The Harbour Read online

  While it resisted a lot of development, Hunters Hill has been recycled in parts. Paddling east, I reach Pulpit Point, named after a rock formation that was shorn and shaved long ago to make room for the religion of money-making. For a time in the 1800s, there were pleasure gardens on the shores of Fern Bay, but then the site was sold and turned into a large oil depot. For ninety years, ships cruised along the inner harbour to the depot, berthing at the long jetty that reached out into Fern Bay. Pulpit Point was a cluster of storage tanks and sheds. But after the depot closed in the 1980s, Pulpit Rock was converted from an industrial site into a luxurious housing development. The estate has the look of a resort, and its residents could be anywhere that includes palm trees. The only thing really anchoring them to the idea they are in Sydney is the uninterrupted view out of Fern Bay to the Harbour Bridge. The exclusivity of this place is explicit in the signs attached to its marina. They warn a passing kayaker that the marina is private and for residents only, so KEEP OFF.

  From this pocket of tightly held privacy, it is little more than a stone’s throw to the scene of a historic victory for the preservation of bushland and the public’s right to access the water.

  Kelly’s Bush is a thick patch of green covering almost five hectares of the peninsula. In the midst of the reserve, you can catch thin slices of harbour views between the tree trunks, which rise from a bed of sandstone and ferns. In the heart of Kelly’s Bush, nature is at its most tenacious and defiant. Which are the very qualities its saviours displayed.

  For many years, a tin smelter operated by the Kelly family was on the foreshore. The harbour was an important component of the Sydney Smelting Company. Supplies of ore were shipped to the works, and the slag created during the smelting process was carted away by barges and used as fill across the water at Drummoyne and Birkenhead Point. Eventually, no one would take the slag, so it was dumped around the site. The patch of bushland above and beside the smelter had been preserved by the company as a buffer between it and the residents, to offer at least some distance from the slag heaps and the emissions the industry created. Yet the land was also a playground for local kids, a shortcut for locals heading to and from the ferry, and it was the largest remaining parcel of native bush along Parramatta River.

  In the 1950s, the council had bought 2.8 hectares at the top of the parcel for a park. But when the smelter closed in 1967, the real estate developer A.V. Jennings, took out an option for the rest of the land, to build apartments and townhouses on it. With the developer having the backing of the state government, it seemed another part of the harbour foreshore was about to be built on and locked up. But what no one counted on was the Battlers for Kelly’s Bush.

  Thirteen local women formed the residents’ action group in 1970 to oppose the development. One of the ‘Battlers’ is Doctor Joan Croll.

  ‘We were the original greenies!’ exclaims Joan, when I meet her in her Drummoyne unit, with views across the harbour – all the way to the peninsula she helped conserve.

  Joan is a feisty, energetic character. She gives the impression that she is still a ‘Battler’, not in the interpretation most Australians apply to the word, but that she would be up for a fight, if necessary. Indeed, as Joan remembers it, she joined the campaign to save Kelly’s Bush not just because of what she was fighting for, but who she was fighting against.

  ‘Nobody likes developers,’ she declares. ‘To save the waterfront from a developer, that was important.’

  When Kelly’s Bush came under threat, Joan lived further east along the peninsula than most of the other Battlers.

  ‘I was one of the few who didn’t live in Red Square,’ she says, applying the term disparagingly used to criticise those in the group who lived in blue-ribbon Hunters Hill yet, as part of the conservation campaign, formed an alliance with the union movement.

  The Battlers met in each other’s homes, with the aim of raising the money to help the state government buy the land. But when it turned out the state was not interested in that option, they changed tactics: they would enlist the public’s help to save the bushland.

  I ask Joan whether the activists, who lived in a well-to-do part of Sydney, were being ironic in calling their group, Battlers for Kelly’s Bush.

  ‘No, they meant it!’ she counters. ‘They were used to getting what they wanted.’

  ‘So why were there only women in the group?’

  ‘In those days, women did things, and men did things. We didn’t need them!’

  The group organised public meetings, they wrote letters to politicians and departments, and they organised essay writing competitions for school children. They held ‘Boil the Billy’ fundraisers in Kelly’s Bush and sold an information leaflet, with a foreword by the writer and Hunters Hill resident Kylie Tennant, who argued this was more than a struggle to save land: ‘It is a confrontation of values. Kelly’s Bush is a symbol of our lost land. Take away Kelly’s Bush and you take away one more assurance that in man is left a possibility for the future. The unborn Australian will ask for his birthright and be handed a piece of concrete.’

  Despite that combined pressure, in June 1971, the state’s Minister for Local Government signed the documents to rezone the land for residential development. The middle-class women then reached across the water to some working-class men. They sought the assistance of the union movement. The State Secretary of the Builders’ Labourers Federation, Jack Mundey, became involved, holding a meeting with a few of the Battlers.

  ‘I nearly had a fit when I heard the BLF was involved,’ recalls Joan, who left the group in protest. ‘My husband was so disgusted [with her], he told me to go back immediately.’

  ‘Why were you disgusted by the involvement of the BLF?’

  ‘Well, I was a Liberal voter, for God’s sake! But I quickly resolved that issue.’

  The BLF offered its support, imposing a black ban on the Kelly’s Bush site. This became known as a green ban, the first of its type in the world.

  The Battlers eventually prevailed. The bush was saved. In 1983, the State Labor Government announced it would buy Kelly’s Bush for public open space. It marked the end of the fight, and the dissolution of the Battlers for Kelly’s Bush. Their success inspired other campaigns to protect areas around Sydney Harbour, particularly the formation of alliances between action groups and the union movement to save bushland and historic buildings.

  ‘It helped us rethink the harbour,’ Joan muses.

  Joan Croll has achieved much in her life. She has been a renowned doctor in the area of breast cancer, pushing for the widespread introduction of ultrasound technology and mammography. She has also figured prominently in Australian art, both as a collector and subject. She features in one of John Brack’s best known portraits, as she stares directly at the viewer with a determined look. I presume it’s a look many a critic of the Kelly’s Bush campaign would have received. Yet, despite all she has done, in Joan’s opinion, the battle to save Kelly’s Bush ‘is the most significant thing in my life’.

  I point to the distant slash of green that Joan helped save and ask her how often she looks over there. Joan squints and shakes her head.

  ‘It’s funny, I don’t think to look,’ she says. ‘Maybe it’s because I’ve got all this greenery here out the front and I can’t see the bloody thing!’

  THE PENINSULA is divided between Hunters Hill and, further east along the ridgeline, Woolwich. For a time, it was also divided between the residential and the industrial. Hunters Hill was predominantly fine homes and big gardens; Woolwich was more working class.

  Before Woolwich became a hub for industries, it was promoted as an ideal place to live. In 1841, Joseph Simmons, who was an actor, theatre entrepreneur and auctioneer, promoted land at Woolwich, declaring that ‘to attempt even an outline of its many advantages would occupy an unlimited space’. But he went on to outline its many advantages, anyway; the proximity to Sydney, ‘the finest views of any known spot in the Colony’, along with the residents be
ing able to enjoy ‘health in the breeze’. Mr Simmons’ exhortations didn’t attract land buyers to Woolwich at the time.

  I inhale that health in the breeze as I paddle along the Woolwich shore towards Clarkes Point. The stretch is devoted to recreation, with a marina, a broad area known as the Horse Paddock, because work horses used to graze here but is now a playground for dogs to run leash-free, and the Hunters Hill Sailing Club. Just beyond the club is a strip that looks like a beach, but it contains faint and rotting reminders of the area’s industrial days. Sliding from the foreshore into the harbour are the remains of a slipway. Ferries were built here before the First World War, and a few more were constructed on the shore during the 1920s. During the Second World War, work began on the construction of two large cargo ships. Photos taken at the time show a great iron shell on the shore being tended to by cranes towering over it. That scene of earth stripped bare for shipbuilding is hard to reconcile with the gentle space dotted with trees that I’m looking at.

  The parkland curls around Clarkes Point. The view of the harbour from here is what made the actor-auctioneer Mr Simmons so rhapsodic in 1841, and while it may have changed, it still warrants purple prose, or quiet contemplation. It takes in the sandstone headlands, the CBD’s clump of towers, and the Harbour Bridge curving across the water, so Clarkes Point is, to quote Mr Simmons, ‘delightfully situated’. The shoreline, however, has undergone dramatic shifts through the years. In the 1880s, the Atlas Engineering Company bought a large chunk of land on the waterfront, cleared it and built a series of workshops and imported a floating dock from England for ship repairs. The company itself was taken over by Mort’s Dock and Engineering Company, whose base was across the harbour at Balmain, but the shipbuilding yards, docks and workshops remained in operation until 1959. The writer P.R. Stephensen hated what had been done to tip of the peninsula, decrying in the 1960s that the dormant industrial site ‘had the appearance, in contrast with its naturally beautiful surroundings, of the Abomination of Desolation – a man-made scar on the landscape, which perhaps time would heal’. Time, and a whole lot of human effort, has helped the scars on the point to fade. Yet there remains one awesome incision deep into the sandstone skin of Moocooboola. Woolwich Dock.

  When Mort’s Dock and Engineering Company took over the site in 1898, it set out to build a dry dock capable of accepting the largest ships sailing in Australian waters. To build that dock took teams of men hacking and cutting into the stone face for more than three years. The sandstone cut out was carted by horses around the point, to build a seawall and reclaim land. That knobbly yet majestic wall is still largely in place; I had paddled past it and remember thinking how these sandstone seawalls are yet another character marker of Sydney Harbour.

  By the time the labourers had finished in 1901, they had carved a dock about 188 metres long and about 27 metres wide. At high tide, it had a draft of 8 metres. When Woolwich Dock officially opened in December, the first ship that sailed into it was Neotsfield. She was the first of many ships over more than half a century to enter the dock, have the caisson close behind her, and have the water pumped out beneath her until she rested on keel blocks. During the Second World War, battle-damaged ships limped into the dock for repair. For some of Mort’s workforce, which reached a peak of 1500 in 1917, a ship in the dock meant not just employment but a feed. When the water was pumped out, there was usually a large haul of fish flapping on the dock’s floor. In tough times, when few ships were in dock and men were laid off, they did as Woolwich families had done before the industries arrived: they fished. During the Great Depression in the early 1930s, to make ends meet, the wives would walk up the ridgeline to the households more resistant to downturns and sell their catch. When a ship was in the dock, it brought not only work but also sailors into the community. Woolwich even had a club for the visiting seamen.

  When the dock closed in the late 1950s, 700 men were out of work. A few years later, the dock and surrounding land became a base for army water transport squadrons. The army stayed for more than thirty years, and, once the military had transferred its operations to Townsville, developers wanted the site. Locals who united under the name Foreshore 2000 Woolwich and another action group called Defenders of Sydney Harbour Foreshores fought for the preservation of the dock and the surrounding area, and they won.

  As well as retaining the area for public access, a maritime community has mushroomed once more in and around the dock. In the large sawtooth-roofed shed that was built in the 1940s, shipwrights and detailers whittle, grind and polish, and outside, yachts are cradled and manoeuvred by crane into the water. While this hubbub of boating maintenance is reassuring in a harbour that is watching its ‘working’ title slowly sink, the most impressive part of Woolwich Dock is experienced when you paddle into the incision, in the wake of ships long gone.

  With the dock’s sandstone walls and above them the carved cliffs, I’m kayaking into a chasm. Near the entrance, on the wall to my right is a series of Roman numerals inscribed in the stone, measuring the depth of the water. Above the wall on the left are a few masts, with yachts being worked on outside the big shed. Berthed in the dock is a row of larger yachts. The legendary Sydney to Hobart race record breaker, Wild Oats XI, is often resting her carbon fibre body in the dock. The supermaxi’s 44-metre mast towers above the toil of men etched into the cliffs. But not today; she is off scooping more silverware from the deep blue somewhere. However, a couple of head-turning vessels are berthed in here. For those who consider ocean-racing yachts to be the sports cars of the sea, there is compelling evidence in the dock: a sleek beauty called Maserati.

  At the end of the dock, the rock wall curves like a ship’s bow. The rock is dark and weeping groundwater, and it wears a wispy beard of ferns. This ancient striated rock face stares at the state-of-the-art sailing technology behind me. One holds time in its layers; the other is designed to race time. Between the rock and the fancy yachts, lying beside me, is an old barge, which is gradually being broken down by time. Here, at the meeting of the waters, the past meets the future.

  Where the peninsula ends is called Onions Point. It is named after Samuel Onions, who bought this patch of land in 1835. Perched on the end of the point and hovering over those meeting waters is an old boatshed. In one sense, the shed is like a border post between the Parramatta and Lane Cove rivers. The shed’s entrance is facing away from the main harbour, with a slipway leading from its wooden doors into Lane Cove River. Those doors are open and, inside the shed, Ross Gardner is hunched over a wooden boat, carefully tending to a plank. He is concentrating so hard, initially he doesn’t notice a kayaker bobbing outside the front door. And he looks content, with a soft smile across his face.

  ‘For me, this is heaven,’ Ross tells me, as he takes a break from the restoration work. ‘I don’t have to die, I’m already there. Working on the boat gives me such great pleasure.’

  The source of his pleasure is also his creation. Ross built the boat, which he named Ellen Mary, in honour of his mother. Ellen Mary is a 12-foot yawl crafted from Huon pine. Ross took three years to build her, treating it as an after-work project. The creation of Ellen Mary was a celebration of traditional skills. He would split the wood, make the planks and shape them, then secure them using copper nails clinched with rooves.

  ‘It used to take me a week to put two planks on,’ he grins.

  The current restoration of Ellen Mary has also seen weeks flow into months, but Ross doesn’t mind because when he is in the shed, ‘I feel as though I’m out on the boat’.

  The shed is also a wonderful ramshackle museum that holds the tools and clues as to where Ross learnt his boatbuilding skills. Crammed into old wooden chests and drawers are old chisels, planes and patterns, each with a story attached, and most handed down from one generation to the next. Ross comes from a family of boatbuilders. On a wall hangs a bronze plaque, which reads, ‘E.H. Gardner, Boat Builder’. He was Ross’ great uncle.

  Ross was born so close to
the water, the harbour might just as well have been his cradle. His first years were spent in Balmain, above Johnstons Bay. Ross can still picture the P&O and Union Steamship vessels coming and going. The Gardners ventured onto the harbour, often in boats crafted by their own hands. The first vessel Ross recalls going on was an 18-foot sailing boat his grandfather had built in 1911.

  Ross’ father was also handy at woodworking, so much so it secured him part-time work at Mort’s Dock at Balmain. But he planned for a monumental shift for his family, all the way across the harbour. He bought a plot of land on Onions Point, built the boatshed, with his wife mixing the concrete, and, at the top of the escarpment just outside the shed, a house. In March 1949, the Gardners moved in, and Ross has been there ever since. As Ross declares, he lives ‘at the most easterly point of the Western Suburbs’. His favourite room is what he calls ‘the wheelhouse’. It used to be a glassed-in veranda but has grown into a walled-in room with a bay window that is filled with views across the harbour.

  When Ross was a boy, the big windows reminded him of the wheelhouses of the old Lady ferries that graciously glided around the harbour, ‘and being a ferry driver was an ambition of mine as a very young bloke’. So, whenever he is in the room, he is realising an ambition.

  ‘It doesn’t go anywhere, but a lot goes floating past.’

  Ross’ parents already knew this part of the harbour when the family moved into the house. Ross gestures for me to look across the wide expanse of the bend in the river to a building on the opposite bank. That’s the Greenwich Flying Squadron, he explains, ‘and that’s where Dad met Mum, at a dance’.

  As a boat sails, it is only a few kilometres from Johnstons Bay to Onions Point, but it felt like another world to Ross when he was a boy. There was not as much boating traffic on Lane Cove River, although the ferries ran regularly, and punts would wait for the high tide to transport raw materials to industries upstream. It was quieter over here as well. At night, Ross would sometimes hear the heavy splash of sharks. As a result, he never swam in the river, and he still won’t. Ross guides me onto the small deck wrapped around the shed and gestures straight down. Not long ago, he saw a shark, which he thinks was a bronze whaler, lying there in the shallows. He estimates it was 16 feet (about 4.9 metres) long.