Cockatoo Island

You can catch a ferry to this island and camp overnight on a UNESCO World Heritage convict site in the middle of Sydney Harbour. That alone is worth knowing. But the history of what happened here will keep you awake in your tent.

Aboriginal people knew this island as Wa-rea-mah. In eighteen thirty-nine, the first sixty convicts arrived from Norfolk Island. The welcome party was grim: the island was described as without water and abounding with snakes. And then the real punishment began. Those convicts were put to work carving grain silos out of solid rock -- seventeen bottle-shaped pits, each up to five-point-eight metres deep, capable of holding one hundred and forty tonnes of grain. All by hand. All with basic tools.

That was the appetiser. The main course was Australia's first dry dock. Convicts manually excavated one-point-five million cubic feet of rock to create a dock where ships could be repaired. With hand tools. Try to picture the scale of that. A million and a half cubic feet of stone, chipped out by men who were sent here as punishment.

The island then operated as a major naval shipyard from eighteen fifty-seven all the way to nineteen ninety-one -- over a hundred and thirty years of building and repairing warships. During both world wars, this was one of the most strategically important industrial sites in the country.

It is now considered one of Australia's most haunted locations, which makes the camping situation interesting. People report hearing metallic clanging from the empty shipyard buildings at night, footsteps on the gravel paths, and, in the convict quarters, the sound of chains. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, lying in a tent on an island where convicts were brutalised for decades does something to your imagination after dark.