Ninth Island

A trivia quiz question that crops up now and again is: "How many islands are there in Sydney Harbour?" Then:  "Name them".

I distinctly remember being at one such quiz where the answer for the number was given as nine. The names were, in west to east order, given as: Rodd, Spectacle, Snapper, Cockatoo, Goat, Fort Denison, Garden, Clark, and Shark.

There's a problem or two here. Garden Island is no longer an island. It was joined to the mainland during World War 2. And if you're going to count other islands that are no longer islands, then you've got Berry Island too, Darling and Glebe Islands, and there's Bennelong Point of course, which became the site of a tram depot and later an opera house of some renown. And it seems that Spectacle Island used to be two islands, but got joined into one. Plus near Middle Head, there's Sow and Pigs Reef, which becomes an island during low tide.

Ninth Island, by the way, is the name of a rather good brand of wines from Northern Tasmania. I particularly recommend the pinot noir. I'd had an idea the name may have been somehow linked to my nine (or eight, or 12, or 13, or 14 or whatever) islands in Sydney Harbour. But no, it's

named after Ninth Island, in the Waterhouse Group in Bass Strait, not far from the vineyard.

So here's my Sydney Harbour Island quiz: name the seven that are pictured in this post, in the order that they're pictured.


A useful little guide to the islands, and how to get to them, is put out by the Australian Society for History and Technology. See here: http://ashet.org.au/images/All-islands.pdf