Dawes Point Battery

The Dawes Point Battery is an historical fortification that was located adjacent to the southern pylon of the Sydney Harbour Bridge at Dawes Point, New South Wales, Australia.HistoryThe first known building to be constructed on the site of Point Maskelyne was an observatory constructed in early 1788 by Lieutenant William Dawes.A powder magazine was installed in 1789 followed by the Battery in 1791. The first guns came from, which had wrecked at Norfolk Island the year before. A dispute in 1790 between Spain and Britain, leading to fear of a Spanish attack, motivated the project.In 1798, the Governor's concerns regarding the arrival of schooner prompted defensive measures at the Battery. George Barney, one of Australia’s most important colonial engineers of the mid-19th century, oversaw the construction. The site had previously been used as a cemetery for prisoners executed at Sydney Gaol .In 1810 Napoleon ordered the French forces at Île de France to launch an attack on Sydney. However, but the captured the island, forestalling any attack. During the Napoleonic War French and Spanish ships captured in the Pacific Ocean and brought into Sydney harbour received salutes from the battery.The fort was expanded substantially in 1819 when Governor Lachlan Macquarie ordered convict Francis Greenway, who was an architect, to design and construct improvements. The result was a semicircular battery, supported by a new, decorative castellated guardhouse built on the site of the 1780 powder magazine, which now provided the guardhouse's basement. The elaborate defences were meant to appear threatening to ships sailing into Sydney Harbour. In that same year sandstone blocks were quarried on site at Dawes Point Park for the construction of the fort.