Don’t follow the crowd: Sydney’s most unusual overnight stays

We help you find a unique overnight stay in Sydney. Photo / Destination NSW
An island prison, an old quarantine station and an immersive night at the zoo provide a unique alternative to cookie-cutter hotels in Australia’s harbour city, writes Catherine Best.
Waking to the merry chortle of a magpie, I peel back the canvas on our abode. Daylight streams in, illuminating the water as a trio of rowboats glide past, their capped occupants all puffed cheeks and glistening biceps. It’s barely 7am, yet Sydney Harbour is abuzz. And we’re in the thick of the action, having spent the night in a pre-erected tent a kangaroo hop from the water.
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We’re on Cockatoo Island/Wareamah — the largest island in Sydney Harbour, home to a World Heritage-listed former convict prison. The glam-seekers can have their five-star hotels because this stay — in the heart of the harbour — trumps them all for location, atmosphere and historic distinction.
We arrive on the island after a 20-minute ferry ride from Circular Quay, a transit hub straddled by the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. First impressions are of an industrial ghost town. Rusting cranes (there are 17), gargantuan corrugated-iron sheds, concrete water towers and a boiler chimney occupy prime Sydney waterfront. A runway-like swath of pavement dominates the island’s eastern flank, fringed by a sheer 17m-high sandstone cliff. Crowning the upper settlement are the stately former superintendent’s residence and convict barracks, ringed by a low-lying chain of docks, slipways and wharfs — annexed and gouged at the shoreline. Almost 185 years of occupation — first as a penal settlement from 1839, then as a shipbuilding and maintenance complex until 1991 — have moulded the island’s footprint.
The latest incarnation is the campground, an oasis of green lawn and native flowering shrubs on the north side of the island, dotted with tents. Ours is a Deluxe Waterfront dome nestled between fig trees, and comes with two raised stretcher beds, camp chair recliners, linen, lantern and a wooden bedside table that doubles as a cool box. We’ve organised a barbecue pack (the two on-site cafes are closed in the evenings) and cook dinner in the large al fresco camp kitchen. Afterwards, we toast marshmallows by the communal firepit before checking out a movie playing in the former ship design building.
Making sense of the pastiche of buildings and infrastructure is best accomplished on a tour with a Harbour Trust guide. We join Nicole Leong and explore the isolation cells (unearthed in 2009) and barracks where up to 500 recidivist convicts were sardined in deplorable conditions. We tiptoe along a vertiginous clifftop gantry, past convict-built grain silos carved into the sandstone, and down a staircase to the cavernous Turbine Shop, whose dimensions resemble an aircraft hangar built for triple-decker jumbos. Walking through the Dog-Leg Tunnel, a north-to-east passage built as a bomb shelter in WW II, gives us tingles.
At the mouth of Sydney Harbour, near Manly, we find another Harbour Trust property, where overnight stays come in heritage buildings with a storied past — and maybe even a ghost. The Quarantine Station precinct, now known as Q Station, was Australia’s longest continuously operating quarantine facility from 1832 to 1984. On a steep hillside, sandwiched between military fortifications and the shimmering curve of Quarantine Beach, sit 67 buildings that served as Australia’s first line of defence against infectious diseases — including smallpox and the Spanish flu — where ships were routinely intercepted and passengers detained.
Some travellers spent three months quarantining here. Others never left (there are 572 people buried in three cemeteries). Today, the site, part of Sydney Harbour National Park, offers accommodation and function spaces across a suite of preserved and refurbished cottages and quarantine lodgings.
We check in to one of the former staff cottages — a comfortable three-bedroom, two-bathroom red-brick house on a hill with sweeping views overlooking the harbour. It’s late August, but winter has abandoned Sydney and we take the 234 steps (in place of the old funicular) down to the beach for a brisk swim. At the end of the wharf, the site of the original luggage shed that now serves as a museum and visitor centre, there’s a pop-up Finnish wood-fired sauna where bather-clad guests emerge pink and dewy before diving into the sea.
In the evening, we dine at the waterfront Boilerhouse Kitchen and Bar, sitting at a lamp-lit table on the mezzanine level of the century-old brick power station building. The prawn orecchiette is silky and flavour packed, rivalled only by the juicy charred fingers of Angus beef striploin. But the highlight of our stay is the history tour, led by ebullient guide of 27 years Martin Brennan. The tour starts by the wharf where more than 1600 inscriptions have been etched into the foot of the sandstone cliff face, the earliest dated 1835. We see the autoclaves, cast-iron steam chambers used for sterilising luggage; stand in the steam inhalation room; and walk through the showers, where arrivals were made to wash in a solution of hot water and carbolic acid. On an adjacent hilltop, we tour the hospital and Spanish flu isolation ward, strategically positioned to catch the ocean breeze. The dying never had views so good.
Midway between Q Station and Cockatoo Island on the northern side of Sydney Harbour, the animals, too, have won the panorama jackpot. If there’s a city zoo with a more exquisite setting than Taronga (12 minutes by ferry from the CBD), I’m yet to find it. That you can stay here, in a luxurious harbour-view room overlooking the bridge and the Opera House, makes Taronga Zoo a one-of-a-kind overnight experience.
Opened in 2019, the Wildlife Retreat at Taronga sensitively blends 62 guest rooms into a living wildlife habitat on the edge of the harbour. Ours peers into a koala enclosure and the Sanctuary, an animal reserve exclusive to overnight guests and patrolled by roaming echidnas, wallabies and fat Cape Barren geese. In the morning, we wake to Matteo the koala, sleeping in the fork of a gum tree outside our window, and I’m sure I heard the grunting call of a seal overnight. The rooms — thoughtfully styled with timber finishes and natural colours — have sliding doors that open to a glass balustrade, giving the illusion of an outdoor balcony.
In Me-Gal restaurant (a Cammeraigal word for “tears”, referencing the harbour), meals are served in an elliptical space of soaring floor-to-ceiling glass. Sunsets are outrageously good, but the jury’s out on which is better — the restaurant or the ambience on the lobby balcony, accompanied by birdsong.
A stay at the retreat is foremost about the animals, and exclusive tours ensure guests have VIP access to the wildlife. In an afternoon guided walk through the Sanctuary, we hold still as echidnas with whipper-snipper tongues sniff at our shoes. We join an after-dark tour and spy a capybara and binturong going about their nocturnal musings. In the morning, we return before opening and have the bird aviary — the second largest in the Southern Hemisphere — all to ourselves, as 350 birds flit and screech around us.
All profits from Taronga Zoo are put back into wildlife conservation. But these encounters — being up close with the animals after hours — feel like experiences money can’t buy.
GETTING THERE
Fly non-stop from Auckland to Sydney with Air NZ, Qantas and Jetstar.
DETAILS
Deluxe waterfront tents on Cockatoo Island cost from AU$155 (NZ$169) a night for two guests. Rooms at Q station start from AU$199 (NZ$217) a night. Overnight experiences at Wildlife Retreat at Taronga cost from AU$849 (NZ$926) for two including breakfast, dinner and a Sanctuary tour. All three properties are accessible via public ferry from Circular Quay.
sydney.com
The writer was a guest of Cockatoo Island, Q Station and Wildlife Retreat at Taronga.