The convicts are returning to Sydney Harbour’s UNESCO World Heritage-listed Cockatoo Island this February. The Sydney Harbour Federation Trust and the award-winning Convict Footprints Productions have joined forces to present Convict Footprints on Cockatoo Island – a rollicking 90-minute “living history” adventure through one of Australia’s most extreme and brutal 19th-century penal establishments.
Written by Stephen Hopley and directed by Jerry Retford, Convict Footprints on Cockatoo Island offers a candid, funny, engaging and sometimes confronting insight into another era. Travel back in time to 1852 and join Charles Cowper, parliamentarian and leading advocate for the abolition of transportation to NSW, on his fact-finding investigation of Cockatoo Island’s prison.
Watch Cowper engage in heated debates with the island’s volatile prison superintendant Charles Ormsby and discuss the ongoing struggle to build Sydney’s much-needed dry dock with the urbane Engineer Gother Kerr Mann. Hear about the highs and lows of island life from soldiers and convicts alike. Come face-to-face with the harsh reality of Cockatoo Island’s convict prison. See prisoners hauled out of the infamous solitary confinement cells, be appalled by the living conditions in the stifling and overcrowded barracks and watch a bone-crunching, bare-knuckle fight in the prison courtyard between the famous convict prize-fighters John Perry and Patrick Sinclair.
When: Saturday 25 and Sunday 26 February 2017. 10.00am, 1.30pm & 5.00pm.
Where: Cockatoo Island, Sydney Harbour.
Cost: $55 adult, $45 concession & under 18, $150 family (2 adults, 2 children).
Our media partner Inside History have arranged a 10% discount. Use the code: IHdiscount2017 when booking your tickets.
Contact: (02) 8969 2100
Image: Geoff Magee, courtesy Sydney Harbour Federation Trust.