Fort Denison (Pinchgut Island)

See that tiny island sitting out in the harbour? The one that looks almost quaint with its little stone tower? Its nickname is Pinchgut, and once you know why, you will never look at it the same way. In the early days of the colony, convicts who committed offences were rowed out to the island and left there on starvation rations -- bread and water, for days or weeks at a time. Pinching their guts. That was the mild version.

In seventeen-ninety-six, a convict named Francis Morgan was hanged on the island, and then his body was left hanging in chains as a public warning to every other convict in the settlement. You could see the corpse swinging from the shoreline. The practice was called gibbeting, and it was meant to be the last thing you saw as you looked out at the harbour.

The island was known to the Eora people as Mattewanye or Muddawahnyuh long before any of this. The convicts later quarried its sandstone to build Circular Quay -- so bits of this island are literally embedded in the ground you walked across to get here.

The fort itself exists because of a diplomatic embarrassment. In eighteen thirty-nine, two American warships sailed into Sydney Harbour at night, completely uninvited, and circled the island. Nobody stopped them. The resulting panic about harbour defences eventually led to the Martello tower being built -- and here is a good detail -- it is the only Martello tower ever constructed in Australia and the very last one built anywhere in the British Empire.

Today the cannon fires at one pm every day. If you hear a boom echoing across the water, that is Pinchgut reminding you what time it is.