]The deluxe waterfront sites cost $315.

[00:39:37]There's a marina cafe and bar in the docks precinct. The Sydney Harbor Federation Trust says the campground attracts around 20,000 campers a year.

[00:39:46]Lonely Planet describes it as one of the world's most spectacularly located campsites.

[00:39:53]On the wall of the visitor center, which used to be the muster station, where dockyard workers clocked in and out, there is a single aerial photograph from 1944.

[00:40:05]Cockatu Island at full power, every wararf occupied, every slipway in use, every workshop standing.

[00:40:15]The sandstone is barely visible under the steel. The photograph is approximately 3 ft wide. Most visitors walk past it on the way to the cafe.

[00:40:27]So, what do you make of it?

[00:40:29]Lesson one, the two ocean strategy and the cost of strategic reorganization.

[00:40:37]In March of 1987, Kim Beasley moved Australia's naval center of gravity to Western Australia. He had a strategic argument. Indian Ocean exposure, Sterling's deeper water, room to expand.

[00:40:51]What the Defense of Australia white paper did not cost, what no Treasury paper ever costs, was the death of 134 years of accumulated trade knowledge.

[00:41:02]You cannot reopen a dockyard. You cannot retrain 21 trades. You cannot reassemble 13 unions. You cannot teach a young Australian apprentice how to cut a propeller shaft in Southerntherland dock from a textbook. The two Ocean Navy was a strategic choice. Cockatu Island was the price. And the men who paid it weren't sitting in Canberra. They were standing on a warf in Balain, redundancy checks in their hands, looking back at an island they would never work on again. Lesson two. When the union movement eats its own, the 1989 occupation did not end because the workers gave up. It ended because the ACTU, the New South Wales Labor Council, and the AMW National Leadership withdrew support and threatened the striker's own union with $250,000 in daily fines under section 45D of the Trade Practices Act. Claude Sandalgen and the Shop Committee were not defeated by the Department of Defense. They were defeated by George Campbell and the men who were supposed to be on their side.

[00:42:11]Bob Hawk had been president of the ACTU before he was prime minister. He knew exactly which levers to pull on his own movement. The accord, the celebrated wage agreement between labor and the unions, paid for itself out of dockyards like cockatu. The hawk years had given Australia floating exchange rates, a deregulated banking system and the accord. They had cost it the auto industry, the textile mills, the steel furnaces at Newcastle and 134 years of cockatu.

[00:42:44]Reform always has a price. The price is always paid by the people who work with their hands.

[00:42:51]Always.

[00:42:54]Lesson three. The wreckers are named.

[00:42:57]The builders forgotten.

[00:43:00]Again, we know every name in the collapse.

[00:43:04]Bob Hawk, Kim Beasley, Paul Keating, Australian National Industries, Vicers, the Department of Defense, advertising the island as the jewel in the crown. We have less for the men who built it.

[00:43:20]Gothic man designed Fitzroy Dock. There is no statue.

[00:43:26]Louis Samuel built Southerntherland Dock and died at 26. There is a small heritage plaque. Lawrence Wackett built the Kodok for Kingsford Smith. There is no aircraft, only Vandals Ashes at Mincenbury.

[00:43:40]The 4,085 men of December 1919, there are no names.

[00:43:46]The convicts who hand cut 580,000 cub feet of sandstone. There is one name we know, and that's only because he escaped and became a bush ranger. There is no museum of the Wacket aircraft. There is no statue of man. There is no memorial to the 4,085 men of 1919.

[00:44:09]The Australian dictionary of biography lists more property developers from the 1980s than railway engineers from the 1880s.

[00:44:18]The corporate names of the men who sold the yard will outlast the names of the convicts who hand cut its foundations.

[00:44:25]The marketing brochure outlasts the cathedral and the cockatos that gave the island its name never came back.