The Harbour
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Sydney Harbour. I know what it looks like.
I know what it feels like. Now with this wonderful book,
I know its story. This book is a joy to read. And essential for anyone who loves Sydney Harbour . . . and who doesn’t?
Ken Done
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Introduction Fare forward, paddler
1 Following Henry: Up Parramatta River
2 Down Parramatta River
3 Gladesville Bridge to Woolwich (via Cockatoo Island)
4 Lane Cove River
5 Greenwich to Lavender Bay
6 Milsons Point and the Bridge
7 Kirribilli to Middle Head
8 Middle Harbour
9 North Harbour and Manly to North Head
10 Between the Heads
11 South Head to Darling Point
12 Rushcutters Bay to the Opera House
13 Bennelong Point to Barangaroo
14 Darling Harbour to Goat Island
15 From Mort Bay back to Henry
Map
Photographs
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Endnotes
Select Bibliography
Index
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers
T.S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’,
Four Quartets
For William, Tom and Jo – my harbour
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Section
1 The journey’s beginning and end. The memorial to champion sculler Henry Searle, rising out of Parramatta River.
2 A shipwreck in Homebush Bay carries a cargo of mangroves.
3 Shells along the shoreline at Cabarita, Parramatta River.
4 An arc of concrete: Gladesville Bridge.
5 Spanning the water and touching the sky: Sydney Harbour Bridge and Blues Point Tower.
6 The tourist photo essentials: the Bridge, the Opera House and Luna Park, as seen from Lavender Bay.
7 The other side of an icon: Sydney Harbour Bridge, from below.
8 Securing a slice of waterfront real estate for New Year’s Eve: McMahons Point.
Section 2
1 HMAS Sydney Memorial at Bradleys Head, and in the distance North and South heads guard the harbour entrance.
2 Reflections of another time: an old explosives store, Bantry Bay, Middle Harbour.
3 A city of sails at sunset: twilight racing on the harbour.
4 Harbour life and death: the former Quarantine Station’s Third Cemetery on North Head.
5 Escape from high-density living: stacks of kayaks below apartment blocks at Elizabeth Bay.
6 Famous face of the harbour: Sydney Opera House.
7 Layers of history, as seen from Nawi Cove, Barangaroo.
8 Early-morning harbour view from Pulbah Raider.
INTRODUCTION
FARE FORWARD, PADDLER
EVERYONE KNOWS Sydney Harbour. At least, we think we do.
So much of the globe is covered in water, about 71 per cent. What is cupped beneath the 5000 hectares of Sydney Harbour’s surface is some of the most famous water in the world.
Everyone can see the harbour, whether we have ever been to Sydney or not. With just a word or two, the harbour floats into our mind’s eye. The Bridge. The Opera House. Fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Flotillas on Australia Day. When we conjure up those mental images, we feel a sense of belonging, if we live in Sydney, and longing and desire, if we don’t. No matter who we are or where we’re from, we picture the harbour, and we feel good.
The harbour also makes us feel safe. It has held the promise of shelter since James Cook sighted the harbour’s entrance in 1770. Not that he entered it. Cook had just sailed out of Botany Bay, which he considered ‘safe and commodious’, so he was not about to steer HM Bark Endeavour left again. However, as he sailed past the great sandstone headlands that marked the entrance, he did note that Endeavour was ‘about 2 or 3 Miles from the land and abreast of a Bay or Harbour wherein there apperd to be safe anchorage which I call’d Port Jackson’.
Eighteen years later, Captain Arthur Phillip used that reference and passed between the Heads seeking more than safe anchorage; he wanted to find somewhere to build a penal settlement. He had led the First Fleet to the new land, and for its cargo of convicts, the harbour was meant to be about banishment and confinement half a world and an eight-month voyage away from Britain. Yet the harbour quickly came to be seen as holding the potential for escape – physically for a few, and metaphorically from their past for many. Rather than isolate them from their origins, the harbour connected these convicts with possibilities and potential. For the officers on board those eleven ships, the harbour offered natural protection like no other waterway they had sailed into. They were rhapsodic in their descriptions, beginning the unbroken tradition of visitors lavishing praise on Sydney Harbour.
‘Port Jackson, I believe to be, without exception, the finest and most extensive harbour in the universe, and at the same time the most secure, being safe from all the winds that blow,’ the expedition’s chief surgeon, John White, noted. White’s fellow officer and surgeon George Worgan thought the harbour was unequalled in its ‘Spaciousness and Safety’ and, what’s more, ‘exhibits a Variety of Romantic Views, all thrown together into sweet Confusion by the careless hand of Nature’. The man entrusted with starting a colony predominantly populated by criminals and cast-offs on the furthest edge of the Empire was less prosaic but no less impressed in his description of the harbour. From his flimsy base by the water, Arthur Phillip penned some of the earliest letters from Sydney. He sent a dispatch to the man after whom he had named the cove that cradled the colony, Lord Sydney. He told the Home Secretary back in London of the ‘satisfaction of finding the finest harbour in the world’. Phillip also wrote to the Marquis of Lansdowne about five months after arriving. That letter is held in the archives of the Mitchell Library, less than a kilometre from where Phillip dropped anchor to begin this extraordinary social experiment. Louise Anemaat, a senior curator at the library, showed me the letter. In a florid font, Phillip explained why he had decided to found the colony on the shore of Sydney Cove.
‘Botany bay, offerd no Security for large Ships,’ he wrote. ‘Here a Thousand Sail of the Line may ride in the most perfect Security.’ Reading those words on the fragile paper, I could have run my finger across the reason why Sydney came to be where it is. I could have touched the words of the founding Governor who had so much belief in what the colony could become. What some considered a dumping ground for Britain’s unwanted, he saw as a most valuable acquisition for the Empire, and he envisaged a great city by the water. In no small way, the harbour carried Phillip’s hopes and ambitions.
The harbour continued to play that role from the 18th century through the 19th and well into the 20th century, carrying ships filled with the hopeful, the ambitious, the weak and the war-weary from the Old World and ruined empires to the wharves of a fresh beginning. Sydney may not have a Statue of Liberty at the mouth of its harbour, or any great proclamations of ‘Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore’, but the t
opography articulates that kind of welcome as clearly and as profoundly. Once an immigrant or a refugee passed between the sentinel sandstone bluffs at the harbour’s entrance, they would have had their first inkling of having at last found shelter. In the process, the harbour helped create a new country. It carried to the shores the raw materials for building a nation.
Yet there have also been fears about who, and what, else would come through the Heads into the harbour. Threats, real and imagined, have always been in the water. Concerns about foreign powers attacking from the sea have shaped – and helped preserve – the harbour’s headlands, while the fear of being eaten by sharks has led to stretches of the shoreline being trussed and stitched in netting.
The harbour also encourages us to imagine possibilities. Just as it has carried ships into the city’s heart, the harbour has coaxed vessels out into the world. Those departing ships have been loaded with exports manufactured and nurtured in Australia, from sheep and wheat to brilliant and creative minds seeking further education or simply a great adventure. The quest for adventure is inscribed on the harbour just about every day, whether it is the helter skelter of skiffs inhaling the north-easterlies on summer afternoons, the sleek yachts of the Sydney to Hobart fleet dashing towards the sea each Boxing Day, or the floating hotels in the shape of cruise ships.
The harbour has not just carried the fortunes of a continent in and out of the Heads, it has also supplied vast wealth to many. Entrepreneurs have seen financial opportunity in the harbour. They always have. The harbour was considered an extraordinary asset, to transport products to the wharves, to cradle industries on its shores, or to swallow all the waste that could be dumped and discharged into it. And it wasn’t just the industrialists sullying the water; everyone was. For many years, it was treated as one big sewage outlet. The city was poisoning the very thing it was suckled by. Sydney continued to exploit the harbour, as if believing that anything that went into the water would be washed away. As a result, Sydney Harbour was, for a time, one of the world’s most polluted ports. Changes in regulations and public attitudes to protecting the harbour have stopped a lot of the worst practices. What’s more, it is no longer the ‘working harbour’ it once was. Most cargo ships now berth in other ports along the coast, and the factories have been largely removed from the shoreline, making way for yet more residential and office developments. But that doesn’t mean Sydney Harbour is now as clean and healthy as its beautiful face would have you believe. Pollution continues to make its way into the water, and the harbour remains scarred by decades of abuse, even if we can’t see it, or choose not to.
To Sydneysiders, the harbour is beyond compare. Visitors have also deemed it incomparable. As an American preacher and writer floridly declared in 1894, ‘He only belittles and be-dwarfs and demeans Sydney Harbor who compares it to the Bay of Naples or the entrance to Rio Janiero [sic]’. Even so, Sydney Harbour is used as a comparison. Sydharb is an unofficial measurement, based on how much water the harbour holds, which is about 500 gigalitres. Although at high tide, it can hold up to 562 gigalitres of water. Not that anyone really cares about the actual volume; it is the comparison to Sydney Harbour that counts. No matter how big a waterway is in Australia, and there are quite a few larger than Sydney Harbour, spruiking that capacity alone is not impressive enough. Authorities somehow have to state how many Sydney Harbours it can hold.
Yet it is the immeasurable that makes the harbour so special. For something whose body literally slips through our fingers, Sydney Harbour has a tight grip on the heart and soul of the city, and of the nation. We imagine it flowing through our lives, defining not just where we live but who we are. The novelist Robert Louis Stevenson reckoned if an Englishman wished to have a patriotic feeling, it had to be about the sea. For a Sydneysider to experience a similar emotion, it would have to be about the harbour. It fills Sydney people with confidence and pride, and rarely in a quiet way. They love showing off the harbour to visitors. To do that, in many Sydneysiders’ eyes, is to reveal the most attractive feature of themselves. But how Sydneysiders see themselves can be seen as smugness and arrogance by other Australians.
When Melburnians sometimes argue they have superior cafés and a greater commitment to the finer cultural things in life, Sydneysiders can be relied on to dismissively reply, ‘Yes, but we have the harbour’. Which is kind of like saying, ‘So what if you’re smarter? I’m more beautiful’. It is as though having a stunning harbour means a Sydneysider doesn’t have to try in any other way. As Tim Freedman, leader of rock band The Whitlams and charmingly cheeky chronicler of Sydney life, sings, ‘You gotta love this city for its body and not its brain’.
The most seductive bit of the body is, of course, the harbour. It is the part people lust over. They become obsessed with just being close to it. For that pleasure, you must pay dearly. A harbour view, no matter how thinly sliced, can cost the purchaser millions of dollars. The harbour is the Lorelei of Sydney. Its song is so intoxicating that many people sail closer and closer to the wind just to have a glimpse of its beauty, until, finally, some are smashed onto the rocks of financial ruin. Still, a few get to buy the rocks and build a mansion on top of them. Many Sydneysiders value not just their home but the worth of themselves by their proximity to, and view of, the harbour. And quite a few sell chunks of their own soul to buy into the dream and move as close as they can to the holy grail of Sydney property ownership: water frontage. Even when more and more people are crammed into phenomenally expensive housing and commercial developments on waterfront land reimagined and reclaimed, shrinking the shoreline, somehow the harbour responds by seeming not smaller and besmirched but serenely beautiful and filled with endless possibility. No matter what we do to its foreshores, or to the water quality, the harbour itself delivers on the ridiculous promises of real estate marketing slogans of living a dream. Which means yet more want to be near the harbour, to gaze at the water and into what is almost like a magic mirror. If the harbour is a reflection of how Sydneysiders imagine themselves to look, then in our desire to be close to the water, to stare into it, perhaps we really are – as some Melburnians would have it – a pack of shallow narcissists.
If they can’t stare into the water, Sydneysiders can always laugh at a refracted version of themselves presented by playwright David Williamson. He is originally from Melbourne, but the popularity of his wry observations and one-liners about Australian life helped Williamson shift to Sydney into a harbourside house. A few years after moving, Williamson wrote a play about Sydney, titled Emerald City. Its main character is Colin, a scriptwriter who moves from Melbourne to Sydney and, like just about every other character in Emerald City, covets a home with a harbour view. Elaine, the scriptwriter’s agent, tells Colin, ‘No one in Sydney ever wastes time debating the meaning of life – it’s getting yourself a water frontage. People devote a lifetime to the quest. You’ve come to a city that knows what it’s about, so be warned.’ Colin is warned but hardly deterred. How could he be after he has seen the harbour view from her office?
However, the problem with just looking at the harbour, especially when you’re staring at undeniable beauty, is that you miss what is going on beneath the surface. You can miss the personality, the soul and the brain contained in the body. You can miss the complexity. After all, what we refer to as ‘the harbour’ is actually a series of waterways: Parramatta and Lane Cove rivers, which feed into the main harbour; the inner harbour, which extends to just east of the Bridge; the outer harbour, which presses through to the Heads, and, before reaching the sea, there is a deviation to the left, into North Harbour and Middle Harbour. Each section contains more than just water but its own character, its own challenges and idiosyncrasies. Yet as each body flows into the next, it is easy to miss all that. Especially if you are engrossed in your view of the harbour, whatever it may be. You can become blind to the fact there are so many other ways to look at the harbour. After a while, when you’re caught in a routine, you barely notice what you are look
ing at.
And then it hits you. You see the harbour through the prism, and the prison, of your view and realise, ‘I hardly know you’.
THIS BOOK was born in an old cemetery.
Each day, on the way to and from work, I would walk through St Thomas’ Rest Park, on the fringe of Crows Nest, on Sydney’s lower North Shore. More than strolling through history, in this park you’re treading on the dead.
Before it was handed over to the community in the 1960s, this urban sanctuary was a cemetery. From the time its ground was consecrated in 1846 to the last burial more than a century later, St Thomas’ Cemetery accommodated about 4000 souls. As part of its conversion from a resting place for the dead to a refuge for the living, many of the headstones were re-sited or removed altogether. About 450 headstones, and some grand monuments, remain. As well as providing excellent obstacles for kids and dogs to run around, they tell the story of a harbour city.
A number of the headstones are etched with the names of Sydney pioneers and settlers whose memory is retained beyond the rest park, on street signs and maps, such as the Milsons. There are the names of fortune seekers and finders, such as Bernhardt Holtermann, who helped unearth the world’s biggest lump of gold quartz in 1872. With his dug-up wealth, he built a mansion with a tower, from which panoramic photos of the harbour were taken. There are the builders, the law-creators and the decision-makers of a colony clawing its way towards nationhood. And seeping out of the stone, through the inscriptions, there is the harbour. The headstones remind you of the connection many of those buried here had with the water. They were born by it, worked on it, and, in quite a few cases, it led to their grave.
As I walked through the park, the first headstone I would see each morning was that of Jacob Hooper A.B., who died in 1879. The insignia of a rope-furled anchor and Union Jack is engraved in the headstone, erected by the officers and crew of HMS Emerald ‘in memory of their shipmate’. There is no indication of how Hooper died, but the 29-year-old’s headstone is etched with a verse. Its first line reads, ‘SAFE HOME. SAFE HOME IN PORT’.