The Harbour Read online

  Time to keep paddling. On the map, the very outline of Manns Point seems to be telling me where to go. It looks like a finger pointing down the harbour. Instead, I trace around the finger into Gore Cove. Not that I can paddle directly into the cove. Just off the finger is a mooring dolphin with a sign attached to it that encourages me to take a wider arc: DANGER. MOORING LINE SNAPBACK AREA. But it’s the ship attached to those mooring lines that is the great persuader. The cove is home to a large oil terminal, and it has been for more than a century.

  ‘The present peaceful suburb of Greenwich promises to become a hive of industry in the near future,’ the press excitedly reported in 1900. ‘A large firm, with headquarters in London and with branches in all parts of the world except Australasia, has obtained the permission of the Lane Cove Council to establish large petroleum works on a site which it has purchased and which has a frontage to the river.’ That firm was Shell. The company initially imported kerosene, and for many years it shipped in crude oil. The oil was transported from the terminal up Parramatta River to its Clyde refinery by barges until a pipeline was installed.

  Just before the terminal opened in 1901, a newspaper reported, ‘The company guarantees that the industry is not of a noxious or offensive character and that the waters of the river will not be polluted.’ Through the years, the terminal has received complaints from residents, ranging from environmental concerns to worry at having something extremely flammable for a neighbour.

  Paddling along the south-western shore, past the twenty or so large tanks sprouting like metallic mushrooms in the curve of the cove, I’m reminded this is how much of the shoreline used to look, hosting industry, but also this is what the harbour used to be: a bustling workplace. This cove is one of the few parts of the harbour where you can still see ships filled with a cargo other than holidaymakers. Often, while paddling around the tip of Berry Island, I’ve been confronted by a great wall of steel, as a tanker slides in or out of the cove. It is an awesome sight to be so close to a ship, as its bow gently nudges aside the harbour, while at its stern the propellers churn the water into a boiling pot of energy. What’s more, as the names on the ships indicate, the furthest reaches of the world, from Hong Kong to Majuro, have floated into this wedge of water.

  On early mornings, I have seen ships disappear like a spell as they slip their lines at the terminal, head down the harbour and sink into the fog. In those moments, I feel as though I’m watching one of those wonderful photos by David Moore of the working harbour in the post-World War Two years lift off the paper and emerge out of the past and the skeins of mist. Moore was a master photographer who had grown up near the harbour, and, throughout his career, he used cameras to capture the movements of ships, and of time, on the water. In many of his black-and-white photos, the harbour looked dirtier, but undeniably busier, with smoke chuffing from the funnels of vessels of all sizes, as well as from factory stacks on the shore. Even the light seemed to become tangled in the thick air levitating over the water. But that’s gone now. By the time the fog lifts, the ship will be out to sea, and the light can settle unimpeded by funnel smoke on a harbour cut mostly by pleasure cruisers.

  This cove once cradled ships to be scrapped. Among those sent here to die and be dismembered was the sailing ship Sobraon. After many years carrying passengers and cargo between Australia and Britain, the three-masted Sobraon was moored off Cockatoo Island and became a training ship for disadvantaged boys in 1891. Twenty years later, she was given a new life and new name, HMAS Tingira, serving as a naval training ship. After 1927, Tingira, which is an indigenous word meaning ‘open sea’, was paid off and the ship mouldered in nearby Berrys Bay before making its way to its grave in Gore Cove, where she was broken up in the 1940s. Yet Sobraon was reincarnated to sail again. Or, at least, parts of her were recycled. When the renowned boatbuilders, the Halvorsen brothers, were constructing their yacht Peer Gynt, they used teak decking from the wreck of Tingira.

  As I trace the shoreline, the tanks and pipelines surrender to bush and sandstone outcrops. Unlike most inlets and bays around the harbour, the head of Gore Cove has not been lopped off, filled in and turned into a park. I paddle through a thick band of mangroves, picking my way towards the sound of trickling water. I reach the end of the cove, where a creek trips through a bush-arched gully into the harbour. Some things in here have changed, however. This waterway has grown, in name at least, from ‘cove’ to ‘bay’. These days it is often referred to as Gore Bay. The shoreline to my left, as I paddle out of the mangroves and back down the cove – sorry, bay – still wears a name that is no longer true: Berry Island.

  The island was part of the estate owned by an entrepreneur who came to be one of the wealthiest men in the colony, Alexander Berry. The Scottish-born Berry was a ship’s surgeon for a time, but he moved into the mercantile world. After an initial venture in 1808 when he arrived in Sydney with thousands of litres of grog, Berry returned a decade later and put down roots. He had gone into business with another merchant, Edward Wollstonecraft. The pair set up an operation in the north-west corner of Sydney Cove, just above the mudflats. Berry and Wollstonecraft sought more land by water; they headed south, and in 1822 they applied for, and received, thousands of hectares of land around Shoalhaven River. What they felled or grazed on their estates they could transport in their ships and sell in Sydney.

  More than business partners, Wollstonecraft and Berry became neighbours in Sydney. In the early 1820s, Wollstonecraft was granted land on the harbour’s northern shores, 212 hectares (‘exclusive of rocks and sand’) that he called Crow’s Nest Farm, because of its views of the harbour and surrounding countryside. More than offering views, Wollstonecraft’s grant stretched to the water. Berry obtained a grant of 28 hectares next to Wollstonecraft’s, and his land also tumbled down the gullies to the harbour. His grant included a small island that reconnected itself to the northern shore by a sandy isthmus at low tide. The pair also became brothers-in-law. In 1827, Berry married Wollstonecraft’s sister Elizabeth.

  Edward Wollstonecraft died in 1832, and his property was given to Berry. On the estate’s fringe, Berry built a stone wharf and four-storey warehouse, and in his fleet of small ships was one named Edward. He and Elizabeth lived in Crow’s Nest Cottage, originally built for Wollstonecraft, ‘on the brow of a ridge overlooking the Harbour, Town, & Botany Bay to the South’. When they built a larger home in the early 1840s, they also called it Crow’s Nest.

  Berry’s wealth afforded him great influence in politics and business, and it fuelled significant enemies. He was attacked in the newspapers and the parliament by another powerful figure, the Reverend John Dunmore Lang, for being greedy and an oppressor of the poor: ‘even Mr Berry should have said, “I have got enough land, now let other people get a little also”.’ Yet a lot of land was never enough for the ‘Laird o’ Crow’s Nest’. By the time he died in 1873, Alexander Berry was the owner of the largest freehold estate in the colony, and he was worth more than £1.2 million, an eye-popping figure for the 19th century, and a phenomenal inheritance for his brother David.

  Beyond place names, the legacies of Alexander Berry are sprinkled around the lower North Shore, notably the pyramid-shaped monument above his remains, and those of his wife and brother-in-law, in St Thomas’ Rest Park. People picnic and play in the shadow of Berry’s memory.

  For those who prefer not to picnic with the dead, there is Berry Island. After all, Berry used to picnic here. He joined his small island to the rest of his holding by building a stone causeway on the sandy isthmus. In 1906, the island was transferred to the State Government, as part of an exchange for the building of a hospital in the Shoalhaven town of Berry, in accordance with the will of David Berry. The mud flats on either side of the causeway were gradually filled in to create the lawns that people now relax and party on. Occasionally, the reserve is an unofficial camping spot. One morning, while lifting my kayak out of the water, I chatted to three young German backpackers, two women and a
man, who had pitched a tent in the fringe of bush by the water. ‘Yes, we stayed there,’ said one of the women. ‘We don’t know if it’s legal, but it’s beautiful!’ In Sydney, if it has a view and there’s room for a tent or, better still, a beaten-up campervan, you will almost certainly find backpackers. And no number of council signs or censorious looks from locals will dissuade them. Yet it is one of the mysteries of nature how backpackers can find their way to the remotest of harbour spots that most Sydneysiders don’t know of, let alone have ever visited. Then again, maybe it’s not such a mystery. ‘Google maps,’ shrugged the young German man.

  On the eastern side of the ‘island’ is Balls Head Bay, which includes a couple of smaller coves. Long before backpackers pitched their tents, others camped around here. In the early 20th century, artists from The Bulletin magazine had a campsite, giving them somewhere far but near to sketch and paint in the landscape. And before all of them, the Cammeraygal people lived along these shores. The oysters that helped feed many generations also provided the name of the cove here. The shores hold the Wondakiah residential development, but amid the hives of apartments are a few concessions to the site’s past, with a chimney and old brick buildings. Oyster Cove was home to a succession of industries, including a sugar refinery, a kerosene plant, and, from the early 1900s, a large gasworks.

  The wharf that was once integral to industry in Oyster Cove is now a promenade. With people strolling above, I paddle under the wharf, among the concrete piers. A few birds are flittering about, and the sound of the water swells and bounces off the concrete. I turn and look out at the light-washed harbour. All that has happened above – the industries, the apartments – doesn’t matter; for right now, sitting in here, it is just me and the water. Not even a backpacker is in sight.

  Neighbouring Wondakiah is the HMAS Waterhen naval base. Waterhen is fairly unassuming, tucked into the cove and flanked by two bushy headlands. Minehunters can be seen ploughing the harbour as they head in and out of the bay. When the grey shapes glide by, they can look menacing. But that sense quickly fizzles when, as happened one morning while I sat in the kayak waiting for HMAS Gascoyne to pass, an officer on the bridge gives you a wave. The base’s long finger wharves reach back to a cluster of buildings hunkering under a cliff. What was sliced from the landscape here was used to shape another naval base. When the graving dock was being built at Garden Island, rock was quarried on this site and transported down the harbour. The Waterhen site was used during the Second World War by both the Australian and United States navies. These days the base is the main home for the RAN’s mine warfare facilities.

  As if the presence of navy ships doesn’t hold the promise of a secure place to berth, the landscape curling around the bay offers protection. Even if the wind is ruffling the harbour, it can be fairly still in here. What’s more, while the CBD’s crown can be seen over Balls Head to the east, it can feel wonderfully distant in the bay. As a result, Balls Head Bay draws in yachties.

  On a stunning day, under a sky freshly rinsed and blue, I paddle past a catamaran in the bay. From its mast an Australian flag flutters, but at the stern, the Stars and Stripes are riding the gentle breeze. I see a woman on the aft deck, we chat, and she introduces herself as Pam. Her husband, Eric, appears. I’m guessing they’re in their 60s, but they have a vitality that makes them seem much younger. They invite me on board.

  ‘Sorry about the washing,’ Pam says. A string of clothes along the deck and a couple of waterproof jackets hanging at the bow are waltzing in the light breeze. I ask if there’s a washing machine on board. ‘There it is.’ She points to a five-gallon bucket. ‘It’s actually good exercise.’

  This 38-foot catamaran, Pied a Mer III, is Eric and Pam Sellix’s world. And it’s taken them half way around the world. They are from a small town, Clatskanie, in Oregon.

  ‘It’s a river town,’ they explain, as we sit in the catamaran’s saloon. Clatskanie is a sea-going community of sorts; Alaskan fishermen live in the town in the off-season. Not that Pam and Eric had thoughts of heading to sea. Pam had trained as a teacher and Eric, a Vietnam veteran, as an electrical engineer. They ran restaurants together. They liked their life in Clatskanie.

  ‘I was never going to move out of my home,’ says Pam, ‘let alone cross the ocean. It wasn’t my dream.’

  ‘It wasn’t even mine,’ adds Eric, who had done some sailing.

  ‘I couldn’t see the point,’ says Pam.

  After the global financial crisis in 2008, Eric and Pam decided to downsize. They sold up most of their possessions and had a catamaran built on the other side of the world – in Wollongong, south of Sydney. They took delivery of their catamaran in 2010, and a couple of years later, they declared, ‘we’re going sailing’. They’ve been sailing ever since.

  They cruised off Mexico, sailed up to Canada and, in March 2015, they set off across the Pacific, island hopping, until they finally reached Australia, making landfall in Newcastle, before sailing down to Sydney.

  ‘When we came through the Heads, I was just glad to be here,’ exclaims Pam. ‘I didn’t think we’d ever get here. Sailing through the Heads made it real, but not as real as seeing the Opera House and the Bridge!’

  Sailing in, Eric was particularly surprised by the numbers of moored boats.

  ‘Obviously, even if you’ve never been on the harbour, a lot of Sydney residents think they’re going to be, judging by all the boats here!’

  The couple had moored in a few coves around the harbour before dropping anchor in Balls Head Bay, which, Eric reckons, is ‘one of the nicest, cleanest places we’ve been’. In the few months they’ve been in the harbour, Eric and Pam have been absorbing Sydney experiences on the water. They’ve watched the start of the Sydney to Hobart race. They observed the curious episode of a pleasure boat running ashore at a nudist beach, and the bathers wading out to help the stricken boaties. They’ve sat on their boat with Australian friends they’d met on their voyages and stared at the night sky blossoming on New Year’s Eve. And Pam has been riding the ferries. They make for a leisurely change after the catamaran.

  ‘Oh, I like to use the ferries,’ she enthuses. ‘I don’t have to work then when I’m on the water!’

  Eric and Pam intend to keep sailing, back across the Pacific, and then over to the Atlantic, to Europe, to wherever their catamaran takes them.

  ‘I think we very well might sail for as many years as we can,’ says Eric.

  And they will sail ‘home’ to Oregon, adds Pam, before she hesitates and looks around the well-ordered world within the catamaran. She smiles, perhaps thinking about the sum of their adventures, before she murmurs with satisfaction, ‘This is home.’

  JUST ACROSS the water, at the foot of Balls Head, two chapters of Australian maritime history remain afloat and are being gradually restored by supporters. Cape Don is a former tender that was built in Newcastle, commissioned in 1963, and spent a quarter of a century on the seas, helping service manned lighthouses, mostly off the Western Australian coast. Now Cape Don sits, docile, at an old wharf. Her white paint is spattered and mottled with rust, and a loading crane’s jib bows to the deck.

  Berthed at the stern of Cape Don is one of the beautiful old workhorses of the harbour, Baragoola. The ferry was built only a couple of kilometres away at Mort’s Dock. Baragoola was launched in 1922, and for sixty years, she carried passengers on the legendary run between Circular Quay and Manly. Through those six decades, she rode over all manner of obstacles that both the ocean and developing technology tossed at her. She survived the conversion from steam to diesel, massive waves and high winds tearing through the Heads, collisions with other boats, and even banging into a whale in the harbour. But time itself eventually stopped Baragoola, and she ended up in Balls Head Bay. Paddling close to her and looking up at the curling wave of iron, Baragoola still looks powerful and majestic. She is tethered, but she is rarely still. The old ferry rocks slightly whenever a set of small waves is pushed through by a passin
g vessel. She makes a low rubbing sound, as though the harbour is scratching her belly, when she rises a little, then there’s the sound of water trickling off her hull.

  The ships are in better shape than the old timber wharf in front of them. A rusting steel barrier girdles the wharf’s base, and there are signs warning people not to go underneath it. Not that you need any signs. It looks forbidding enough; with so many planks missing from the deck, sunlight is peppered through the wharf on to the water. The structure was built about 1917 as part of a coal storage and loading facility.

  When industry began grinding its way towards Balls Head, there was an outcry. The prospect of this dramatically beautiful landmark being defaced with a coal loader provoked a protest from the most famous poet in the land and sometime resident of nearby Waverton, Henry Lawson. Not only did Lawson write to a local paper, voicing his opposition to what he considered vandalism of the North Shore, he also composed a poem, ‘The Sacrifice of Ball’s Head’:

  They’re taking it, the shipping push,

  As all the rest must go –

  The only spot of cliff and bush

  That harbour people know.

  The spirit of the past is dead,

  North Sydney has no soul –

  The State is cutting down Ball’s Head

  To make a wharf for coal.

  Lawson predicted the ‘grimy trucks’ and the ‘soulless cranes’ dumping their ‘grimy loads’ would bring an end to the natural beauty and spoil the place where ‘boating couples land’.

  No more our eyes shall be relieved

  In the city’s garish day –

  A sordid crime has been achieved!

  And none has ought to say.

  Eloquence and indignation helped protect some of the headland, which was declared a public reserve in the 1920s. But industry had its way on the western face. The coal loader was built and operated for more than seventy years. Bulk carriers offloaded their cargo at the finger wharf, and the coal was stockpiled on a large platform near the top of the hill. Underneath, tunnels had been crafted, and coal-heaped skips rolled on rails through them. The tunnels are still there, and you can now walk through them, deep in the soul of Balls Head, towards the sliver of light on the other side. On top of the hill, there are a few old buildings. In a delicious irony, what were facilities for handling fossil fuel have been converted into a centre for environmental sustainability.