The Harbour Page 17

  But it is possible for boating and the seagrass to co-exist. Marine biologist Professor Bill Gladstone has told me about work his team has been doing on environmentally friendly moorings. Instead of using a block and chain, a screw is inserted into the floor, with an arm that sits above the seagrass. The line is attached to the arm and taken up to the surface, so it doesn’t come into contact with the bed and doesn’t cut through the seagrass. Better still, research indicates that seagrass beds can recover.

  ‘So you can still have a high level of boating, and a healthy seagrass bed,’ Bill says.

  That is encouraging, in the face of increasing demand for moorings in the harbour. The waiting lists can be long, for, just like with real estate, Sydneysiders hold on tenaciously to their little piece of the harbour. Even if some hardly ever untie their boat from its mooring.

  I talk with a bloke who is launching a tinny from the shore to row out to his sailboat in Woodford Bay. He’s travelled from the western suburb of Seven Hills, and he regularly makes the journey to go sailing. He is surprised not so much by the number of boats moored in the bay, but how many remain unused.

  ‘I think some have forgotten they even have boats in here,’ he remarks. ‘They don’t move.’

  For half an hour or so, there is one less vessel in Woodford Bay. I pull Pulbah Raider out of the water, so I can get into the water. Jutting out from the bay’s south-west shores are Lucretia Baths. The harbour pool is between an old slipway and a boatshed, with a wooden canoe sticking like a highly varnished insect to one of the walls. On the shore is scattered a marooned armada of dinghies, kayaks and tinnies. A couple of boats are tied to the baths’ protective timber bars, so it is doubling as a marina.

  Although it is a hot day, I have the baths to myself. Tip-toeing across the burning sand, the sting on my soles makes me nostalgic for childhood days at the beach. The baths are about a century old and are considered historically significant, because of their timber paling construction, designed to keep out unwanted flotsam and jetsam – especially those with fins. In the unmown grass on the shore is a plaque explaining these are actually the ‘Jean Mitchell Lucretia Baths’, in honour of her ‘many years of service’ to the baths. They could do with having Jean back, by the look of it. The setting is charmingly unkempt.

  The bottom of the baths is tiled with muddy sand and studded with shells, including the occasional oyster shell. The clammy feeling under foot is only further inducement to start swimming.

  Nancy Phelan, who wrote of her childhood further east on the shores of Middle Harbour in her book A Kingdom by the Sea, recalled swimming in a similar pool in Tarban Creek.

  ‘After our crystalline beach and rock pools these baths were rather frightening, dark and sinister, undisturbed by tides,’ Phelan wrote. ‘There was the sense of something dangerous and slimy in the obscure depths; you dived in with panic and got out as fast as possible, yet with far more excitement than on our wholesome beach.’

  Once I’m floating, any discomfort washes away. At the pool’s end, I can see to the other side of the bay and distant high-rise buildings on the lower North Shore. To the east, I can view the top of that stunning steel arch marking the heart of the harbour. This is the wonderfully democratic element of these harbour pools. You may not exactly swim with the rich – after all, they have their own pools in their harbourside properties – but you’re swimming among the rich.

  Occasionally, that’s not all you’re swimming among. Under the New South Wales Government’s Beachwatch monitoring program, the water quality of a couple of dozen harbour pools and beaches is regularly tested. In one table of results I looked at on the program’s website before heading out, the water in these baths in Woodford Bay was listed as ‘Fair’, which means it is generally suitable for swimming when it is dry. But after rain, the run-off rises, and so do the levels of microbial contamination. I’ve revisited the website after it has rained and have read the warning that pollution was likely and to avoid swimming in the baths. Still, on this day, there’s been no rain, and it’s so hot, the harbour water feels like a blessing.

  Pollution, and the sheer cost and effort of maintenance, has seen a few public pools in the harbour disappear. Paddling along the shores, I’ve also seen the rusting and rotted legacies of private harbour pools that have fallen into disrepair and been abandoned.

  Even so, harbour baths have an enduring allure. When you dive into them, you may be advised to not swallow the water, but most have heightened levels of something you’ll rarely find in a backyard pool: heritage. One harbour pool considered historically significant is just across the river. Woolwich Baths took shape in the first decade of the 1900s. For the local working men and their families, the timber palings and pylons pressed into the harbour bottom defined fun. But it didn’t come for free. The entrance fees helped pay for a caretaker, who lived in a tent besides the baths during the summer. For their money, the swimmers received more than a protective fence; there was a diving tower. Apparently one local, Vincent ‘Ned’ Kelly, developed diving skills at the baths that may have saved his life. While working on Sydney Harbour Bridge during its construction, he fell into the water and survived.

  More than a century on, Woolwich Baths still attract swimmers from near and far. One late summer afternoon, as I paddle past, the waters are bursting with humanity. Children are jumping from the deck, squealing with delight before they shatter the surface. Parents cradle their babies and toddlers in the shallows, and, in the deeper water, a few older swimmers are meditatively doing laps. One of those is Warwick Richardson, from West Ryde, about twenty minutes drive away. Whenever he is in the area, he fits a dip at the baths into his schedule. At least, he does from October to about April.

  ‘I’m a summer swimmer,’ Warwick smiles.

  In the decade or so he has been swimming here, Warwick reckons the water quality is much the same, becoming more turbid after rain but overall fairly clean. What’s more, he feels safe swimming here. The nets keep out sharks and large jellyfish, he says. Not that Warwick thinks about all of that when he’s performing the adagio of laps in the historic harbour pool.

  ‘It’s nice to be in salt water from time to time.’

  IF ONLY the convicts who camped along Woodford Bay, nursing their aching bodies after long days of felling trees or cutting grass for hay, could be brought back from a couple of centuries ago and see these shores now.

  The forbidding bush in which those poor souls toiled has been replaced with some prohibitively expensive homes. Even the boatsheds are impressive. One double-storey shed squatting over the water looks bigger than many terrace houses in the inner city. But the bush has not been totally dominated. As I sit in the kayak, I look at the houses that have sprouted on the slopes around this bay over to the next ‘finger’ of land, Northwood. In spite of all that brick, concrete and steel grafted onto the landscape, this stretch still looks bushy. The eucalypts are hanging on tenaciously amid the big homes, just as they grip the sandstone ledges hanging over the water’s edge. The composition of tree trunks and sandstone sculpted by Mother Nature, the sheds on the shore, the boats in the bay, all washed with water and light, has the beauty and intensity of a piece of art. Indeed, this setting inspired one of Australia’s great landscape artists, Lloyd Rees. For more than half a century, Northwood was Rees’ home, and the bays and bush surrounding it were often the subjects of his art.

  Rees learnt from, and was inspired by, the works of the European masters. You can see that in his highly detailed drawings and rich paintings. But he was besotted by Sydney. You can feel that in just about every image of his adopted hometown. As a 20-year-old from Brisbane, he sailed through the Heads in 1916 and was ‘confronted by the golden sandstone portals of Sydney Harbour’. Lloyd Rees would travel far and wide in his long life, but his vision kept returning to the harbour.

  For a time, Rees lived a few bays to the east at McMahons Point. From the top of his apartment block, he would depict the harbour to Balmain, a
long with the headlands, and he would wander those peninsulas and along the shore, searching for subjects. He didn’t have to search far; it was all before him. Rees’ sketches of the rocks and trunks of Port Jackson figs are like academic studies of muscular torsos.

  In 1934, Rees moved to Northwood, which, back then, felt isolated to the artist. He wondered why there was no corner shop. It may have lacked convenience, but the area nurtured his art.

  On a small knoll of weathered rock above Woodford Bay’s eastern shore is a bronze plaque honouring Rees and etched with a quote of his, ‘If you look for light you find it’.

  On this very spot, Lloyd Rees found light and so much more. This was one of his favourite views, and I can see why. I gaze across the bay, through the yachts’ masts and up the river until the water and landscape are smudged, as though Rees himself has scumbled the view with a paintbrush, just to make it even prettier. Sitting here, I’m looking at more than a beautiful view, thanks to Lloyd Rees’ art. What he created in works such as Three Boats, Lane Cove River is what I see.

  The viewing spot is part of Lloyd Rees Park. I reckon he would like the look of this park. It is not gently undulating with carefully laid paths. Rather, there is no clearly defined path, and it is on a steep slope, peppered with rocks, making it difficult to negotiate. This park seems like a metaphor for pursuing a career in art in Australia. Yet, like a Rees painting, when you look for beauty, you find it. There is a nest of ferns in a gully, dinghies along the shore, and the boats can be seen through the stands of gums and casuarinas. The only thing missing are Rees’ beloved Port Jackson figs.

  At the end of the point, just below where Lloyd Rees sat and sketched, there is a small sandstone shelter and a ferry wharf. Rees said Northwood community life once revolved around the ferries and, until the end of the Second World War, there was a half-hour service until midnight. The artist was saddened by the diminishing role of ferries in his time. He would be thoroughly disheartened now. The Northwood wharf is little more than a fishing platform. While ferries do occasionally stop here, the wharf has no timetable on its noticeboard. But at least along the shoreline are weathered lumps of sandstone. They look like a Lloyd Rees drawing. Or a portrait of Sydney.

  Rees delighted in hopping on a ferry at the Northwood wharf, taking an outside seat at the stern and watching the view slowly unfold. Yet the harbour provided him with more than a source of inspiration for his art. Once, while riding on the ferry, he was struck by where he was and what it meant to him. ‘I looked out upon it all and suddenly I thought: I don’t want to go to Heaven because it can’t be as beautiful as this.’

  In perhaps the cruellest of deprivations for an artist, Lloyd Rees gradually lost his sight. And yet he kept finding the light. The details disappeared from his paintings, and shapes softened and liquefied. But there was still the light, especially the way it sparkled on the harbour. He didn’t need to see to express how he felt, and, in doing so with his paintings, he bestowed on Sydney Harbour, or pulled from its depths, a beauty for the rest of us to view. So whenever I’m paddling on the harbour, and the sun ignites the water until I can see nothing but light and quicksilver, I think of Lloyd Rees.

  FERRIES MAY be rarely spotted on Lane Cove River these days, but you can see an aircraft. Occasionally, as I’ve been paddling in the river, I’ve heard an engine clear its throat and roar to life, and then have watched a seaplane slowly slalom its way through the moored boats, preparing to take off on the harbour. When not turning heads near the mouth of the river, the plane is on a slipway at the foot of a house near Greenwich Point. On either side of it, there are some fine looking boats moored at jetties jutting out from some lovely houses in lush gardens. But as an eye-catching water feature, nothing outdoes a seaplane.

  Along the left bank tracing Greenwich Point are deep shaded glades, and the rocks are coated with oysters. In the midst of multi-million-dollar homes, incredibly expensive boats and a seaplane is a symbol of simple pleasures: a rope hanging from a tree, just waiting for some kids to latch on, swing out, let go and shriek with delight as they plunge into the water. Leaving me with those impressions, Lane Cove River pushes me out of its mouth.

  5

  GREENWICH TO LAVENDER BAY

  GREENWICH ON the River Thames may be associated with measuring time and distance around the globe, but its namesake in Sydney is packed with markers of the past.

  Serried up Greenwich Point are historic homes. One of the more prominent properties is Greenwich House. The sandstone mansion was built on the land of boatbuilder George Green, who subdivided his property, Greenwich Estate, in 1840. His marketing for the subdivision was apparently the first time ‘Greenwich’ had been used.

  Tucked into the cove just beyond the Greenwich Point ferry terminal are the local baths. For more than a century, generations of kids have learnt to swim in this little patch of the harbour, pegged out with protective iron rods. The baths and the raggedy shoreline around Greenwich were more than places to swim; they were cradles of friendships. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, two boys living locally, Paul and Peter, mucked around in the water. The good mates almost drowned once, when the leaky canoe they were in was sinking and they had to be rescued. The world would have never known what it had lost if the harbour had taken those two boys. For in time, both of them would be internationally renowned for playing with words – Paul Brickhill as the author of the bestselling books The Dambusters, Reach for the Sky and The Great Escape, and Peter Finch as an Oscar-winning actor.

  Even Greenwich Point, with a crown made shaggy from all the trees growing on it, is an indicator of how times have changed – and changed again. I’ve seen old photos of the point on the Lane Cove River side, and the slope is bald but for grass. The stripped slope was probably seen as scenic, providing unimpeded views of the water. But the denuded landscape was a deep wound, gashed into the landscape ever since the first gangs of convicts had been sent up the harbour and the river to cut down trees. When the author and ‘emigrant mechanic’ Alexander Harris trudged along the harbour’s northern shore from a timber camp on Lane Cove River, he observed, ‘I could not but take notice of the immense numbers of tree stumps. Each one of these had supplied its barrel to the splitter or sawyer or squarer: and altogether the number seemed countless.’ So on Greenwich Point, at least, parts of the past have been healed over, if not cured.

  As I paddle east along the peninsula, gliding by the baths bubbling with excited kids, time flows not just past the kayak but underneath it.

  About 250 million years ago, the land around what would be Sydney was a basin, which held a huge lake system. Over millions of years, the sandstone that would be Sydney’s bed and give character to its face was formed. Sediment was carried in and dropped by ancient rivers, and then, layer upon layer, it would be compressed. About ninety million years ago, Sydney’s bed was dramatically ruffled, as the earth heaved. The land around Sydney rose, and all the ructions and rifts in the earth cut into the sandstone a rough template for where and how the harbour and the surrounding landscape would take shape.

  Water flowing from higher ground followed the template, slicing through the sandstone. Integral to the harbour’s formation was Parramatta River. The river that is holding me helped carve the Greenwich headland I’m paddling by, and the trench to cradle the harbour.

  Water flowing from the east largely filled the harbour. Seawater poured in and then dropped away a number of times. During the last Great Ice Age, about 15,000 years ago, the ocean was about 140 metres lower than it is now, and today’s Eastern Suburbs would have been outer Western Suburbs; it is estimated the sea was about 30 kilometres east of the Heads. Thousands of years ago, as the last major glaciation ended and the seas rose, the harbour and valleys leading into it filled. So in kayaking Parramatta and Lane Cove rivers, I’ve been paddling in partially drowned valleys.

  The river is about to release me.

  One of the most powerful men in the early colony was William Charles Wen
tworth. Not content to be a lawyer, politician, landowner and media baron, he was also a writer. In 1823, Wentworth penned a paean to the land of his wealth and influence, ‘Australasia’. In his poem, Wentworth rhapsodised how the harbour, on its way to the sea, ‘Fled loath from Parramatta’s am’rous touch’. This must be the first and last time Sydney Harbour has been portrayed as some chaste maiden. I think about Wentworth’s hopelessly romantic verse as I approach Manns Point, and I dunk a hand over the side. The water is warm to the touch, but I’m not feeling any of that amorous quality. Which is just as well, because I’m about to love and leave the river.

  Not that there is any clear line to cross. There is no obvious photo opportunity to have the kayak’s stern in the river and the bow in the harbour. Water knows no such boundaries and respects no borders. However, the stretch of a few hundred metres from Manns Point across to the western shore at Long Nose Point, or Yurulbin Point, at Birchgrove is considered the dividing line between Parramatta River and the harbour. Not that it makes any difference; it flows all into one.

  Along the shore near Manns Point, I spot embedded in a retaining wall a couple of large sandstone blocks that must have once adorned a building. They are etched with fine geometric patterns, and intricate floral designs bloom on the stone. This is the aspect of Sydney Harbour that the tourist advertisements don’t highlight. It is also a graveyard for massacred heritage. To me, those sandstone blocks are a monument to the generations of commercial greed and political bastardry that have shaped so much of the harbour’s shores.