This cache is at the Kangaroo Battery, also known as the Bellerive Fort above Kangaroo Bluff.
The panoramic views of Hobart are great from here. Kids will love exploring this site.
There are walls, large gun emplacements, two extant guns (canons), and a warren of trenches and tunnels (all subterranean tunnels and rooms are locked from public access but you can still see through the bars if you bring a torch).
Layout of the battery
The pentagonal form of hte battery fitted snugly into the curvature of the bluff. The ditch, underground passages and chambers were cut out from solid stone and faced with masonry. The excavated stone was cut into 0.6m blocks to build the battery. The fort is at its widest 146m where two caponiers project into the ditch. Several loopholes slit into these stone casements allowed riflefire along the whole length of the ditch to repel any assault by a land party.
Access to caponiers was by iron hatchway. Open passageways were cut into the rock 3m below the ramparts, to connect the gun emplacements on both sides of the fort.
These led to underground magazines, stores, lamp room, well, and loading galleries. Speaking tubes were set into the walls for communication purposes
Building the battery
In 1836, it was thought that mutually supporting batteries on both sides of the Derwent could turn Hobart Town into a fortress.
Kangaroo Point, with its steep bluff, was an ideal site located on the eastern shore. At the close of 1840, arrangements were made to purchase the land. It took almost forty years of re-cast plans, financial delays and further land purchases before Capt. E. Tudor Boddam could lay out the battery.
Excavations commenced in September 1880 in accord with plans provided by Col. P. H. Scratchley, a British military engineer in charge of defences for the Australasian colonies. Work was brought to a halt in April 1881, due to excessive costs. At the end of May, 1883, Patrick Cronly was contracted for the erection of the fortifications in association with the Public Works Department. The work was supervised by the Staff Officer (Boddam) and completed in October 1884. The cost was approximately $16300, at a time when labourers received 50 cents per day.
In mid-1885, public trespass resulted in the ditch being deepened, walls raised a further course, and broken glass set in mortar on top of the wall. A fence was built around the fort (as a safety measure) after a nine-year old boy drowned in the water-filled ditch in November 1885.
From obsolete fort to Historic Site
After federation, the battery passed into the control of the Commonwealth, but had little use. In the 1920s, the large guns were ordered to be buried, and doorways bricked up. Other work was completed in June 1930 just prior to the Clarence Council being granted permissive occupancy of the area as a public park.
When the battery was disposed of as obsolete in 1961, the Clarence Commission bought the road frontage and the Scenery Preservation Board acquired the land containing most of the battery. The fort subsequently became a Historic Site under the National Parks and Wildlife Act, and is now under the management of the Department of Parks, Wildlife and Heritage.
Please see attached in the image gallery a couple of images of the subterranean chambers (barred from public access). I was lucky enough to get a tour of these areas as part of the Open House Hobart initiative which runs each November.
Russians?
This cache is a tribute to GCM2N6 ("The Russians are Coming") which has been archived. It is NOT at the original location, but it is nearby.
This is a reference to two Russian warships arriving in the Derwent River in 1873. The area at the time was a Colony of Britain, who were at war with Russia a short time before in the caucuses. This prompted the coastal defence construction.