Maritime and colonial expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly the opening up of Sperm whaling, saw a marked increase in the number of ships in southern seas. With French, Russian, American and Spanish vessels all calling in at the small British colony set up at Port Jackson in Australia it is not surprising to find they felt increasingly nervous about their security.

One measure taken by the Sydney residents was the setting up of fortifications at points on both sides of the port Sydney to address any threat of invasion . These were, Dawes Battery (at what was then known as Maskelyne Point, after the Astronomer Royal, later Dawes Point), Cattle Point, (later Fort Macquarie and still later Benelong Point, the site of the Opera House) and the less well known Fort Phillip.

Fort Phillip was commissioned in 1804 by Governor Philip Gidley King partly as a response to external threats and partly due to the internal unrest caused by the convict uprising at Castle Hill in May of that year". Observatory Hill was the chosen site for the fort as it was the highest point above the colony, affording commanding views of the Harbour approaches, the surrounding country, and of the entire town below. Work however appears to have been both slow and expensive and by August 1806 it had already cost 1909 pounds; making it the most expensive building listed at almost twice the cost of the next on the list, a brewery at Parramatta .

August 1806 was also when King was replaced by Governor William Bligh who initiated a number of new alterations to the fort's design. A year later the colonial Artillery Officer and Engineer, Minchin, complained to King, now back in England, that none of these changes were "for the better". Minchin went on to say "I understand the foundation stone, on which your name is, as the then Governor, is to be taken out and substituted."

According to Ashley Brown who completed a conservation plan on the site in 1989 this order may have indeed been carried out as, "… there has been a single stone missing from the North-Eastern corner of the ramparts where such a foundation stone might have been placed for at least 80 years, with the hole having been carefully plastered over." Bligh appears to have had as much success as his predecessor in completing the project and in 1810 the supervision of the work was taken over by the Bligh's replacement, Governor Macquarie. While the new Governor was keen to complete the Fort, this project, along with other public works, was thwarted by Commissioner J T Bigge. One of his main complaints about Macquarie was his unnecessarily extravagance in "prematurely introducing into a new colony a taste for ornamental and expensive tastes of building".

Even after all the time and money expended on the project an impressive defensive fortification failed to materialise on Observatory Hill. Instead the project was canned and the completed part of the structure, its external wall, eventually formed the foundation for the Signal Station which built on the site in the 1830s.

Ashisha Cunnigham and Geoff Barker, Curatorial, September, 2008

References
'List of Port Signals in 1853', published in Moore's Almanac and Handbook for NSW, cited in Ashley Brown, A Conservation Plan for Fort Phillip Signal Station Observatory Hill Sydney, 1989

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