Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2018L00053:body:0:p41
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2018L00053
Segment Type: other
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Character Range: 105707–108535

other uses such as restaurants and cafes, hotels and conference facilities, and film and TV studios that could be accommodated on the island without having adverse noise impacts.
8 HERITAGE VALUES
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Heritage Values

Cockatoo Island's Character
Three major factors combine to create the cultural landscape of Cockatoo Island. First, the island is the largest of the islands in Sydney Harbour, and its location in a broad reach of the Parramatta River, with the smaller Snapper and Spectacle Islands nearby, has considerable aesthetic appeal. Secondly, the island has been home to convict, penal and institutional activity and much fabric survives as evidence of this fact. Finally, Cockatoo Island was for many years home to one of Australia's major shipbuilding, repair and engineering facilities.
The island's function has been highly varied, ranging from incarceration, heavy shipbuilding and engineering; to small boat construction and design, fine joinery and cabinet making. This diversity of activity is reflected both in the buildings - their materials, scale and pattern of windows - as well as the spaces created between them and their articulation by industrial infrastructure such as rails, slipways, docks, wharves and cranes. It is a place of cuttings: the hillsides cut to form cliffs and the spoil used to form broad aprons, two docks nose to nose, rail tracks, tunnels, slipways and the grain silos cut by hand into the top of the sandstone plateau.
The island's evolution has been accretive as it has been modified and adapted as required - to fulfil a particularly large contract, or to accommodate changes in ship size and building technology. An important character of the island derives from this reworking of existing buildings and facilities.
The island was 'off-limits' as a gaol and as a naval dockyard, contributing to its sense of mystique. It was also a place of innovation and learning through apprenticeship training.
It is the relationship between the island's physical form and setting, and the layered built form surviving from the various human endeavours that have taken place there - that combine to create today's landscape and to give us the following key values:
  * The quality of isolation inherent in the island. This was one of the main reasons for its selection as a convict prison and one appreciated by today's visitors;
  * The layering of uses and history;
  * The hard-edged industrial character;
  * The bleakness of the stone convict compound and associated buildings;
  * The values and examples of innovation and 'making do' evident in many of the dockyard buildings; and
  * The tradition of adaptation associated with the dockyard.
The following statements of significance have been taken from the Conservation Management Plans prepared for the island