Ghosts and grime

Our water taxi bumps and thuds across the harbour. We seem to be heading for the grinning gateway mouth of Luna Park, Sydney's famous fairground. Instead, we swing left and Cockatoo Island looms into view. Nobody could describe the place as scenic. If you want paradise, try Fiji.

Despite its name, Cockatoo Island is all red brick and hard angles. As we step ashore we see sandy-coloured Alsatians watching from one barracks-like building. 'Are there ghosts?' asks a little girl. I can see only convict-built sandstone tunnels sculpted from the rock, grain silos, smoke stacks, cranes, water towers and the occasional flying fox.

But an old sea dog reputedly haunts one tunnel, according to our guide. A security guard on his first night was puzzled when his dog's hackles rose and it refused to enter one of the buildings. So he went in alone. Suddenly, he heard footsteps thumping towards him. He looked up and saw ... nobody. He ran for his life and headed back where we'd come from - the bright lights of Circular Quay - never to return.

An Englishwoman in our group says ghosts appear only to those who believe in them, and that they usually stand on the spot where they died. So, if the ground is raised by new flooring, for example, it cuts them off at the knees, or wherever.

Accentuating the spooky mood, our guide tells a series of gory and sometimes gross tales about the wretches who graced Cockatoo Island. In my mind, they merge into a single nightmare. It contains lice, excrement, despair and a cat whose tail a convict cut off at the end so he could use it as a pen to write his release plea on the back of his shirt. It contains wayward women, desperados eating snakes, and thugs who carried out the worst crimes you can imagine. It includes dockers performing their ablutions over the faecal soup that the water became, attracting sharks.

This island is the dark side of good-time Sydney. Remaining in its natural (read snake-infested) state until 1839, it was at one stage a quarry employing convict labour, and one of the colony's major prisons.