Dawes Point Battery

The Dawes Point Battery sits directly beneath the southern approach of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Four sandstone walls and a cluster of cannons facing the water mark the site where Lieutenant William Dawes established Australia’s first observatory in seventeen eighty-eight. He used this spot to track a passing comet, but the colonial authorities eventually evicted him after he refused to participate in a punitive expedition against local Aboriginal people. The cannons left behind remain as heavy, silent relics of the colony’s earliest defense efforts.