Cockatoo Island: Biennale of Sydney and Contained find harbour home

The industrial past of this Sydney Harbour spot forms the perfect backdrop for art and plenty more.

A decorated container at Contained Sydney, on Cockatoo Island. Picture: Katrina Lobley.

You’d be hard-pressed to find real cockatoos on their namesake island in Sydney Harbour. Those raucous birds no longer frequent the place, but a painted sulphur-crested can be spotted on the side of a shipping container there. The decorated structure is part of Contained Sydney, a pop-up project that opened in February, encompassing restaurant, bar and a waterfront micro-hotel. Contained sits near the World Heritage-listed Cockatoo Island’s industrial precinct, beneath the steam-punk beacon of the submarine crane.

Alfresco dining at Contained Sydney. Picture: John Appleyard.

It’s the latest development on the harbour’s largest island, once a sandstone knoll covered in red gum forests before convict chain gangs were put to work carving, chipping and chiselling it into a new penal colony. One of the more thrilling moments of this chapter was when bushranger Fred Ward, better remembered as Captain Thunderbolt, slipped away from his work gang and swam to freedom in 1863. When the penal colony closed six years later, the island became an industrial shipyard (those modern-day shipping containers could be read as a clever nod to this history), an industrial school for orphaned girls, an exercise yard for orphaned boys living in a ship anchored offshore, a girls’ reform school and a jail for petty criminals. More recently, it’s served as a movie location for X-Men Origins: Wolverine, starring Hugh Jackman, and Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken.

One of the boutique hotel rooms in a converted shipping container. Picture: John Appleyard.

Learn more about the island on a Haunted History tour starting at dusk. Tour guide Nikki Kennedy reckons the island is one of Australia’s top five most haunted sites. “People have seen ghosts but you might experience them in other ways,” she says. “If you feel something on your neck [such as] a cool wind or a hot wind, it could either be someone blowing on your neck or it could be a ghost.” Before entering Tunnel 1, dug during World War I to expedite machinery movements, Kennedy says some people have seen a figure standing just inside, pressing a button on the lift that goes to the island summit. “There’s some very frustrated ghost who’s having trouble with the lift arrangements out here,” she jokes. “Imagine spending an eternity trying to get the lift to move.”

Inside one of the shipping container hotel rooms. Picture: John Appleyard.

Guests also send Kennedy spooky images captured on the island. Up on the plateau in front of Biloela House, she shows us a photo that’s “the closest to a photo of a ghost out here”. Indeed, it’s hard to explain except as an old-fashioned double exposure.

You can linger, looking for apparitions, if overnighting on the island. Options include camping and glamping in waterfront tents, or lording it over campers from upon high. The heritage hilltop accommodation includes a studio apartment in the former fire station right up to four-bedroom holiday houses. While Contained continues, there’s also the option of one of its two shipping-container suites.

The brainchild of the operators behind The Mantle (a hub of restaurants, bars and work spaces inside a historic Fremantle warehouse), Contained adds another dimension to Cockatoo Island, also a Biennale of Sydney venue until June 11. The Biennale’s centrepiece, in a former industrial workshop, is the epic 60m-long Law of the Journey installation from Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. The piece is a black rubber inflatable boat crowded with more than 200 anonymous figures, all made in the same Chinese factory that manufactures the vessels used by refugees crossing the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. Also worth catching is Hiroshima-based artist Yukinori Yanagi’s neighbouring work, Icarus Container, a disorienting maze of shipping containers that just might give you a surprise at the end. Nose further around the island to the Powerhouse precinct to discover Yanagi’s two poignant pieces that reflect on nuclear war.

IN THE KNOW

The 21st Biennale of Sydney, Australia’s largest contemporary visual arts event, is on until June 11. On Cockatoo Island, 20 artists are featured; viewings from 10am to 5pm daily. The two Contained pop-up hotel suites are in repurposed shipping containers by the water’s edge at Bolt Wharf and feature queen-sized beds, en suites, decks and plunge pool access; $305 a night for two; Monday to Thursday; Friday to Sunday, $385 a night for minimum two nights.

■ cockatooisland.gov.au

■ contained.sydney

■ biennaleofsydney.art