The Harbour Read online

  The gardener introduces himself as Mark and says he’s pleased to see me pull up at the wharf, because few ever use it. He jokes he keeps the shoreline clean for the ‘water lookers’ living in the homes along the shore.

  Mark advises I’m seeing Canada Bay at its best. At high tide, he says, it is ‘lovely and peaceful’. But when it is low tide, and the water drops about a metre, this part of the bay can be ‘muddy and horrible’. Mark sometimes heads onto the water, fishing for bream and flathead, in a shallow-draught boat. He points over to two small clumps of mangroves on the opposite shore and says there are good spots around them. But he releases what he catches; Mark wouldn’t eat the fish from here, because he’s concerned about what remains in the mud. You only have to dig a little, he explains, and it emits an odour. On this day, there is no stink, just the faint scent of coffee wafting from the factory.

  Paddling out of Hen and Chicken Bay, the view is expansive. Little wonder when Governor Lachlan Macquarie toured this area soon after his arrival in the colony in 1810, he noted how it was located on ‘the southern side of the arm of the sea or river between Parramatta and Sydney’. It would be too generous to view Parramatta River as a sea, but from Abbotsford Point, it does look impressively wide.

  On Abbotsford Point, sail and oars co-exist and have done so for decades, with the bases of the Abbotsford 12-Flying Squadron and the Sydney Rowing Club. The rowing club has had a base at Abbotsford since 1874, when it bought an inn that was a popular watering hole for those taking the punt across the river from Bedlam Point. The new facility was launched by a festive flotilla rowing up the river to Abbotsford from the club’s base in the main harbour at Woolloomooloo.

  The boatshed perched on the point these days was dismantled and transported from Woolloomooloo in 1946. The old clubhouse at Abbotsford had been ravaged by fire a dozen years earlier. Like many of the private schools’ rowing bases dotting the banks along this reach of the river, this is no shed. It is a distinguished building, with a steep-pitched roof, observation areas facing upriver, and a storage area packed with expensive racing shells.

  I want to stop and have a drink at the rowing club. The ramp outside the boathouse is designed for ease in getting in and out of the water. Perhaps it is the sight of all those fancy craft in the club’s belly that compels me to paddle a little further and look for another, more humble, spot to hop out of Pulbah Raider. I find an older ramp below the restaurant, but its slimy skin ensures all I can do is keep sliding helplessly back into the river. I paddle on, defeated and sober, slime-coated and wet.

  Between the rowing and sailing clubs is a shed brimming with character, and a pontoon that allows a kayaker to alight with a degree of dignity. No sooner do I clamber onto the pontoon in front of the Abbotsford Point Boatshed than I’m surrounded by the past. An old Maritime Services Board launch berthed out the front is in the throes of restoration, and a rambling collection of artefacts are on the deck and leaning on the boathouse, including a life-ring from a tug that was renowned on the harbour, Monterey. But the most compelling artefact is the boathouse itself.

  Although a sign on the boatshed indicates the business was established in 1851, it’s believed this two-storey weatherboard building has been here since the 1890s. The Abbotsford Point Boatshed is one of the oldest surviving commercial operations on the harbour.

  In all its years, the boatshed has been in the hands of only three families. The present owner, Roger Kyle, has been at the boatshed since 1983, taking over from his father. Bruce Kyle was well known not just for his business by the river, but he was also a world champion in boomerang throwing. He would practise throwing the boomerang from the front of the boathouse. For a time the business was called Bruce’s Boats and Boomerangs.

  When Roger inherited the business, he reverted to the boatshed’s old name, and he retained the reminders that this building has been here a long time. Walking into the shed is like entering Davy Jones’ Locker, only without any sailors’ bodies, just the spirits of another age. Posters, photos and memorabilia hang on the walls and from the ceiling, and just about every square centimetre of the time- and tide-seasoned wooden floors carry the weight of history, from old ropes to bits and pieces of boats. Roger’s father used to call these items ‘nautical niceties’. Although not everything attached to the boatshed is old or deeply significant. I ask him about a model of a reindeer perched like a figurehead on the roofline.

  ‘That’s just a Christmas decoration I haven’t taken down,’ shrugs Roger, who is in his mid-50s and looks like he is prepared for a voyage out to sea, wearing a beanie and a fleece jacket.

  ‘Maybe I should make up a better story about the reindeer. You’d be amazed by the number of people passing on ferries who photograph it.’

  Roger shows me a photo from the late 1800s of a rowing race. The competitors heave their way past the boatshed, whose façade is daubed with the words, ‘Boats for Hire’. The shed’s appearance hasn’t changed much in more than a century. All around it has. The surrounding bush has turned into buildings. In the photo, a rowboat in the foreground is filled with spectators, decked out in their finest clothes.

  ‘Abbotsford used to be like Bondi,’ Roger says, adding there were river baths that also attracted many visitors.

  The boatshed remained a leisure destination well into the 20th century, as commemorated by one of Bruce’s boomerangs hanging on the wall. Roger tells how during the Vietnam War, US servicemen on leave would hire boats to go water skiing, and they would also buy boomerangs and receive a quick lesson from Bruce. Before the boomerangs were thrown, Bruce would explain if any dropped into the river, the visitor would still have to buy it. Sure enough, a boomerang would often plonk into the water. After the soldiers had left, having paid for their lost souvenir, Bruce’s dog would retrieve the boomerangs from the river.

  From where he sits in the shed, Roger has a perfectly framed picture of change; he need only look out the doors at the river, observing what passes, and no longer passes.

  Growing up in Abbotsford, he saw the final days of the colliers, as Hexham Bank huffed towards the gasworks at Mortlake, and he and his mates would jump on the rafts of logs being towed to the timber yards upriver. Roger also remembers the fishing trawlers working the river. Sometimes his father would rig up an old gramophone in the boatshed and play O Sole Mio at full volume. The Italian fishermen would float closer to listen, and their singing voices would ripple across the water.

  Just as he’s talking about how the workboats have all but disappeared off the river, a trawler chugs by.

  ‘It used to be a trawler,’ says Roger. ‘It now services moorings.’

  Then one of the biggest symbols of change rumbles into view just off the boatshed: a RiverCat. The Abbotsford ferry terminal is next door. The RiverCat’s engines churn up the water, and the old launch moored at the pontoon rocks restlessly.

  Yet Roger looks beyond the RiverCat, beyond the churn and changes.

  ‘It’s like a postcard, looking out,’ Roger smiles.

  AS PART of their business, the Abbotsford Point Boatshed’s original owners ferried workers along Parramatta River. One of the popular destinations was more or less around the corner. The Nestlé factory snuggled into Abbotsford Bay for the best part of seventy years. The factory was in the grounds of Abbotsford House, a mansion built in the 1870s by a prominent doctor and parliamentarian, Sir Arthur Renwick. The property was later owned by department store tycoons, the Grace family, before Nestlé bought it in 1917. The company built the largest chocolate factory in Australia around the mansion, which it used for offices. The factory buildings have gone, but Abbotsford House remains. Only the mansion now has to share its grounds at the head of the bay with townhouses and apartments, in a development called Abbotsford Cove.

  Nestlé had its own jetty, and the shoreline was used in filming part of the convict epic For the Term of His Natural Life in 1927. The shore is hardly cinematic these days, as I land on a slice of sand below th
e stone seawall. However, if you take a long, tight shot straight ahead, the picture would be impressive. The two-storey mansion, with its wide verandas, looks majestic.

  Around the mansion exists a community. Paul Roman is playing with his grandson on the large common lawn that sweeps from the mansion to the waterfront. The dips and terraces are ideal for the grandson’s billy-cart to rip down.

  Paul has lived here since 2000. When he moved in, the lawn was still a construction site, and he could see heavily armed troops in inflatable boats on the river, on security patrol for the Sydney Olympics. He and his family had moved from a house in suburban Strathfield. He gladly traded a big yard for a harbour view.

  ‘From our place, you can look straight down the river to Gladesville Bridge,’ he enthuses.

  As Sydneysiders do when they’re standing near the harbour, we talk property prices. He points to a townhouse that had recently sold for more than two million dollars, and he gestures across the lawn to another place that went for three million. In this city, to ensure capital gain, just add water.

  Paul is unwilling to do more than dip his feet in the water, because of the ongoing pollution problems upriver.

  ‘Apart from that, the river is wonderful,’ Paul says.

  ‘People pay good money to go overseas and stay in a resort. I’ve got one here!’

  PADDLING OUT of the bay, I think about how many place names along Parramatta River carry echoes of the Thames. Chiswick, Henley, Mortlake, Putney. Ahead of me, downriver, are the suburbs of Woolwich and Greenwich. These are all names that can be found by the river threading its way through the heart and soul of London.

  I think about how those who named these places along a river in the colony were probably driven not by what they saw but how they felt. After all, the land along this river could not have been further removed in distance or appearance from that great, sprawling, dirty city many of them had sailed away from. These transplanted place names were likely an expression of homesickness, or, at least, of longing for something familiar in the midst of everything that was so alien.

  The bank approaching Blackwall Point is unmistakably, beautifully of this land. The sandstone face is etched with marks and squiggles. They tell an epic story stretching back more than 200 million years, when vast amounts of sand were deposited across the area by floods. As layer fell upon layer and the sand was compressed, it eventually became stone. The mass of ages held in that stone was exposed merely thousands of years ago, when the last Ice Age ended, and the water flowed in to form the harbour and the river valleys. The stone became a parchment on which time, with the help of water, could continue to tell its tale. And with each rise and fall of the tide, with each boat that passes, with each moment, the story on that sandstone face continues to be written.

  Squatting right on top of that sandstone wall is a block of brick apartments, about forty years old. The contrast between the naturally sublime and the architecturally ridiculous is glaring. But in so many places around the harbour, the ridiculous is perched on the sublime, which somehow only highlights the beauty of one and the ugliness of the other.

  Rounding Blackwall Point into Five Dock Bay, I see a tidal pool, enclosed in netting. It is the first pool in the river I’ve seen. On the eastern side of the bay’s opening is the reason the waterway was given its name. The sandstone headland was once indented with five small coves that looked like docks. Two of the coves remain. In one are the remnants of steps cut into the stone, and above them is a gnarled flowering gum reaching out to the water.

  Moulded in and around the ‘five docks’ is a wall of sandstone blocks, plunging into the water. As I bob around at its oyster-encrusted feet and look up, the sandstone wall has the formidable air of an old fortress. It is actually an abutment of the first Gladesville Bridge, which opened in 1881. The wrought iron, lattice-truss structure was a vital link from north to south. It was the first bridge across the river east of Parramatta, and an answer to the entreaties and demands of those living on the north side. They had been calling for a bridge for at least three decades. Gladesville Bridge had an opening swing span to allow ships through. Yet in the years ahead, what allowed for the flow of river traffic became an ever growing cause of frustration for motorists, as the numbers of cars increased. Paddling across the river to trace the northern bank, I recall chatting with Donald Chivas, whom I had met at Kissing Point, about the old Gladesville Bridge. Donald told me how he spent many an hour sitting at the end of the bridge. With only two road lanes and a tramway, traffic could be congested at the best of times. But when the bridge opened for a ship, the wait – and the lines of vehicles – stretched interminably. The colliers heading for the Mortlake gasworks would barely squeeze through the opening, with only centimetres to spare on each side. In summer, Donald remembered, when the heat made the steel expand, the bridge’s components would occasionally not close properly. The fire brigade was called in to hose down the bridge, so that everything could align once more.

  Sydney had outgrown the bridge. The solution to that growing pain arcs through the sky a few hundred metres ahead.

  3

  GLADESVILLE BRIDGE TO WOOLWICH (VIA COCKATOO ISLAND)

  FROM A distance, the arch of Gladesville Bridge looks like a concrete rainbow. When it opened in 1964, this was the longest concrete arch bridge in the world. And in replacing the old Gladesville Bridge, it offered something better than a pot of gold to commuters on both banks of Parramatta River: time saved.

  Every hour, thousands of vehicles ride the 305-metre span across the river. From the crest of the bridge, you feel as though you are not so much driving as flying. Sneak a glance to the left and you can take in the bridge that gets all the attention, along with the Opera House and the city centre. Look to the right, and you have Parramatta River unravelling through the suburbs, and the mountains in the distance. For a few brief moments, soaring through the sky, you can appreciate the beauty and the scale of the harbour city.

  But to appreciate the beauty and the scale of Gladesville Bridge itself, you have to be under it. Sitting in the kayak just off the northern bank, I crane my neck and track the flow of concrete above me. The perspective gives the impression of the concrete narrowing as it pours onto the Drummoyne shore. The underside of the arch is ribbed and, accompanied by the guttural roar of trucks on the bridge, I could be peering into the belly of a monster. It is a humbling view. From here on the water, you can appreciate the engineering and all the labour involved in creating this great curve of concrete.

  Ossie Cruse is one of Australia’s most revered Indigenous leaders. He has devoted much of his life to helping Australians understand the importance of Aboriginal culture, and to share his passion for preserving it. Ossie Cruse is, in a most important sense, a bridge builder. But when he was in his mid-20s, Ossie helped build a different kind of bridge.

  ‘We knew it was going to be massive,’ Ossie says of the Gladesville structure.

  He began work on the bridge soon after construction began in 1959. Ossie’s initial job was digging the bridge’s foundations, cutting deep into the river bottom. The waters were held back by a cofferdam, as Ossie and his co-workers drilled and jackhammered through solid sandstone, cutting almost 20 metres into the rock.

  ‘It took us a fair few months to get down through the rock,’ Ossie recalls. ‘It was a big chasm by the time we’d finished.’

  As Gladesville Bridge took shape, Ossie’s roles expanded. He operated the cranes, became a rigger and ‘dogman’, often riding the load of building materials high above the water. He wasn’t bothered by heights, he assures. He just enjoyed the views when he was hanging more than forty metres above the river.

  Ossie was hardly alone in expanding his skills on Gladesville Bridge. Ideas and techniques were being pioneered on its design and construction, particularly with the use of concrete as a dominant bridge-building material. Hundreds of pre-cast boxes to form the bridge’s arch were barged up the river and then lifted and pushed into
place. According to Ossie, each box weighed about 50 tonnes, and they were secured with cabling and more concrete. After each block had been manoeuvred into place, Ossie would put his faith in the sum of everyone’s labour.

  ‘I used to lie on my back and inspect the concrete,’ he explains. ‘It was just above my face, and I’d make sure there were no cracks.’ When I ask him if he was a little worried having all that concrete looming over him, he simply replies. ‘We took it in our stride. We were told even without the grout, the blocks would stay there, with the weight on them.’

  Ossie adds that no workers were killed during the bridge’s construction, even though safety standards were less stringent then and, as far as he remembers, he was the only one who wore a hard hat, which was an old miner’s helmet.

  Ossie Cruse was a young Aboriginal man at a time when racism continued to trample its way through the attitudes and policies of Australia. While he was helping build a symbol of the nation’s future, Ossie had no official say in what that future might look like. Aboriginal people around the country were not given the same voting rights as other Australians until 1965. And it was only in 1967 that Australians voted in favour of Aboriginal people being counted in census figures. Yet on the construction site, Ossie says, there was a sense of community, ‘a really good spirit, we were good mates’. I ask Ossie had he been mindful he was building a link from the land of the Wallumedegal people on the north side over to the traditional area of the Wangal people on the south bank. No, Ossie replies, people didn’t think like that back then.

  In the years ahead, Ossie Cruse would be instrumental in advancing social justice and recognition for Aboriginal Australians. He was a member of key delegations to the United Nations and Commonwealth Heads of Government meetings. He was a member of the World Council of Indigenous People. He has chaired boards and councils in Australia and has been the prime mover of education and cultural programs. He is also a Christian pastor, and he founded the Aboriginal Evangelical Fellowship. In a remarkable life that has made a difference to not just other lives but that of this nation, Ossie Cruse ranks his work on Gladesville Bridge right near the top.