Dawes Point Battery

The Dawes Point Battery is marked by its jagged, excavated stone ruins, which sit directly beneath the heavy southern pylon of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. These remnants are the foundation of what was once the colony’s primary line of defense. The site began in seventeen eighty-eight as a humble observatory built by Lieutenant William Dawes, but it quickly evolved into a military fortification. By seventeen ninety-one, cannons salvaged from the shipwrecked HMS Sirius were mounted here to protect the fledgling settlement from potential invaders.