By Lorraine Fildes and Colin Randall This paper was compiled to mark the 80th anniversary of the opening of the Captain Cook Graving Dock at Garden Island in Sydney Harbour ...
Garden Island
Occasional Paper 177: Australia’s First Tennis Match
By Martin Linsley and Colin Randall. Sometime about now (late 2023 or early 2024) marks the 150th anniversary of someone playing the first game of tennis at some location in ...
Book Review: Portrait of a Working Dockyard
Portrait of a Working Dockyard. This photobook by Berylouise Mitchell comes in a limited edition, handmade in A4 landscape format by Australia’s premier photobook printer MomentoPro in Sydney and sells ...
Throwing a Party: The Naval Ball of 1899
Colin Randall, one of our venerable archivists, discovered some newspaper cuttings from well over a century past which perhaps reminds us of how things were done when a celebration was ...
A Tribute to Norman Rivett
Norman (Norm) Rivett, an esteemed founding father of the Naval Historical Society, passed over the bar on 8 March 2021 just shy of his 96th birthday. He will be ...
Trouble with the Neighbours
By Colin Randall Garden Island has always had trouble with the neighbours. The earliest recorded was in 1788 and the latest in January 2020. Over the intervening 232 years neighbours ...
The HMAS Parramatta Memorials
In this our 50th year it is well to reflect on some of the more important projects undertaken by the Society and none is perhaps more worthy than conceiving a ...
Kings Cross in World War II
By Nick Hordern In 2020 we celebrate the 75th anniversary year of the opening of the Captain Cook Dock which joined Garden Island to the mainland and we gained a ...
Occasional Paper 70: The Ship’s Garden – GARDEN ISLAND
By Colin Randall Colin is a Committee member, volunteer researcher and tour guide of the Naval Historical Society of Australia with a particular interest in the history of Garden Island. ...
Occasional Paper 69: The Naval Garden on Garden Island, Sydney
December 2019 By Colin Randall Colin is a volunteer researcher with the Naval Historical Society of Australia and a tour guide for its heritage tours of the Hill. He lived ...
Harry’s Café de Wheels
By Ray Vidler The story of ‘Harry’s Café de Wheels’ goes back to the Great Depression years of the 1930s. With the world on the brink of a devastating war, ...
Letter: Villers Bretonneux Museum – Garden Island Dockyard crest
Dear Editor, Some years ago when I was serving in the office of the Naval Historical Society a letter was received with a copy of a photograph of a Garden ...
Garden Island Rangefinding
Before the days of radar an array of optical rangefinders was an important feature of nearly all warships. In Royal Naval vessels, including those of the Dominions, these were mostly ...
Ready to Serve
Norman (Norm) Rivett is one of the longest serving members of the Garden Island fraternity and now aged 93, after a total of sixty-three years spent at the Island, is ...
Naval Fuel Oil
By Peter Colthorpe With recent announcements that the redundant naval oil fuel installation beneath the Sydney Domain is to be used in an extension to the Art Gallery of NSW, ...
Weather Signals
By Leyland Wilkinson I recently came across a guide to ‘Weather Signals at Sydney’ which was produced by the NSW Section of the Ex-Naval Men’s Association and could be purchased ...
Our First Gardeners
By Norman Rivett Who were they? The first garden from which Garden Island derives its name commenced here on Monday the 7th of February 1788 when a party from HMS ...
Letter: The Hammerhead Lives
The following interesting letter has been received from our member Roy Kingston of Castle Hill. On 10 September I had the privilege of attending the ‘launch’ of the public display ...
Peter Hibbs Remembered
By Norman Rivett Peter Hibbs has a unique association with Garden Island that is not generally known. He was born at Ramsgate in Kent in 1757 and is buried at ...
Tales from the Dockyard – Lawrence Beare Westaway
By Norman Rivett During the period 9 February 1889 to 15 February 1991 at HM Naval Establishment Garden Island (later referred to as HM Naval Dockyard) there were, in addition ...
Letter: The Hammerhead Crane
A number of our readers have pointed out an erroneous comment made in the article regarding the Hammerhead Crane contained in the June 2013 edition of this magazine. This concerns ...
HMS Penguin (VII) and her 64 Pounder Gun
When I first started work at Garden Island in January 1955, there was a small wharf at the southern end of Riggers Lane known as Kuttabul Steps, not to be ...
The Hammerhead Crane
In the 42 years of this publication there has not been one article dedicated to Garden Island’s Hammerhead Crane. It is timely to correct this omission which has been done ...
Memories of a Garden Island Patternmaker
By Ian Thomson The author provides us with a delightful vignette of life as a dockyard apprentice. We should also remember that workers at Garden Island Dockyard were employed by ...
General Managers of Garden Island Dockyard
Foreword In the century past (plus two more years, until 10 May 1989) Garden Island was a Naval Dockyard managed by a succession of twenty six Naval Engineering Officers of ...