The Harbour Read online

  ON COCKATOO Island, where shipbuilding was seen as a symbol of nation building, there is now imagination building.

  Since 1998, the island has been a venue for the Biennale of Sydney. The catchphrase for the 20th Biennale, held in 2016, was ‘The Future is Already Here – It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed’. But for the twenty-one artists exhibiting on Cockatoo Island, ‘The Future is Already Here’ was staged amid the hulking pieces of the past. Among heavy industrial machinery imported from Glasgow and Bath and Leeds were the creations of artists from South Korea to France, from Germany to China.

  In the shed where Ross Gardner, and thousands of other apprentices trained, there was an installation titled, ‘Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time, no. 2’. Hundreds of plumb bobs, similar to those used for setting a vertical reference in boatbuilding, were hanging from strings and swinging like pendulums. You were encouraged to negotiate your way through the ranks of plumb bobs, assuming you weren’t first lost and tangled in the artist’s statement. I still don’t know what ‘unconscious choreographic competence’ is, but I think it means ‘don’t bump into the plumb bobs’.

  The convict precinct on the upper island also provided exhibition spaces. The hard stone walls that once spoke of confinement were used as screens to project images of people talking freely on mobile phones in open fields.

  The sum of roles the island has played through its life means it has the kind of character that attracts not just visual artists but movie-makers. It has been used as a set for Hollywood movies, and it has hosted a film festival. And the island’s buildings have provided stages for a range of live performances, including what is possibly the most theatrical and beautiful statement of ‘I love you’ ever created in this town.

  When the acclaimed sculptor and performer Ken Unsworth was seeking a space large enough to stage a tribute to his late wife Elisabeth in 2009, the answer was before his eyes. From their home on the harbour’s edge at Birchgrove, Ken could see Cockatoo Island. But it was only when a friend suggested the island as the venue for what he was quietly planning did Ken visit.

  ‘Once I went to the island, things fell into place,’ Ken smiles, as we talk in his home. His lithe frame is clothed in black. Behind him, trickling in between the trees and through his lounge room windows, is the harbour, which on this day has the appearance of tin. It is as though the water has been pressed in one of the old machines on the island and then rolled out in a sheet to Ken’s windows.

  To stage his production, A Ringing Glass (Rilke), Ken hired the old turbine hall and set about turning the cavernous and industrial into something intimate and magical. On one winter’s night, about 170 invited guests in dinner suits and ball gowns were transported across the harbour, and deep into Ken’s imagination.

  As they approached the island, guests could see the water tower shimmering in an ethereal blue light. After the formally attired crowd disembarked, they walked through an old tunnel, accompanied in the low light by a soundtrack of noises before they emerged into another fantastic world. They were guided through a marquee then through four galleries Ken and his team had created in the turbine hall. Inside the galleries were installations, from a large skeleton, which moved with the slow deliberation of a Tai Chi master, to suspended toy pianos and the pieces of a dismembered piano, casting long shadows, and with two automated sticks tapping out a mournful beat on the lid. The art was honouring a life; Elisabeth had been a superb pianist.

  Yet the most extraordinary experiences occurred in a ballroom plotted out among the machinery. Recordings of Elisabeth playing reverberated through the hall, as a piano descended from the ceiling. The audience became performers, dancing to an orchestra. They were choreographed through a dream. Then, for these Sydney Cinderellas, the Cockatoo Island dream was over. The performance ended and they were ferried off the island. But for those who were there, it is still talked about as an amazing night.

  While he staged another production and installation on Cockatoo Island a couple of years later, Ken says he couldn’t afford to do it again. The barging costs alone have risen dramatically, he explains.

  For all the expense and effort, what remains of Ken’s Cockatoo Island creations are little more than memories. Still, Ken feels he added another layer to the archaeology of human experience on the island. What’s more, there’s an overlap of experiences between the industrial workers of the past and the creative conjurers of more recent times. For a few years until the mid-1920s, the Cockatoo Island workers had a choir, which practised on the ferry as it transported them to Circular Quay.

  ‘Well, they would have approved, wouldn’t they?’ Ken says, smiling.

  Ken has not returned to the island since he dismantled his last project there. Although he can look at the island from his home whenever he wants. But when he does, he doesn’t think about what he created there, and how he let imaginations soar.

  ‘I never look back,’ he says shaking his head, swishing his gleaming white hair. ‘I’m not one of those people who look back.

  ‘The island can’t remain a mute museum of the past, it has to change to mean something to present society.

  ‘I just see it as an island that has not really found its future, and in many ways that’s sad.’

  THE PAST repels Ross Gardner from returning to Cockatoo Island.

  From his boatshed on Onions Point, he could easily sail or row his own beautiful creation, Ellen Mary, across to the island. But he has no desire to. Ross has visited Cockatoo Island only a couple of times since he left on that summer’s day in 1993 but he was uncomfortable, because ‘there are too many ghosts’.

  ‘I think it’s gone,’ Ross replies when asked is there any hope of reviving industry on Cockatoo Island. ‘But there’s to be some consideration for somewhere to repair things or build things, and, with a boat, that’s got to be near the water.

  ‘If industries such as Cockatoo Island are continually shut down, you’ll end up with a desert, because there’ll be no reason for people to be here. If there aren’t jobs, who is going to pay the rent for all those apartments?’

  Yet to Ross Gardner what cut deepest with the dockyard closure was not the loss of jobs or even an industry.

  ‘It wasn’t the physical rock on which it was built, it was the people,’ he says. ‘It was a community, and that’s what was destroyed when they closed Cockatoo Island.’

  But not all has been lost. The skills Ross learnt on the island are being carefully, even lovingly, applied to Ellen Mary. While his past, and an entire tradition, can be seen through his shed window, Ross concentrates on what is before him, in restoring his wooden boat and sliding her back out the front doors and down into the river, where both she and he belong.

  ‘We don’t live on the harbour here; we live on Lane Cove River,’ Ross says as he looks at the water, the skin around his eyes crinkling, perhaps from the glare, more likely with delight.

  ‘We’re sort of river rats, I suppose.’

  4

  LANE COVE RIVER

  IN OUR search for something that symbolises the flow of time from the cradle to the grave and beyond, we often rely on rivers. At least, a torrent of poets and philosophers, musicians and writers through the ages has relied on the idea that a river is like life itself. Which makes sense. After all, a river has a beginning and an end, it twists and turns, it occasionally runs dry or breaks its banks, and its waters can carry hopes or drown them. On a river, as in life, you can float or go under. You can push against the current and feel your defiance stretching and grinding the moments into a seeming eternity, or you can go with the flow and embrace time.

  Yet for a symbol of life and time, rivers can give the impression of being timeless. Their waters carry history and the future, and their course changes through circumstance. And yet, when you’re on a river, it can seem unchanged, as its waters forever stream through the present. A river seems to transcend time; it is simply there.

  But that’s not how I feel when I paddle on
Lane Cove River.

  As soon as I enter the river’s mouth, the past flows back. I think of each time I’ve kayaked up here with my friends, Bruce Beresford and George Ellis. Actually, I don’t even need the river as a symbol to remind me time is whooshing by. I have George and Bruce to do that for me, mercilessly.

  The three of us have been kayaking different parts of the harbour for years. We have watched each other age, if not mature, on the water. We help each other age. No matter what George and Bruce say, I’ve aged the least.

  We call ourselves the Gentleman Kayakers’ Club. It is a very exclusive, if woefully misnamed, club. Although we are kayakers. We describe ourselves as a ‘B-grade conductor’, ‘an old film director’, and ‘a burnt-out hack’. Of course, we don’t refer to each other in these terms. We say far worse.

  Bruce began paddling in the mid-1990s.

  ‘Kayaking’s one of those things that help you,’ he muses. ‘You have various problems on films, trying to work out how to solve them, and you go out paddling, you relax, and the problems seem to solve themselves. You come back and go, “I know what I can do”. It’s exhilarating out there.’

  While he included the harbour in a documentary he shot about Sydney in the lead-up to the 2000 Olympics, Bruce has not yet used it as a setting in any of his films. But he may well soon.

  George has been paddling since early 2009. A wonderful conductor and arranger who possesses the hair and on-stage energy of a rock star, George had been cast by Bruce to be in his film Mao’s Last Dancer. He was to play a conductor. George reckons it wasn’t his conducting skills but his late 1970s–early 1980s ‘outdated hair’, which fitted the setting of the film, that gained him the role. But, more importantly, his hair was an entrée to the glamorous world of kayaking and its beautiful people. In other words, Bruce and I.

  Water, with all its cadences and rhythms, has the sound and feel of music. In his novel The Refuge, Kenneth Mackenzie wrote how the harbour on an early winter’s morning conjured up the opening of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony in E minor.

  ‘It is a beautiful opening line in that symphony,’ agrees George. I ask him what music he hears while paddling.

  ‘Mine is much less romantic,’ he replies. ‘What I hear is my huffing and puffing, trying to keep up with you blokes. That’s about as rhythmic as it gets for me.’

  One of Bruce’s acclaimed movies is Black Robe. It is a beautiful, at times harrowing, film set in North America in the 1630s. A Catholic missionary and his young offsider undertake a perilous journey by canoe deep into the wilderness. As one of the characters mutters before the party sets off, ‘1500 miles by canoe in that country, at the beginning of the winter, death is almost certain’.

  It is as though Bruce were directing a film based on our harbour kayaking adventures. Only when we paddle, we almost die laughing.

  The beauty of kayaking alone is you revel in sounds other than your own voice, and you learn to observe more carefully. The beauty of kayaking with George and Bruce is revelling in the sounds of their voices and their wry observations of us, the world and life. We talk – and laugh – so much, we often forget to dunk our blades in the water, until we’re going at a pace that makes the stately car in Bruce’s Driving Miss Daisy seem like an F1 racer.

  But the main purpose of our paddling is not about getting somewhere. It’s just to be out there. The harbour is our men’s shed. In the harbour, there are secrets; on the harbour, we share ours. Indeed, in the Gentleman Kayakers’ Club, we don’t drown our sorrows with a bottle. Instead, we paddle our sorrows out into the harbour or up the river, slice their throat with some sharp comments, tie some heavy sarcasm around their feet, and we laugh in their face as we toss them overboard and watch them drown. As a result, by the time I return to shore after paddling with Bruce and George, my kayak feels lighter, and I feel more buoyant.

  So whenever I kayak into Lane Cove River – actually, around most parts of the harbour west of the Bridge – I think of my gentleman kayaking mates and smile at the knowledge of all the drowned sorrows lying beneath my hull.

  We could choose deeper water than Lane Cove River to be rid of our worries. The water beneath our kayaks had been plumbed and measured soon after the First Fleet arrived. As part of his survey of Port Jackson in 1788, John Hunter and his party had rowed into the river. The plan indicates Hunter explored the lower reaches of the river and noted the depths were mostly less than 4 metres. Among Hunter’s party was Lieutenant William Bradley. He was the first to refer to ‘Lane Cove’, but no one is exactly sure why the river was named that. Bradley and his party may have been officially surveying the river, but he saw this waterway was already well used. Ahead of him, Aboriginal people in canoes were paddling away.

  The peninsula that holds Hunters Hill and Woolwich is not just defined by two rivers; it seems to possess two faces and characters. It is like Sydney Harbour’s Janus. That sense of difference, of transiting from the company of one character to another, greets me whenever I paddle out of one river into the other. No sooner am I in Lane Cove River than I’m struck by what I see or hear very little of: boating traffic. On the other side of the peninsula, vessels are constantly trundling and tearing past; on this side, the occasional pleasure craft putters by.

  The shoreline looks different as well. This seems like the gentler side of the peninsula, and the more genteel. There are fewer new mansions on the water’s edge; instead, many of the homes keep their distance up the hill. The historic houses of sandstone and brick are swaddled in trees and landscaped gardens, while on the riverfront are tennis courts and boatsheds. These homes don’t scream, ‘Hey, I’m rich!’ Rather, they murmur in mellifluous tones, ‘Well, yes, we’re comfortable’.

  The more meditative mood along the Lane Cove River side is underlined by one building in particular that I notice while kayaking towards Newcombe Point. High on the hill is a sandstone church, with large stained-glass windows facing the river. It is a Catholic church, St Peter Chanel, and it was built in the late 19th century. Like the harbour itself, the church has a link with the Pacific Ocean. It was named in honour of Peter Chanel, a French missionary who was killed on the island of Futuna, near New Caledonia, in 1841.

  From the water, the church has a quiet dignity; up close, St Peter Chanel maintains that air. In the grounds is a sundial, and on its face is inscribed the words, ‘Some Tell of Storms and Showers/I Tell of Sunny Hours’. On this day, a shadow creeps across the dial. The sun is shining, and the air is still. Although it could well be blowy on the peninsula’s other face.

  As I consider the peninsula’s split personality, I recall my conversation with Graham Percival, from the Hunters Hill Historical Society. Before he moved further up the peninsula, Graham had Lane Cove River at the bottom of his property. He liked the peninsula’s northern face because it wasn’t whipped by the southerlies that would skip across the water and harass the homes on the other side.

  ‘But I know people on the Parramatta River side who say they wouldn’t live anywhere else because they’d miss all the activity on the water,’ Graham mused. ‘There’s always something happening on that side.’

  On this side as well, there’s always something happening in small, subtle ways. I pull ashore at a relatively untamed strip known as the Ferdinand Street Reserve. As I look through the screen of trees and over the muddy banks, a solitary tinny grumbles by. It all feels very distant from one of the world’s greatest harbours, rather than being an arm of it.

  A stairway, hewn from stone, climbs the hill beside a rambling Port Jackson fig. As I climb the steps, there’s a distinct change in atmosphere, from the Australian shoreline to something remotely European, with the slush of autumn leaves underfoot and stately sandstone homes on either side of the path. The historic houses on top of the hill are identified not so much by number but name, such as Cleverton (1876) and Maruna (1856), whose original owner gave his address as ‘Lane Cove River’.

  Yet along this reach, the house that is syn
onymous with the river, because it is virtually in it, is Figtree House. The building sits under Fig Tree Bridge, which carries thousands of vehicles across the river every hour, and yet somehow the house seems removed from all that rushing and roaring above its head. From the road and on the water, Figtree House, especially its wooden tower, grabs attention. While it looks like it is from another place, perhaps New England, Figtree House is from another time. Its origins stretch to 1836, when the Sydney businesswoman Mary Reibey established her farm on this land. She built two stone cottages and named the property Figtree Farm, after a Port Jackson fig on her land. The massive tree not only survived through the years, it stamped its presence on the main house as it took shape. It grew through the bathroom, and the residents would hang their towels on nails in the trunk.

  In 1838, Reibey leased the property to Joseph Fowles, who was an artist and later author of Sydney in 1848. Fowles intended to farm the land and ship the produce downriver to Sydney. As Reibey had already discovered, the soil did not easily yield a living. But the river always offered a feed. As Fowles recorded in his journal, ‘we have plenty of sea fish and the rocks are covered with oysters’.