Kelly's Steps

Kelly’s Steps consist of eighty-four stone stairs rising steeply between high sandstone walls in Battery Point. James Kelly, a famous nineteenth-century sealer and explorer, built them in eighteen thirty-nine. He needed a shortcut from his cottage on the cliff top down to his boats moored at the wharf below. The rough stone walls still show the original labor of the convicts who cut them from the rock. The steps provided a private path for a man who spent his life navigating the southern ocean.