Have your say about the Future of Goat Island !

Have started the time trip back to several years of my childhood living on Goat Island by immersing myself in the latest draft.

It is an absorbing document that will take time to digest.

My dad, Sydney Sandilands, was a marine engineer for the Maritime Services Board, and we lived in residence No 4, which was built in 1922. There was also my mother Mary, my sister Susanna, and my brother Malcolm, who was born (after a middle of the night dash by launch to meet an ambulance to Crown Street) while we were there, while the rest of the tribe were born in Clovelly, which we moved to some time in 1952.

I recall the night of the 1951 Jubilee of Federation fireworks display as seen from our then unenclosed front verandah, which puts our residency on the island as starting sometime in 1950, or just possibly in 1949. (The next and last fireworks display I saw from Goat Island was the Bicentennial display...the first of the great harbour fireworks events...on January 26, 1988 when the former residents on the island were invited back for the event.)

Goat Island was a wonderful place to spend part of childhood. We went to school at Woolwich by launch captained by Hughie Brodie. We were surrounded by a working harbour. We woke to the sounds of trains and trams going over the bridge, and lived to sound of the deep throated steam horns of the great passenger liners and other shipping. You could see the flying boats come and go from Rose Bay looking under the deck of the bridge, and hear the steam trains leaving Central.

There were no skyscrapers. The Opera House site was a tram shed. The highest structures on the city skyline were the AWA radio tower, the Sydney Town Hall and distantly, the Central Station clock tower.

Goat Island had sheep, not goats. We clambered all over the top of sandstone wall over the quarry side of the island because we were forbidden to do so. The swimming enclosure was often invaded by jellyfish. As kids were were often treated to trips on tugs and tenders and even a vintage steam yacht, I think the Lady Hopetoun. Captain Luckett, the harbour master, sometimes took us on his yacht to the cove below the North Head Quarantine station on family picnics.

In my time the lower tier of cottages still existed, and there was a timber community hall further south from the surviving cottages, a short distance from Cottage 4, where we had film nights and community kid's parties. The MSB did double Christmas Parties. One in its old headquarters, which were demolished to make way for the rail link to Circular Quay, and one especially for the island families in the community hall. My memories of the island are all good.

I haven't worked my way right through the report or even reached the recommendations as yet. I'm glad to read in today's SMH that there will be recognition of the significance of Mel Mel's Indigenous heritage. (Mel Mel was said at the time to have been the Aboriginal name for the island.) However I hope that the cultural layer that represents the period of Sydney as a working harbour also remains in view. I realise the timber wharves have a finite lifetime, but they are now rare and endangered artefacts, and perhaps they should be allowed to see out their natural term, with their eventual removal or restoration left for future generations to decide.

Goat Island has been fortunate to survive in the form it has for so long. One of the early plans for a harbour crossing involved a Y shaped bridge from Milson's Point or thereabouts which split at the point of a massive anchoring structure atop the island with one branch going to the Balmain peninsula and the other from memory to somewhere around the Argyle Cut.

No Quarantine Station !!!Try & think of other options ie. volunteers , educational places, etc..

I recently took the Family Day Tour of Goat Island, completely unaware of what was awaiting me. And and it was quite a shock to be greeted by grizzled, menacing, musket-bearing Royal Marines (cira 1788), to be hailed as "scum," forced into a "convict" line, forbidden to speak, forbidden to even look at a soldier, forced into chains, then marched off to, as we were told, be "worked to death" quarrying rock for the new Sydney settlement. Of course, we weren't worked to death, but we were given lectures on how brutal life was for Sydney's first convicts, given a demonstration of a cat o'nine tails, herded through a crowd of newly enlisted "soldiers" -- all abusing us as scum again -- then treated to a display of 1788 firepower -- a firing party discharging flintlock muskets.

What to do with Goat Island? Keep it historic, keep it as a living reminder of the brutality, on both sides of the line, that was wreaked on our ancestors. Goat Island and its volunteer Royal Marine detachment, does something that no history lesson can ever do -- allow us to feel the shame, disregard, pain and helplessness that our convict forefathers endured.

I visited Goat Island yesterday (with other members of the Maritime Museum) and was very impressed by what has been achieved in the various areas of restoration in four years with only $8m. Clearly money well spent.

It seemed to me that a balance has been achieved, with supervised educational visits (it would not be a good idea to have visitors run rampant over the island), probably with volunteer guides as in other NP locations. We discussed the pros and cons of retaining some of the newer buildings and I think those decisions should be left to SHNP as they clearly have the most informed overview.