Georges Head Battery

Resting on one of Sydney, Australia’s “Heads,” as various points along the Sydney harbor are called, is the Georges Head Battery, a sprawling concrete military fortification that now sits abandoned.

Built in the late 1800’s after a much earlier (and smaller) gun placement had sat on the site, the much larger Georges Head Battery was to be an impenetrable bulwark. The exterior of the fortress was outfitted with a quartet of massive guns that had been retrofitted and transported to the site by simply rolling the giant barrels across the country over a series of months. Unfortunately when the guns were installed, they were done so in seeming haste, placing the weapons at such angles that they were likely to fire on one another. Eventually, large piles of dirt placed in the firing lines between the guns so that they no longer posed a threat to each other. The fortress was also built with a network of concrete tunnels running beneath the outer defenses.

The site never saw any action during its lifetime but was repurposed a number of times overt the years, used for storage and as a hospital space. However, the battery was finally decommissioned in 2002.

Today the fortress is maintained by a private group and the grounds are open to the public. Now the battery mainly protects the shoreline park from being uninteresting.