History Now: Interpreting Cockatoo Island/Wareamah: Past, Present, Future

Waramah/Cockatoo Island is one of Sydney Harbour’s most complex historical sites. Shaped by layers of incarceration, labour, industry, and governance, the island offers a rare opportunity to examine how power, punishment, and productivity were engineered into a single landscape—and how those histories are interpreted today.

This episode brings together curators, historians, archaeologists, and digital specialists to explore Cockatoo Island’s past and present. We begin with its global significance as part of Australia’s World Heritage–listed convict sites, tracing how solitary confinement, labour yards, reform institutions, and shipbuilding transformed the island into a microcosm of colonial authority and industrial ambition. From there, we turn to contemporary stewardship, discussing how the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust balances free public access with conservation, and how light-touch interpretation allows the island’s material textures to remain visible.

A central focus of the conversation is method. New technologies—LiDAR, aerial and confined-space drones, and bathymetric survey—are revealing features that are otherwise inaccessible, from tunnel interiors and dock geometry to the harbour floor itself. These tools are creating detailed digital records that support conservation planning, risk management, and education, while limiting physical intervention in fragile spaces. We consider how these datasets intersect with maps, photographs, archival sources, oral histories, and First Nations-led storytelling, and what it means for humans and machines to work together in the production of historical knowledge.

This episode invites listeners interested in Sydney Harbour, heritage practice, and historical method to reflect on how the past can be documented, preserved, and shared with care.

This event is in the 2025 History Now series. History Now is presented by the History Council of NSW in conjunction with the Chau Chak Wing Museum and the Vere Gordon Childe Centre. 

History Now 2025 was supported by Create NSW.

Transcript

Welcome And Country Acknowledgement

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Welcome to the History Now 2025 podcast series, brought to you by the History Council of New South Wales in partnership with the Child Chakwing Museum and the Via Gordon Child Centre at the University of Sydney. In this episode, we focus on an island at the heart of the Sydney story, Cockatoo Island, Warima. The presentations focus on recent research being conducted into the island's history and include a detailed discussion of the use of new technologies to record the rich history of the island. Presentations will be delivered by Kirsten Mackenzie, Bradley Maneira, Nerida Campbell, Joseph Leoner, and Elliot Cummins.

Series Context And Why History Now

SPEAKER_08 0:42

Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the Chow Chak Wing Museum. For those of you in the room in the Nelson Mears Foundation Auditorium, and for those of you joining us online or listening to the podcast recording at a later date. Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge that we're meeting today on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. And to pay our respects and to acknowledge the tens of thousands of years of care for country and the custodianship of land, sea, and air that the Gadigal people have brought to this part of Sydney. Thank you for joining us on what's been one of Sydney's weirdest weather days. It's a bit more, a bit more Melbourne than Sydney, to be honest, today. And I am the uh very proud to be the convener of the 2025 series of History Now Talks. History Now is a series of presentations aiming to allow public conversations about key issues in history, history research, and history presentation run by the History Council of New South Wales. This year, co-presented with the Chow Chak Wing Museum and with the Veer Gordon Child Centre, of which we are going to hear much more tonight. This is all only possible because of support from Create New South Wales. It's my great pleasure to introduce Catherine Shirley from the History Council of New South Wales, who has also achieved the impossible task tonight of attending two events at exactly the same time. Catherine is a time traveller, but Catherine is also here to provide some content and context for the History Now series. So thank you, Catherine.

SPEAKER_04 2:46

And welcome on behalf of the History Council of New South Wales to this History Week, a History Now event. I'm Catherine Shirley, as Craig has just said. I'm the executive officer and strategic development person of the History Council of New South Wales. And we're proud to be in partnership with the Child Track Wing Museum and in this event tonight with the Via Gordon Child Centre as well, to present the 2025 History Now series. History Now owes its existence as a tongue dangler to passionate historians who wanted to bring new perspectives to all aspects of historical practice. And as we're witnessing at this very time in global affairs, a historical perspective helps us make sense of current chaos. It shines a light on our culture as well as other cultures and helps us comprehend the true value of the human experience and living in a civilised society. Our speakers tonight, to be introduced shortly by Craig, bring us a fantastic diversity of historical endeavor. And I'm looking forward in particular to hearing about their use of new technologies to record and interpret the rich history of a place that I've visited often over the years, walked across it, sailed around it all in my watery past to Cockatoo Island over to Ukraine.

SPEAKER_08 4:14

Thank you. And I must say, actually, I'm not introducing our panelists tonight, but I'll get to that in one moment. Tonight's presentation is a very exciting exploration of an area very much at the heart of Sydney and beloved by all of us, Sydney siders. And as you'll see, it's a story that covers a network of interconnected other stories: First Nations, Convict, Industrial, Military, and now recreational histories. And tonight we're going to hear from the perspectives of archival research, heritage management and conservation, archaeological investigation, world heritage listing, and the application of new technologies to explore old lives. It's my great pleasure to introduce my colleague, Professor Kirsten McKenzie, Chair of Australian History at the University of Sydney and the director of the Vordon Child Centre, to introduce tonight's presenters and to contextualize the research. Kirsten will also chair the QA at the end of tonight's presentations as well. Thank you very much.

Cockatoo Island’s Many Lives

World Heritage Story And Convict System

SPEAKER_05 5:14

Thanks, Craig, and thanks so much for the opportunity to speak in this beautiful space and to you all tonight. The Veer Gordon Child Centre is not a childcare center, as AI has been known to Google us, but in fact a uh a centre for the study of humanity through time. And I'm very proud to be the director of the centre and also chair of Australian history. The VGCC, as we like to call it, is dedicated to bringing together expertise from different disciplines to understand the human past, its importance in the present, and its impact on the future. And it's named after the distinguished uh uh Australian archaeologist Via Gordon Child. The quest to understand humanity through time is the quest to understand change and to endeavor to see the world from different perspectives. Researchers pack a diverse set of tools when we set out to encounter these other times and cultures. I'm a historian and likely to be most likely to be found within an archive, but other members of our research center are just as likely to fly a drone or excavate or pick up a recording microphone or do whatever it is that geoscientists do. I mean, who knows what they do. Um I'm being deliberately vague. Uh, don't ask me what they do, I'm just the director of the center, to make the point that while we might not understand how our different disciplines operate, you know, what we have to do to get our results, working together means that we can ask and answer more complex questions than we can do alone. And tonight's talk exemplifies that mission. It comes out of a collaboration between the VGCC, the Sydney Harbor Federation Trust, and two industry leaders in robotics and remote sensing technology, Sphere Drones and YellowScan. Our goal is to understand one of the most complex heritage sites in the country, one that sits right in the heart of our city, Cockatoo Island, Waramah. Before I introduce our speakers, just a few words on why interpreting heritage on this site is so challenging. I won't anticipate our speakers, I'll keep it short. I'll refer you to the history section of the excellent website maintained by the Harbor Trust. But most importantly, nothing beats going to the site itself. So I want to put a big plug out for actually visiting Warama, Cockatoo Island. Warama was a meeting place for Aboriginal people across the 60,000 years leading into European occupation. As Cockatoo Island, it served as a penal establishment between 1839 and 1869, and it is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List along with 10 other convict sites nationwide. In the last quarter of the 19th century, it was repurposed as an industrial training school and reformatory for young women on the island and for boys on nautical school ships more nearby. It has yet another history unfolding in parallel to these histories as a shipbuilding and ship repair facility from 1859. It played a vital role in wartime defense of Australia through the 20th century. So across all these multiple usages, the fabric of the island itself changed. As such, it preserves in its very landscapes, in its very buildings, these entangled histories of incarceration, of punishment, of resistance, of labor relations and industry, of threats to the state both within and from without. We're left on the site with many islands that have now been layered into one. And today's speakers are going to discuss how complicated heritage, this, how this complicated heritage has been interpreted in recent decades, what's going on on the island now, and what possibilities there might be for the future. So looking to that possible future, we'll be reporting back on a field work uh trip that we did in October last year, in which all the speakers tonight played important roles. Our goal was to map the island and the associated seafloor using three LIDAR scanners: one terrestrial, one bathymetric, one subterranean. Across a very intense day, our team managed multiple challenges, including dicey weather, large numbers of people on the island, air traffic restrictions, courtesy of King Charles' visit. We didn't really need that one, but we we managed. LIDAR, for those of you who don't know, stands for light detection and ranging. It's a remote sensing method that uses light as a form of a in the form of a pulse laser as an accurate mapping tool. But I'll save the specifics for those who actually know what they're talking about. We'll give 10 minutes to each section past, present, future, then we'll open up the evening to conversations and questions. Just to save time, I'm going to introduce all our speakers in order now. Our first speaker is Brad Maneira. Brad is senior historian and curator at the Anzac Memorial Sydney and currently serves on the board of the Sydney Harbor Federation Trust. He was on the team that put together the bid for UNESCO World Heritage Listing, and he'll speak a little about that. Our second speaker is Narida Campbell. Narida is head of curatorial research and production at the Harbor Trust, and she'll talk to us today about showcasing the diverse story of the island to visitors and the initiatives that are taking on place on the island right now. Lastly, we have Joseph Sepi Lerner and Elliot Cummings. Sepi runs the VGCC with me as the deputy director. He's an archaeologist with specialities in material science, remote sensing, and digital approaches to the human past. Elliot is a remote, is chief remote pilot at Sphere Drones. He led the team mapping the island last year. So I'll call Brad up to the lectern to be our first speaker. Thank you, Brad.

Landscapes Of Incarceration Explained

SPEAKER_06 11:35

Yeah, look, I was a very, very junior member of the uh the team that uh was that talked about the uh um the the World Heritage Listing for the 11 sites. Um so yeah, I don't know that I can take very much credit at all. But in 2010, the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization recognized the internationally significant impact of convict transportation on Australia with the serial listing of 11 sites around the continent and into the Pacific. Cockatoo Island Warrior was one of those sites. Between 1788 and 1868, over 166,000 men, women, and children above the age of nine were transported from the United Kingdom and other parts of Britain's Second Empire to the Australian colonies for crimes and for political activity. At the time I was the head curator at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum. Um but the most influential historian on the team, without a doubt, was the irrepressible and indefatigable Professor Hamish Maxwell Stewart, who was at that time working in the history department of the University of Tasmania in Hobart, but in his unpaid hours was volunteering and providing expertise at sites from Macquarie Harbour to the Tasman Peninsula. We had hundreds of sites, potentially thousands of sites to choose from. So selecting 11 was was quite a challenge. Convict transportation changed the British Empire. It saw enormous development in attitudes and practices of legal and penal systems. To start with, some brief generalizations, approximately 60% of those transported to Australia were assigned on arrival. They worked on farms or were contracted in other farms, forms of employment that was off the ration scale. Forty percent of those transported suffered servitude, experienced life in barracks, in construction camps, in stockades, where they worked on road gangs or in a range of other infrastructure employment that required a captive labor force. The system saw the introduction of various levels of secondary punishment. The convict system experimented with methods of reformation rather than punishment, incentives rather than corporal punishment. There were stories of sadists, of monsters, of torturers, and of reformers, of visionary penal administrators, and always the role of religion and occasionally of education, both formal and practical and industrial. So let's quickly look at some of these sites. From my home state in Western Australia, Fremantle Prison was uh was an obvious site because it had housed transported convicts from the 1850s to the late 1880s. On the other side of the uh the continent and out in the Pacific, Kingston and Arthur's Vale had two periods of uh of use initially, their first settlement from 1788 to 1814, and then as a place of secondary punishment from 1825 to 1855. But of course, say convict transportation and uh really you know uh from from Marcus Clark to Robert Hughes, you can't ignore Tasmania. And uh so Tasm um Port Arthur was was an immediate addition to the uh to the site. Uh but further down the Tasman Peninsula, there was a fascinating site we referred to as coal mines, uh, where convict labor uh and uh was was used in the uh in the mining for for coal. Um in the in the Midlands in Tasmania, Brickenden and Walmers to sheep farms still had much evidence of the convict labor force that had been there from 1820 to the mid-1850s. And um while they illustrated those that were assigned, um there was the the Molesworth Committee had uh was very enthusiastic about reducing the amount of of uh of assignment. And um and so in Tasmania at Darlington on Mariah Island, you've got a very almost complete uh probation station, the probation system that was introduced from 1842 uh to the end of transportation. The fifth site in Tasmania was the female factory at Cascades. There wasn't a great deal of it left, essentially the um perimeter fences. And uh so I was a little reluctant, but um in recent years the interpretation has really excelled itself. And again, as Kirsten was saying, get yourself to Cockatoo Island. Next time you're in Tasmania, don't miss a visit to the female factory at Cascades. But the final four locations were here in New South Wales. Uh obviously, I was going to champion the cause of the Hyde Park barracks uh because it was accommodation for those work gangs by the road gangs, farming gangs, uh, market gardening gangs, and uh that that we could compare that with the use of those labour gangs uh by by um uh adding the old North Road, north of Wiseman's Ferry, to the um to the system. The last two locations on that serial listing were always going to be debated, and uh the old government house at Parramatta won out over the archaeological site of the original government house on Bridge Street. But the um I the other uh uh I guess discussion was who gets priority? Is it going to be Cockatoo Island or Goat Island? There's so much of the convict infrastructure remains uh in the construction of the magazines by convict labor on Goat Island. What immediately won out, though, was public access. That was one of the main criteria for the convict listing. So this uh convict built wall and the view down to the uh uh one of the magazines on Goat Island, uh, there's still the remains of a convict wharf structure there. But uh, you know, because of the access issue, then uh Cockatoo Island with streets in front. And this image of Cockatoo from the early 1840s shows some of the original convict structures on on the island. Um from the uh research by Professor Hamish Maxwell Stewart uh and the evaluations by the legendary Peter Watts. And I noticed there's a few Historic Houses Trust uh veterans in the in the audience. Um the convict use of of Cockatoo Island between 1839 and 1869 was uh a very easy and straightforward addition to the list. It was always going to be a high priority for consideration. This early image of the island shows some of the convict-built workstations at the eastern end of the island. It was a place of incarceration as well as a work site for light industry. Criteria four and criteria six of the World Heritage Listing required that these sites contribute to the understandings of the geopolitical spheres of influence, convict transportation, and the issues like transportation as a deterrent model and discussions of punishment and reformation. Criteria six emphasized penal transportation as a deterrent model in the Age of Enlightenment and the impact of transportation as an influence on the emergence of a national penitentiary system. Cockatoo Island encapsulates all of those. Here we see another sketch from the island. Now, the transportation system evolved between 1788 and 1860. The frequency of capital punishment was reduced. The prison population included political prisoners as well as those with criminal convictions. There were exiles transported from under very dubious interpretations of what was legally allowed. In Australia, as in other parts of the British Empire, First Nations peoples who resisted settlement frequently found themselves absorbed into the colonial penal system. Once undergoing a sentence, there were levels of experience from those assigned on arrival to those incarcerated and forced to work in labor gangs. Corporal punishment was common. Leg irons, manacles, and other restraints were frequently applied. Those who committed secondary offences while prisoners were marked. This image shows two individuals undergoing secondary punishment on Cockatoo Island. We know that because they are wearing party-colored clothing. In this case, yellow and grey. In Western Australia and Van Diemen's Land, it would have been yellow and black. Solitary confinement was another punishment inflicted in many sites of incarceration, and Cockatoo Island was amongst them. It had cells that deprived prisoners of sound and light. When examining Cockatoo Island, like so many other convict sites that involve an extended precinct, we can view the whole area as a landscape of incarceration and coercion. The commandants and overseers' barracks are high on high points of the islands, island. Some convict accommodation and workhouses are situated on lower contours. The location of the military garrison is isolated from the convict barracks for separation and protection. A potential killing ground is created to intimidate any potential insurrection. This image of the barracks yard shows the former convict barracks flanking a mess hall or providing an enclosed quad for parades and roll calls. It dates to the period of transported imperial convicts. The rooms have been modified for later uses. After the end of transportation, Cockatoo Island was provided space for reformatories for both young men and women. There were industrial schools and behavioral reconditioning for those that society deemed at risk. So industry has been a theme of the island from convict days through to its use as reformatories, and then its reuse of the infrastructure for initially light and later heavy industry. I had to throw this in because it's part of our own collection. This is an invitation that is in the collection of the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park. It is but one small example of the level of heavy industry that has been occurring on the island since the late 19th century. Heavy industry that took over the workshops once occupied by transported convicts, reused by male and female juveniles in reformatories, then producing some of the most skilled artisans in the colony and eventually the nation. It was a hub for the colonial naval force and eventually the Royal Australian Navy. It built ships that saw action from the Great War to Vietnam and most recently in the Persian Gulf. It's arguably the most significant. It was arguably the most significant military-industrial complex in the South Pacific during the Second World War. It is an island that's had a rich and complex and layered history. UNESCO began serious consideration of the proposal for listing convict sites in Australia at the turn of the 21st century. Each of the sites developed plans for the management of cultural heritage. The focus on our convict past was reinforced in 2007 when the convict records of Australia were added to the Register of the Memory of the World. Finally, after submissions had been rejected and rewritten, Cockatoo Island and ten other sites were added to the World Heritage List. For Cockatoo Island, its convict past is but one of many of the layers of the history you can experience when you visit. How to unpack those layers and to interpret this extraordinary site, I'll leave to my much more learned colleagues.

From Convicts To Industry And Navy

SPEAKER_00 24:10

Thank you, Brad. Well, if Brad's done the past, I'm going to do the present. So Cocktoo Island is one of nine extraordinary sites on Sydney Harbour that are managed by the Harbour Trust. We look after many of the former defence sites, and our goal is to make them accessible to the public so everybody can come and enjoy them. We look after the buildings and we also tell their stories. 18 months ago, I came on board working as a curator with the Harbour Trust with the key task of having a look at Cockatoo Island's really complex and complicated stories and finding some ways that we could tell them and share them with the public. Harbour Trust had done a lot of consultation with members of the community, and this was one of the things that they really strongly wanted to see happen on the island. So, of course, Harper Trust began that work. And this is an image of the Fitzroy dock with a case on in place. So this is one of the many fantastic convict-built spaces on the island that you can visit and have a look at. It's currently full of water, but you'll still get a sense of the sandstone and the shape. And I'm sure that Sepi and the team will tell us a little bit more about what they found when they flew some drones through that area. So Harbor Trust had provided a master plan, a schema for understanding the island and for thinking about its future and how we're going to really capitalise on this fantastic, this gem, the largest island in Sydney Harbour. It's got, as I've said, a really layered history. We've heard about the convict history. It also has an industrial history, a history relating to Australia's wartime activities. And also for people today, we have many thousands of visitors who come to the island and make their own stories and have their own experiences. Everything from previous biennales to dance festivals occur on the island these days. So one of the things that I'm charged with doing is sharing stories of the island, researching stories of the island and making them accessible to the public. But when doing that, we don't want to turn the island into a museum. That's not what is special about Cockatoo Island. It's raw, it's dirty, you walk through the turbine shop, you can still smell the oil and the industry that once happened in there. So we don't want to clean it up to the stage where you no longer get a sense of that grit and grime and dirt of the island. But that said, we also don't want to rob people of the opportunity of having a deeper experience on the island by understanding some of the stories that are important to what makes it such a special place. Part of what I'm looking at doing is amplifying some of the key themes of the island's history. So it's natural history. Currently, I'm working on sandstone, and we're also looking at the archaeology with our friends here at Sydney University. In particular, how do we tell stories out of stone for people who are not scientists, who are not geologists? And we've been really lucky to work with partners at the National Rock Garden to help us with those stories. And that's one of the things at Cockatoo that I found so refreshing, the generosity of so many of our colleagues working in history, science, the universities, as well as the ex-workers of the site and people in Sydney who have stories to share and tell. That's something that I find delightful about the job, being able to really connect with people who have a passion for Cockatoo Island, Wariama. We've also been working with First Nations communities to tell more stories of the island, in particular with the Gajaga Foundation, who have helped us tell the story of Bori Buri, which is one of the dreaming stories associated with Wariama. Bori Bori was a really angry kind of humpback whale, deservedly angry. Come to the island, you can see the story told in our masteryard. We've also got really interesting and difficult stories about convicts, vulnerable children, and prisoners who are held on the island. And that's another layer of difficult storytelling, quite dark and disturbing stories at times. And then the history that many people today have within their living memory of the dockyard, shipbuilding, and other kinds of industrial work that happened on the island up until its closure in 1992. If you're interested, go to our website where you can read through our future plan and our master plan. So guiding principles for me as an interpreter and a curator, community feedback, talking to people who care about the island and listening to what they have to say about it. Trying to create experiences for different audiences. And we've done a lot of work at Harbour Trust trying to find out who comes to the island, why they come there, and also who doesn't come to the island and see if there are ways that we can entice them to come. Because the island is free, you don't have to pay to come onto it. Catch a ferry and you're there. And there is a range of activities. Some of them you've got to pay for, some of them are free. But it's a really great place for you to sort of dive into Australian history. I've done a lot of research and I'm trying to make that research relatable, not just, you know, things like conservation management plans, which are great, but for the general visitor, sometimes they can be a bit hard going. My um role is to take that information, huge amounts of information, compress it down into bite-sized chunks for people to understand on the island, and also to tackle these layered stories. Um I'm also trialling some of the concepts from the master plan. You'll see over here in my slide a little a little piece of uh island history. The lads have all gone, the skill is all lost, vanished into a bygone age. Long live the rock, written by an anonymous worker in 1991, just before the island finished. So all of these marks, graffiti, and bits of layering history um really excite me about the island. So, what have I been doing? What's happening on the island right now? What's changed? It's complicated. We do have different kinds of tours available for different kinds of experienced seekers. For those people who are really fact-focused, we've got in-person tours where you can come along with an expert guide and have a very sort of select history told to you. We've got also a range of three new audio tours. We've worked with a company called Art of Multimedia on those. Now, we describe them as immersive experiences, and I know we hear that a lot. Experiential immersive, what does this mean? Well, to me, it means going into the places where the history happened, spending time there, and hearing the voices of the people who spent time in those spaces. So for the convicts, obviously their voices are mediated through an archive, and we've worked with actors who've helped to give us a sense of what might have happened on the island at that time. If you come and do our audio tour on shipbuilding, you're actually going to be able to hear from the audio oral histories that we've been recording for the past 20 years with people who worked on the island, where they talk about what they did but also how they felt and their other experiences that they had there. Really light touch interpretation is important on the island so that we keep that grittiness and we don't over-museum it. Um and also giving people the opportunity to listen to stories at their own pace. And that's something that our audio tours allow people to do. You can wander around the island. If you do a tour from end to end, it might take you an hour, but you can also take time to sit and listen. We've been interpreting archival sources. This is our fight club where we hired um uh an illustrator to actually tell the story of John Perry, who was a champion boxer who spent time on the island in the convict period. Um, rather than just regurgitating the 1858 inquiry, we had an illustrator tell the story. It's a bit chonky because the inquiry is a bit chonky. No one saw anything, but things were happening. And this is just a little sample of one of the films that we've made today.

SPEAKER_07 32:42

Cockatoo Island was home to a booming shipbuilding industry from 1870 to 1992. Thousands of school leavers, often drawn by their love of ships, were apprenticed here during those years, around 500 at its peak, learning trades along with life lessons and making their start in an industry that in many cases employed them for the rest of their working lives. The apprentices had to learn on the job, push through repetitive tasks, and not be afraid to get their hands dirty. Here are the stories of three of those apprentices.

SPEAKER_00 33:19

So that's one of the films that we've made as part of our interpretation on the island. You can currently see it in Billawheeler House. We interviewed some of the apprentices because we know how important they were to the story and of Cockatoo Island. And in terms of living history, there are thousands of people out there working still in some of our heavy industries who got their start on Cockatoo and are proud, um, proud ex-apprentices. What else are we doing? Well, we're looking at more graffiti. We have a lot of communist graffiti on the island, and we're really trying to unwrap what that can tell us about the union movement, about politics, and about communism within that particular trade. So you'll see over there a piece of graffiti on the island saying, read the tribune, and somebody else has um put in white paint above it. Don't read the tribune. Commie lies, they've said. Uh, we've been looking at family audiences as well. How to get more families and kids onto the island. So we've got a little family trail, which has been really um really popular. Working with the Australian Museum, we've made a 3D copy of one of the fossils that was found on the island for the kids to feel and play with. You'll also, as you're passing by on the Ferry See Kids with Semaphore flags, because we're bringing semaphore back, put down your phones, communicate with flags. Um the kids are loving it. And this is going to, this is also being produced in simplified Chinese because that's a market that we're really interested in growing on the island. Um, we're working on Bilowilla House and telling many more stories up there, everything from the convict stories through to stories about the shipbuilding history of the island. Um, and we are doing some work with the Jambana research group at UTS, looking at the First Nations men who were held on Cockatoo Island during the convict period, really trying to get a sense of who they were, why they went there, what kind of conflict they were involved in, and um working with their communities so that we can tell those stories in a way that's respectful and looks at the ongoing impact of the removal of those men from their communities. So that's a piece of work that we should have finished by the end of this year, and that will help us also with some of the work we're doing with education audiences and how we can tell that story respectfully within that audience frame. So I hope to see you on the island soon. Um, easy to get to 20 minutes from Circular Key. Oh, sorry, I just touched peek. Um 20 minutes from Circular Key, eight minutes from uh Rangaroo, jump on a ferry, slide past the harbour, um, the opera house under the harbour bridge, come to the island, spend some time there, have a cup of tea, have a coffee, and have a look at the new offer that we have. Thank you.

Present-Day Stewardship And Interpretation

SPEAKER_01 36:19

Hi everyone, uh thanks for having me here today. Uh so it was pretty exciting to be involved in uh such an interesting project on uh a landmark such as Cockatoo Island. Um my involvement is uh obviously as the chief remote pilot at Sphere Drones. Uh we are the distributor of the yellow scan products there, that's the um the LIDAR units, and we've also got a um a flyability Elios 3 just here as well. Um so having worked at Sphere for around eight years, no, nearly 10 years now, um, it's been really interesting to see the technology grow and change and all of the improvements that make it both more easy to use and and also the the quality of the data improving over this these last years has been amazing to see. Um so just a quick little overview of the um the models that we have on the screen at the moment. So on the left hand side there, we've got the the yellow scan surveyor Ultra, um, which is a LIDAR unit that also has two cameras on it, which um are able to capture oblique imagery. Um so the the unit is able to go and capture LIDAR uh data of you know um environments and provide a bit of an insight as to what's happening under the uh layers of vegetation, etc. So it really allows you to get that extra um insight to what's happening uh beneath the canopy. Uh with the the dual oblique cameras, it also helps quite a lot if you're looking to do colorization of uh complicated structures. Um it helps provide a much more um uh easily interpretable um picture rather than having to rely on just the elevation that you'll see in some of the subsequent slides. Um on the right-hand side here, we've got the yellow scan navigator. So that's a newer release which is designed um to uh conduct a bathymetric scan of an environment. So uh in a similar sort of vein to the way that sonar works, where you send out a pulse, then it comes back, it's a similar sort of principle with with the yellow scan navigator. Um, but one of the sorry, but of course, using light instead of uh sound. One of the the unique features of the yellow scan navigator in particular is that it uses a different wavelength of light, um, which helps it better penetrate water, which is one of the big differences between um the yellow scan Surveyor Ultra and the Navigator there. So being able to penetrate that water more effectively allows you to get a better picture of what's happening underneath the surface. Um, so that's a newer technology, a newer uh green lighter, it's called. And it's uh for a green lighter, it's very compact by comparison to some of the other models that are around. Um, but we had that unit um uh that was being used to scan the environments, uh the water around the island, which is quite exciting. Um, and then the flyability Ilios 3 here on the end, um, that's a drone that's designed for confined space um work. So you can put that into a GPS tonight environment, uh, into a place that where you might not want to put a person and create a scan of that environment. So um with that in mind, uh we've got a quick little snapshot here of some of the technology on day. So we've of course got Kirsten there with the um the Elios 3. So it gives you a bit of a sense of scale. Um so that the drones, uh I believe it's 48 centimeters across. Uh the that means that you can put it into manholes, you know, tunnels, all that sort of stuff. Uh with a collision-tolerant cage, it doesn't necessarily need it, um, but it is nice to have that um bit of extra protection. Um, but that's quite a cool piece of technology in that it has a laser scanner on the back there that you can see, and then it's got 10,000 lens of light on the front that you can control in flight to illuminate the space, uh, and then a camera there on the front to see where you're going. Um, and then you can see the scale of that um that navigator there. So it's a relatively big LiDAR unit by comparison to some of the other LiDAR units around. Um, and then that's underneath the A um a sub-25 kilo multi-rotor drone to get that um imagery that that you'll see in the subsequent slides. Um so Kirsten, your your uh definition of LITR before was perfect. So I'm not going to elaborate on it too much more, but um effectively, as as she said, the um light detection and ranging, so it's that sonar kind of comparison, but with lasers, um it differentiates itself a little bit from um the use of uh photogrammetry. Um so it his some people will be familiar with the use of a drone with cameras to take photos and then create models from that. Um, one of the big advantages of LiDAR is firstly being that it's an active sensor, it's actually sending out that light beam and when it comes back, it times it, and then that's how it calculates where that point is in the in the real world. Um, and that all gets geo reference because it has an antenna as well. But um one of the big advantages is being an active sensor, it means that you have that ability to um to work in environments where there's no where there's no light. So you can actually fly LiDAR um units uh at night and still get a picture of what's going on. Not in color, but you'll still get to see all of the information that's there. So if you've ever looked at um flight radar um on uh on Google and and seen an aircraft flying over doing laps at night in Sydney, it's it's usually LIDAR scanning happening. So um fun little fact there for you. Um this is just a basic um example of um the concept of accuracy and precision, and that's one of the things that the yellow scan units are quite uh well renowned for. Um they're used quite extensively by surveyors and educational institutions around the world because of the fact that they are quite accurate and precise. Um sometimes systems will be accurate but not precise, or they'll be um precise but not accurate, um, or they might not be accurate or precise. Um but yellow scan basically the easiest way to explain it is that the the post-processing that you do in their software is all streamlined, um, and it effectively um creates a nice picture that you can rely on being on the points of the point cloud being exactly where they're supposed to be. Um so probably a little bit too much information for today. Um, in terms of the um the example um that that Brad uh was talking to before of the the barracks there, um so this is an example which uh Sepi will elaborate on a little bit later, but um this is uh on the left-hand side. Oopsie, sorry, uh this is the um the colour, um, the colorized point cloud on the left-hand side there, and this is a false color point cloud on the right hand side. Um but you can see this is where the the advantage of having a camera and a lidar to fly at the same time um makes it more efficient, but also gives you a better quality product at the end of it. Uh so that's just an aerial view of uh of the island. Um, but I've put in a couple of little um kind of points there of of where we were flying the internal uh confined space drone. Uh so there's a chimney on the western side of the island over there. Uh, there's a couple of tunnels here. So there's one that I what's the name of that that tunnel? Um, the the small tunnel, is it the stub tunnel, or is that does it have a more formal name? Um, but then uh we've also got the dog leg tunnel, which extends up from the um the center of the island here up to the right hand side. Um and then we also flew inside um the the um warehouses on the end there as well. So um there's a couple of examples of the sorts of data that we captured inside those environments. So on the left hand side there, uh, you know, flying that drone in a cage up through that uh that chimney stack there, um, being able to get a picture of uh both a visual picture, but but um here we have the uh the laser scan point cloud data. So that's a a 3D model that can be rotated oriented and you know measured, etc. So um quite handy from a structural integrity perspective, um, get an understanding of um yeah, how how it's all faring. Um and this is the the small tunnel on the right hand side here that it's uh closed off to access. Uh but we were able to put the drone inside that environment and get a bit of a scan of that environment. So uh again, it this this uh Elios drone is used quite extensively in underground environments, and there's been some amazing uh scenarios where it's been used in search and rescue applications, and um, yeah, it's it's a a really cool piece of technology. So uh this slide is uh a quick little glimpse of the um the data that you can get out of that yellow scan navigator. Um so that you can see that the the software has classified the data into uh the um the surface of the water in blue, the orange there is the the non-ground points, and the gray is the ground points. Uh so yeah, being able to capture that data and have this have the software um uh interpret that data and and help you understand and and interpret what's going on in the scene um is um yeah, a great um capability that the software's brought. This is a um uh a snapshot of a uh of a demonstration day that we did in Queensland. Um and and I just wanted to highlight the the capability of this technology to be able to penetrate these environments um where you you have a um if you were capturing this data with satellite imagery or with your you know uh a drone with a traditional camera, you wouldn't necessarily be able to understand what's going on underneath that dense vegetation. Um but the light is able to find a way down through all of the beams of light that you're shooting down. Eventually, one will make it to the floor, or multiple will make it to the floor and come back. And so it really gives you that ability to both uh understand what's going on under underneath, but also potentially quantify, you know, for example, biomass of what um the vegetation is like in that environment, you can get an understanding of how much carbon, you know, sequestering you can do with that um that that forest, for example. So um and the cross section there of the building in the middle. Um, so it's it's a really cool piece of technology there. Um, so that's a a 3D model of the entire island. And you can see that um we've we've actually had to uh cut a section out up the top there and on the uh uh where there was a boat that was um hanging around, and we we wanted to give it a bit of a wide berth. Um, but yeah, being able to uh create a digital digital model of the environment is is pretty cool. Uh and there's a quick little snapshot of us um at the end of a very long day, and as Kirsten said, the uh the the military decided to do an impromptu flyby practice for the following day when the when the king was going to be in town. So um, yeah, by the time we got off the island, it was a little bit late in the day. But uh yeah, it was a uh quite a feat to orchestrate and um the the entire team did really well. So it was uh a really cool project to be a part of. So uh, and then um that's another snapshot there of the the island, and I'll hand over to Sepi.

New Tours, Audio, And Community Voices

SPEAKER_02 46:46

Well, good evening, everybody. Um I'm Seppi Lehner, I'm an archaeologist, and I typically work in the Persian Gulf. So this was actually um a fantastic opportunity, I think, for myself and just to work with a group of really awesome people doing really radical things um uh in the field to produce this really remarkable data and its multidisciplinary sort of approach to things in particular is what really attracted attracted me to this project. So um standing in the Sydney Harbor, of course, it's hard to imagine really a more layered place. Um, I think a lot of people have already mentioned that. For those of you who've been there, can certainly attest to the complexity of that landscape, its natural environment complexity, its cultural complexity, political complexity, everything is kind of enmeshed into this place. And it's just a wonderful example, uh, an insular example of so much of what has happened in the Sydney Harbor and its reflection on really global history. Cockatoo Island sits proudly in the Sydney Harbor with a rugged, textured landscape that tells multiple histories all at once. First Nations connections to country and sea, convict era engineering, industrial shipbuilding, and more recent cultural relics and reuses uh like camping and festivals and all of this. Its convict precinct was inscribed, of course, as we learned and all know about, um, as part of the Australian Convict Sites World Heritage Listing. And the island also appears on natural heritage or national heritage records for uniquely preserved dock works and convict-built dry dock remains. So why LIDAR? Elliot has, I think, done a great job of explaining it the true technical um uh capacity and capability of what this technology can do. It allows us a way as archaeologists, as culture historians, as curators, um, as engineers, surveyors, to see um in ways that human eyes and traditional surveys really can't match. LIDAR uses laser pulses to measure that distance from the ground and objects, producing these incredibly dense and accurate three-dimensional point clouds. And for a place like Kakato Island, this becomes a multiplier, right? It boosts precision, preserves fragile features without touch, and reveals patterns that are invisible at the ground level. Now, first um is accuracy and scale. And I think Elliot touched on this really well, where Kakatoo Island, of course, has built features carved from sandstone, shipyard infrastructure, timber, gigantries, and complex topography, all shaped by quarrying and dock construction, land use, erosion. LIDAR captures the exact geometry of all these elements down to centimeter level, really. And that means heritage teams can document the current shape of the dry dock, the steps worn into sandstone by centuries of feet, or the exact rusting geometry of a crane, all measured and preserved um digitally. So when you're planning conservation works or monitoring decay, that level of accuracy really matters. And it reduces guesswork and gives conservators really the data that they need to prioritize interventions um wisely. So second is that it's really non-invasive recording. Um many of Cocktail Island's most significant features are fragile, right? Sandstone quarries, underground silos, uh, interiors of historic buildings that can be harmed by foot traffic sometimes and intrusive investigations. Uh, and LIDAR can be collected from the air or indoors from tripods really at ground level, and it produces a full 3D record of all of this without any physical contact. And this protects the very fabric we want to preserve while delivering a faithful digital twin for study, for education, for virtual access. Modern LiDAR workflows really explicitly championing uh and championed in cultural heritage context because they respect the conservation principle of minimal intervention. Now, third LIDAR reveals hidden and subtle features. So when you view a dense lidar point cloud, like you can see right here, um the uh they derive models like hillshades or slope maps. You can produce a lot of products from this kind of data that help us interpret the landscape, measures tiny traces of human activity as a result, faint terraces, old track lines, shallow depressions where buildings once stood. And it can jump out in ways that aerial photos and casual walkways really don't allow. For Cocktail Island, which has been reworked across eras, with the convict quarrying, dockyard expansions, and wartime remodeling, LIDAR helps archaeologists and historians alike to untangle overlapping episodes of use. It can show you the geometry of an early convict-built structure, partially buried under ladder industrial fill, can reveal subtle modifications to the shoreline caused by 19th century construction. So, fourth, I want to talk about context and integration of this kind of data. A LIDAR data set isn't just a pretty 3D picture, it integrates easily with other kinds of data: historic maps, archival photographs, geotechnical survey, uh, geographic information systems showing all sorts of things from uh from vegetation species to the actual historicity, the historical parameters of a lot of the terrain that you can see today shows usage patterns. It can even help in understanding visitor movement. With these integrations, planners can simulate how a conservation and a conservation treatment might change sight lines across the harbor, or how proposed visitor paths might increase wear on vulnerable sandstone cuttings. Ladder becomes the backbone, the baseline of evidence-based management, a kind of reproducible versioned record that stakeholders from Indigenous custodians, conservators, engineers, and um ultimately with the Harbor Trust kind of can inspect together. Now, fifth, it also allows monitoring and time series analyses. If you really want to get hardcore, um heritage sites change, and they change sometimes really slowly, but inexorably. You envision multiple surveys, hopefully without the king intervening every now and then. Um repeat scans over months or years can reveal erosion rates, can reveal structural settlement or corrosion progress on metalwork. That means early detection. So spotting a shifting lintel before it fails, or detect the slow collapse of mortar in a wall face. For Cocktail Island, where weather, salt, air, and visitor use combine to pressure structures, periodic lighter monitoring gives managers a clear and defensible plan for maintenance and funding applications. And it's really not that expensive a technique to use. Sixth, and this will be my last couple of little points here, is access and storytelling. Now, part of Cockatoo Island's value of public uh value is public engagement and telling its stories to locals, school groups, and global visitors alike. 3D LIDAR models make immersive experiences possible. So accessible virtual tours for those who can't visit, augmented reality overlays for on-site interpretation, and animated reconstructions that let people see the island in its 1840s convict configuration, or as indeed as a bustling mid-century dockyard. So practicalities, of course, matter too. Drone-mounted LIDAR systems now make a collection of small islands like Kakato Island fast and really cost effective. They can cover complex vertical facades and interiors and do a whole host of things. And this efficiency frees up budget, um, it allows community consultation at a lot of different levels and really aids in interpretation, which is what we're really interested in. Um, so what's the takeaway in the end? Kakato Island is a palimpsest of histories. It's an island shaped by hands, industry, and the sea. Lilar gives us that means to read that palumcest more clearly and carefully, really than ever before, and to measure with confidence, to monitor with foresight and share with this kind of imagination, which we're really, really keen to progress. So whether you're a conservator checking sandstone decay or an archaeologist mapping hidden features, a planner balancing access and preservation, and a teacher creating a virtual field trip, LIDAR is really that lever that lifts Cockatoo Island stories into a clearer view while helping to protect them. Thanks.

Family Programs And First Nations Partnerships

SPEAKER_05 55:57

Thanks very much to our speakers. I'd like to invite them to come to the front. Um, and we'll I'll start off with a few questions uh to the team and then we'll open it up, we'll open it up to the floor. So I guess Zebi's really sort of started us off with his lot his um his talk, but I'm gonna I'll I'll kind of continue on on that theme of my first question, which is to ask Meredith and Brahmad, you know, they're both curators with a a lot of experience in interpreting the past for audiences, visiting a site like Hokkertu and other sites. I mean, I guess in response to Sepi's talk or your own thoughts, you know, what potential you see for this kind of technology, you know, that that perhaps can't be done in other ways or could interface with you know humans in storytelling. Um maybe maybe Nerd, if I if I ask you first.

SPEAKER_00 56:52

I think um the work that we've been doing in partnership with you and with Elliot allows us to see the island from a very different perspective. Not only, you know, with Harbour Trust, we take our responsibility for looking after our buildings, really. Um that's something that we are really careful about, gives us an opportunity to view the buildings from a different perspective, but also in terms of um allowing public access to some of the spaces that, to be honest, you're never going to be able to go into. So tunnels that run under docks, some of the really delicate parts of the island. This technology allows us to share that for people to see what is happening in it and also to understand better some of the processes of the island, like how do you empty a dock? Well, there's all these tunnels there, but you can't go in them because they're dangerous. But um that little that little um three, or as I like to call it, baby drone. You I call it bat drone because it can just go into places where there's absolutely no Wi-Fi, no technology. I've got no idea how it flies or why it flies, but it does. And it gives you this wonderful um image of a place that I've never been able to go into, and the public will never be able to go into. So it just allows us to share a little bit more of our story of the island. So that's what I've really enjoyed about the work that we've been doing together.

SPEAKER_06 58:20

Yeah, I agree with with everything you you've you've said. I mean, I still did writing with a thumbnail dipped in tar. I'm so you know, this sort of technology is just extraordinary. And um uh, you know, as soon as I saw that thing go up the up the uh the smokestack at the end of the powerhouse, I I um uh was reminded of what an idiot I was trying to climb up the interior of one at the Cunderdon pumping station 40 years ago. And uh so now you can do it without risking life and limb. Very it was very, very impressive. And as you say, uh it being a tool for monitoring the deterioration of a site, and I think is really uh uh a fabulous use of of the technology.

SPEAKER_05 59:06

I don't know if um would you like to add anything, Sefi or Ellie?

SPEAKER_01 59:10

Um I mean, I I think you kind of alluded to it there, Brad. Part of the um the advantage of these tools is that they do allow the collection of data, which is more robust and more accurate and high detail than it's ever been. And so um it really does allow you to do it in a really effective and efficient way while staying in the comfort of your your office. Uh uh at some points now, you know, like um the one of the big things that Sphere Drones is working on is a trailer that's designed to deploy a drone in a box from a remote environment. And, you know, I can see it being something where in future, you know, historic sites have the ability to have uh a drone that can be deployed on a site and go and conduct, you know, daily or weekly scans of an environment to, you know, just as you say, be able to create that time series and you know, get more data than you've ever got before. So I think. It's a pretty exciting time to be working with the technology.

SPEAKER_06 1:00:04

It reminded me on Monday at the ANZAC Memorial, water was the theme for History Week. And we just had a model submarine from the Great War donated to us. And we've been searching for the wreck of AE1 for 103 years, and the 35 men who died in her. And one of these submersible drones found it within 20 hours. Just extraordinary that this wreck that's now a gazetted war grave had been missing for 103 years. And this technology is just opening potential that we just couldn't have imagined.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:48

I'll just uh just say something really quick on this, too, is that this kind of technology, of course, has been around for a little while. But what's novel to a lot of this is its miniaturization. And in a in a lot of ways, because of that, it's it's democratization so that a lot of different people can use it. Um, previously to a flight system like we have here on my right-hand side with this kind of drone, is uh you've had to have flown a system like this on an airplane. And imagine the permissions to be able to do that at low altitude and all this. Now we can do this with really, well, lots of regulations that go on and involved in product in flying something like this in the harbor, but nevertheless, it's it's doable. And uh and that has allowed and driven a lot of new kinds of research all over the world as a result. It's really quite an exciting place to be.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:36

I don't know. I I'll just add um to that, you know, uh, as an old-fashioned archival historian, you know, the importance of bringing these technologies together with the human stories on the island. You know, I was in um Western Sydney Archives uh on a on a field trip with my colleagues a couple of weeks ago, reading the records from the island and discovering the story of a of a young boy whose parents were writing to the authorities to try and get him back off the um one of the one of the ships, the Vernon, uh word alongside the island in 1871. So I wondered if I might ask you to reflect on some of the ways in which humans and machines can interface to actually tell those stories so that we are using multiplicities of of techniques. Um if you have any thoughts on that.

Why LiDAR And How It Works

SPEAKER_02 1:02:29

Uh yeah. So I mean, so robotics and let's say the humanities more broadly is quickly becoming more and more of an intertwined sort of space. And I think that um what we're gonna be seeing is a lot more innovations in this, in this, in these kinds of technologies, um, where lots of different kinds of sensors are gonna be made available that are gonna go beyond even this sort of 3D modeling of things. There's gonna be whole new things that are already available on, like the Mars rover, for example, and areas that are being innovated in space industries that are coming into our spaces, um, hyperspectral analyses, chemical analyses that result from that sort of thing that you can acquire remotely are gonna again dramatically um uh change what we do. And I'm uh I just love being and seeing that happening before our eyes and being a part of that um as tangential as it does seem sometimes. But being a part of that, nevertheless, it's great.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:32

Well, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:33

I was just gonna say, I think ultimately um, you know, the these um drones and payloads and everything, effectively they're they're tools for collection of data. And at the end of the day, the data and the interpretation of that data is the important part. And so the more data that you have, the better you can interpret, and the more aspects that you can consider things from that you might not have considered before. So I think, as you say, that's that's part of where you know this technology becoming more and more accessible and more um affordable in some instances, um, you know, easily deployable. Um, you know, I remember uh being in the industry for a few years, seeing the the way that the technology has just become more and more user-friendly and intuitive and safer to operate, you know, like all of the the features that we have on this drone allow you to actually operate in environments where previously you'd be dealing with um magnetic interference or you know obstacles in the environment, environment might prevent you from being able to, you know, get too close to things. And so, yeah, having those extra protections is a nice aspect of the that too.

SPEAKER_06 1:04:33

But yeah, I I wonder what's whether there's any evidence of the Vernon on the on the floor around the the harbour. The the the boy you were talking about was instructed by a bloke named James Gorman, uh, who's buried in Leichhart, but 170 years ago this week he earned the Victoria Cross in the Crimea. And uh so sort of trying to bring all of that together. He lost a leg at Sevastopol 170 years ago next week. Um, and and the students on the Vernon loved him. Um and uh he lived out the rest of his life, uh, raised three daughters in Norton Street and Lycart. So I think there's there's quite extraordinary to bring all of those stories together.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:18

Yeah, it really speaks to the way in which the island connects the local and the global um and various different aspects of Australia's past. I see it as a kind of microcosm for so many different stories uh about our country and beyond. Um I might just ask one final question, um, particularly perhaps to uh Elliot and Sepi. Um, given that the collection of the data, this this great day we had last October is you know the first step. Um if we had more resources, where could we go from here? And I'm not going to um trap the audience and uh have a have a ball at the at the at the door that you can't get out until we've raised the necessary grant money. But you know, where might we go if um if there were more resources with with a project like this?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:03

I mean, I think we achieved quite a lot in quite a short period of time. We were on the island for a day and uh we we spent the night, um, some of us on uh in the in the evening and then um got stuck into it first thing in the morning. But um it was quite a um uh a fast-paced day with a few interruptions and things. And so I think we did a fantastic job to cover it in the time that we had. Um, but you could easily spend, you know, a lot more time going and doing a lot more detail and getting other aspects of the environment. Um, you know, we we had to kind of cherry-pick a little bit because of the somewhat limited time on the day. Um, but you know, we could certainly be putting the the Elios into a bunch of the other environments and you know getting a full detailed picture. And as you as someone said before, you know, being able to create that virtual environment, you could completely layer everything and have all of the different kind of aspects of it internal and external to be able to kind of create that full picture. But um, I think Seppi's probably got a few more thoughts on on what one could do um with more time.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:03

Oh, well, I mean, there's so much that one can do with this data and of course future sort of aspects. But I think in the more immediate term, coming to your point, Elliot, is um what do you, what's the next stage with this kind of data, right? Because there's actually, I mean, of course, so much that we haven't been able to show. Um, and there's an extraordinary amount that we can do. But the obvious next place that we need to go, and we're talking about this right now as we are thinking about different grants and and how to fund larger projects um uh with this kind of data set, is to um in in many ways uh simplify and classify this data and relate it really back to the histories that it's involved in the island, really integrating this point cloud um back to the island uh in a lot of ways. And the way that that that might look like is imagine, for example, uh a kind of a 3D model of a single building in all of its different phases of construction, coding each of those, especially with um from the with with with understanding from historians, from curators, from from people who who have lived and worked um on the island itself, to to bring in and integrate all of those different kinds of data sets together with this. That to me would be a massive win. Uh it'll it would also take some time, but it'd be a massive win. You just start small and you grow uh from that because that I think um is the is the next layer. Because not only can you use that in a sort of museum setting or a visitor setting, but you can use it analytically. There's a lot of really interesting analytical tools that come from when you start bringing and patching together data from all over the place. Um and that's what I think really excites me. And that's a near-term kind of endeavor. Um, far-term endeavor, uh, the sky's the limit. There's so many fun things that that are that are certainly possible. And I'm just to raise again, I mean, the hyperspectral space is something that I would I would love to see done because there's a lot of really cool stuff that could be done on this, on this island.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:05

Thanks thanks, Zeppi. Um, did you want to echo last comment? And then I think we'll throw it open to the floor, Elliot.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:09

I just had another um another thought on the um, so the Elios in particular is quite an interesting one in that it is designed as an industrial inspection and um you know uh assessment tool. And one of the payloads that um that is available for it is a thickness testing tool. So you can actually go and use it and fly up, you know, inside a chimney, for example, and test the thickness of, you know, a metal coating on the inside of that, or you know, inside um, you know, some of the the turbine rooms and things, for example, being able to get um that really detailed understanding of the health of of the environment is a another aspect that really helps you make those informed decisions around how to best protect and preserve the the environment. Um, like you're you were you were all talking about before. But um yeah, the the some of the payloads are quite interesting for these things. But anyway, I'll hand it hand back to you.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:57

Thanks, Elliot. I I think we might um open it up to the floor. We've got time for one or two questions. Um so Craig will take the microphone around. I think there's a question in front here.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:11

Thank you. Um with this 3D mapping uh with the LIDAR, we can learn a lot obviously from the construction of the island, all the different layers we've discussed. But what about the deconstruction? Did we pick up anything through the interpretation of obviously it's a big island once we saw the the illustration of it, but it's been dismantled and augmented over the time. Has there been any things we learned through um analyzing the uh the results and seeing how any changes in that over the time in interpretations?

SPEAKER_02 1:10:40

Uh yeah, it's a um an ongoing process. But imagine um uh one of the things that we didn't show in a lot of detail here is um one of the kind of quick and easy things that you can actually produce from this kind of data set is to um essentially remove everything except the bare earth. And um, well, it's uh there's a quick method, but there's there's there's some manual work with a lot of that. But by revealing the bare earth, what that essentially allows you to do is to get a good baseline understanding of what the topography of the island looks like, and then comparing that to historical records. Because uh you start with a modern baseline, comparing to the historical records, and you can build out this kind of onion of the landscape that it is. And that I think I don't know if that answers your question or not, but that that is one of the things that we're very interested in because being able to understand the island in a sense without the trees and the buildings and and all that kind of to give you that baseline, and it's from that that you can then really build back from the historical archives to see how this modification happened because a lot indeed has happened on this island and it's incredibly complex. And some answers may not just be answerable, but we can, at least with this data, get a baseline. And a LiDAR would be one of the only ways that you could do it.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:56

It was extraordinary for me to watch Sepi press some buttons and suddenly the uh the vegetation disappears, the buildings disappear, you see the the actual island without any of that stuff on it, yeah.

Confined-Space Drones And Bathymetry

SPEAKER_01 1:12:09

And I think as well, like some of the work that Seppi and his team are doing, um, you know, scanning some environments where you do have these really heavily vegetated environments and being able to identify things like rock shelters or you know, um uh like historic structures that, as you said previously, you there's no way that you'd be able to see it from a ground-based or even sometimes like a visual look with a with a satellite image or a a camera might not actually be able to give you that in that detailed information. So being able to peel away those layers and and you know reveal more stories to be uncovered is is yeah, really cool.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:43

I think we have time for one more question, Craig. One more question.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:48

Are there plans to do other um similar studies on other historic sites around Sydney or the nation?

SPEAKER_05 1:12:58

If we had more resources, we'll trap you all in trap you in the room before no one no one's allowed out until uh someone's put their hand in their pocket.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:10

Oh, I don't I don't have a good answer to that. Not that I'm not that I'm aware of. Um it uh it's it's it's completely novel. We've um we've just recently from the University of Sydney of uh have uh built a capacity for this kind of work. Um and this machine has been around the world now a couple of times. Um but coming back to Sydney to to do projects in the harbor, I think it would be awesome. Or around the Sydney area more generally. I think there's a lot of opportunity for that um and a lot of interest as well. And so with a tight um like research proposal and project that we can put together to do something like that, I think there's a lot of scope. Definitely on the way.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:47

We're really grateful to Elliot's team, to Sphere Drones and Yellowstone. They donated their time across, you know, a huge day and all their kit um uh at no cost. Uh otherwise we wouldn't have been able to do the project. So that was that was we're really, really grateful to their um engagement with us.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:03

Totally.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:04

And of course to the Harbor Trust who arranged everything.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:08

So I think that's probably as much as we've got time for. We'd love to do more projects. Uh we'd love to take more questions. I'd just like to say thank you very much to our four speakers if you can join me in thanking them.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:20

Thank you for joining us for this podcast. If you'd like to hear more, subscribe to our series via your favorite streaming platform and join us for our next History Now episode, Call on Screen, Australia's conflict history in film and television. For a full list of History Council cultural partners, along with a list of other podcasts produced by us, please visit our website, HistoryCouncilnsw.org.au forward slash podcasts. I'm Catherine Shirley. Thank you.