By Graham Davis

Park Air 2 lifts the lighthouse from Garden Island to Fort Dennison.

Photo: ABPH Nina Nikolin

The Cruiser Wharf at Garden Island in Sydney became a helicopter launch pad with a difference a few days ago.

Park Air 2, a Bolko helicopter operated by the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service alighted on the wharf before carrying a restored 90-year-old lighthouse out to Fort Denison, the historic island fort in the centre of Sydney Harbour.

First installed in 1913, the light had fallen victim to salt air and pollution. It needed restoration and was removed last October.

“Conservators discovered a blacksmith in Sydney who still uses the old techniques such as hot riveting, a technique used in the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Empire State Building,” the NSW Environment Minister, Mr Bob Debus said.

On the morning of May 20, Park Air 2 landed on the Cruiser Wharf just a few metres from the bow of HMAS Sydney.

Cargo strops were attached and soon the helicopter was airborne and lifting the lighthouse.

It flew the 500m across to Fort Denison where a group of workers waited to receive the light.

Before the light can be switched on new glazing, especially built to match the 1913 design, will be fitted to the housing.

The light provides navigation guidance to Sydney Harbour users while the fort carries a tide gauge, channel markers, foghorn and beacon.

It has a modern museum and café and attracts 15,700 visitors annually.

Known to the Aboriginal people as Mat-te-wan-ye, then to Europeans as Rock Island and Pinchgut, the island was used to imprison and punish criminals from the time of the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788.

In 1796 the corpse of convicted murderer Francis Morgan was hung in chains from a gibbet as a sign to arriving convicts of their fate for bad behaviour.

The tower on the island, the Martello Tower, was completed in 1857, using eight tonnes of sandstone quarried at Neutral Bay. The island was renamed Fort Denison in 1862 after the governor William Denison.

In May 1942, when Japanese midget submarines entered Sydney Harbour, the fort was accidentally shelled by the US cruiser USS Chicago (the primary target for the Japanese raid).

The shelling caused minor but still visible damage. “Generations of caretaker families were born, married and died on the island before it became part of the Sydney Harbour National Park in 1994,” Mr Debus said.

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