The Harbour Page 22

  After the fire, Luna Park was closed for a couple of years, and for a time its future was threatened. Peter was instrumental in the formation of the Friends of Luna Park. He thought it was vital Luna Park survived. This wild nest of popular culture, with its wide-eyed face at the entrance, stares across the water to the soaring home of high culture, the Opera House. To lose Luna Park, Peter reckons, would have lessened the very look of Sydney Harbour.

  ‘I think it’s amazingly important,’ argues Peter. ‘The relationship between the Opera House, Luna Park and the Bridge – along with the wharves and the ferries – makes Sydney very special. They’re all the anchor points, aren’t they?

  ‘But there was also a great fear of what would replace it.’

  Peter points to the wall of luxury apartment blocks looming over Luna Park. The site could have easily ended up being buried under high-rise buildings. With the support of enthusiasts such as Peter, a listing on the State Heritage Register, and legislation to protect the site passed by the New South Wales Parliament in 1990, Luna Park lives on.

  In Peter’s eyes, the park isn’t quite what it was. However, in his art, Peter Kingston has restored the Luna Park he remembers. In his studio, downstairs from where we’re sitting, he has created images that have boisterous life crawling all over them; the rides, the crowds, the sense of abandon, Kingo has them all going off like a party popper across the paper. More than being just for fun, his Luna Park works seem to pay homage to the art of Arthur Barton. Yet the title of one etching indicates that it is not all joie de vivre for Peter: Au Revoir Old Luna Park.

  ‘I’m glad it’s there,’ Peter shrugs, as he peers towards Luna Park. ‘I can’t imagine that not being there.’

  From his studio window, Peter can see the harbour. He doesn’t always like what he sees, or what he can no longer see. In the bay is one of the old wooden ferries that transported passengers across the harbour to the Quay for decades. Peter fought for the service to be retained, but it finally ended in 2003. A couple of the little ferries were given another life as charter vessels, but Peter wonders how much longer they will stay on the water.

  The working harbour remains in Peter Kingston’s images. Tugs skitter across the water, and the ferries plough on, through grey days and into the night, their shapes like phantoms, made barely visible by their lights that dribble onto the dark harbour. Peter adores the old ferries.

  ‘They’re well built, well made, they’re beautiful, they add to the furniture of the harbour, like the cable cars in San Francisco.’

  Unlike his former neighbour Brett Whiteley’s sensual depictions of the harbour and life by Lavender Bay, Peter Kingston’s images are often pensive, varnished with melancholy. They are an evocative lament for what is disappearing from the harbour.

  ‘It’s not really a working harbour anymore. I think it’s sad. Its diversity, things to draw and paint . . .’

  Still, some aspects of harbour life have changed for the better. In 1973, Peter starred in, and co-produced, a short film inspired by one of his comic book heroes, The Phantom. In Fanta, Peter plays a young man who imagines himself as The Phantom. His neighbour, Wendy Whiteley, has a major role, and so does Lavender Bay. Watching Peter Kingston’s character sitting on a ferry, I notice three marked differences between then and now. He is sitting on wooden bench seats, he is smoking, and he throws a match out the window into the water.

  ‘Did I now?’ Peter asks, when I mention the littering scene.

  ‘Times have changed, haven’t they? You rarely see people chuck something into the harbour these days. It’s the rise of consciousness, isn’t it?’

  The harbour will remain Peter Kingston’s muse ‘till the end, will always be’. He can’t imagine living, or painting, anywhere else.

  ‘I really wouldn’t know where to go,’ Peter shrugs, as his gaze drifts off through the space between the coral trees to Coney Island and its crazy onion dome.

  WHILE I kayak along the shores of Lavender Bay and look up at the wall of apartments on the ridge, the words of Peter Kingston spring to mind.

  ‘Have you ever seen a more miserable group of buildings?’

  Yes, I have. But the cool aloofness of many of the apartments seems at odds with the sounds in the air, as shrieks of laughter and fright, and warped phrases of rock music, are flung out from the rides at Luna Park.

  The new residents and the old fun fair have been awkward neighbours at times, with complaints about the park. Yet I imagine the annoyance of some apartment dwellers would seem like a model of tolerance compared with the reaction of James Milson, if he could see Luna Park.

  Milson was the first permanent British settler in North Sydney. After arriving as a free emigrant in 1806, he secured land on the peninsula now named after him. Milson complained about his land being only rocks and stones but he was advised that was as good as money; they could be sold as ballast to the ships. Milson soon grasped the idea that in this young colony, you made the most of what you had, and soon you would make something of yourself. He sold to ships’ crews fruit and vegetables, and, with the establishment of a dairy farm on his land, milk.

  The first recorded burials on the North Shore occurred on Milson’s land. Three crew members of the visiting ship Surry died of smallpox in 1814. In time, the headstones were uprooted and used in the construction of cottages on Milsons Point but were retrieved when the buildings were demolished to make way for the Sydney Harbour Bridge. While he accommodated the dead on his land, Milson was less appreciative of those swimming at the beaches on what he considered his piece of the harbour. If he were still here, how would he cope with hordes of revellers at an amusement park on what had been his land?

  Visitors arrive at Luna Park not just for fun, but also to get married, attend concerts and conferences, and even to dine out in an eye-bulging pop-up restaurant. The carriages on the Ferris wheel are converted into mobile private dining rooms. Yet many still turn up for the rides. In school holidays, the crowds queue out of the entrance, putting their money where its mouth is.

  Other visitors head for neighbouring North Sydney Olympic Pool, which was built soon after Luna Park opened. Dozens of world records were set in this pool, which hosted the swimming events for the 1938 Empire Games. These days, people go there to slow down time, swimming outdoors, glancing at the harbour right beside them as they stroke out their laps.

  Long before it became a relaxation destination, Milsons Point was a hub for ferries. By the late 19th century, the vessels were steaming across the harbour around the clock. There were also large ferries carrying carts and livestock. The passenger ferries servicing Milsons Point and Lavender Bay had their own wharf at Circular Quay and an elaborate terminal on the North Shore. The Milsons Point complex was built in 1886. It featured a stunning leadlight window, welcoming passengers as they headed under the arched roof. The terminal’s construction coincided with the introduction of a cable tram service, delivering people from further up the North Shore to it, and those numbers only grew when the rail line was extended to Milsons Point in 1893.

  Thousands of commuters poured onto the harbour in the morning and were disgorged onto the North Shore of an evening. The artist Lloyd Rees, who lived nearby, recalled the ‘great evening rush’ of passengers from the Milsons Point terminal to the trains and trams.

  ‘Young men in their dozens line the sides [of the ferry], poised to jump at the earliest safe moment (sometimes they misjudge and go home wet),’ Rees recalled.

  You wouldn’t want to end up in the water around Milsons Point; it seems to be always cantankerous. No matter if the day is still and the harbour seems calm wherever else you look, the water here forms into little fists and punches the seawall. Worse, it grabs the kayak and contemptuously shoves it around. Pulbah Raider is usually content in the harbour. But at Milsons Point, as I deal with the churn, I feel I’d be better off in a sea kayak – or a ferry.

  The washing-machine effect is exacerbated by the water being funnelled between
Milsons Point and Dawes Point on the southern shore. This is among the narrowest parts of the main harbour. And nearby is some of its deepest water, up to about 45 metres. All sorts of things are down there. In 2015, the Port Authority discovered on the floor near Blues Point a ship’s propeller, with each blade about 1.5 metres long. The authority speculated the propeller had been dumped, and the culprit was probably aiming for a hole on the harbour floor but missed.

  Despite the churn and wash, when paddling past Milsons Point, I tend to look not down but up. I stare at a sky of steel.

  SYDNEY HARBOUR Bridge carries more than vehicles and pedestrians. It carries expensive advertising and marketing campaigns, breathless superlatives from tourists, and the demands of Sydneysiders for it to be simultaneously a piece of gleaming costume jewellery and an unmistakable identity badge for their city. In short, it carries the weight of the world’s expectations and emotions. It’s a wonder the Bridge doesn’t collapse into the harbour.

  Yet whenever you lay eyes on the Bridge, it is so transfixing, you not only feel as though you’re the first to ever see it, you’re overcome with a televangelist’s urge to tell everyone else about it. Sydneysiders who can barely remember their phone number are able to rattle off the vital statistics of the Bridge. Which is why the resigned tone of Sydney’s great poet, Kenneth Slessor, is so funny. In his otherwise loving essay, ‘A Portrait of Sydney’, Slessor concedes the Bridge ‘elbows itself into any description of Sydney as truculently as it forces its presence on the city’. Slessor then takes a big breath, presses his tongue into his cheek, and spews figures: ‘The Bridge is 20 miles high, weighs 736,000 Persian Yakmans (which is roughly equivalent to 24,000,000 Turkish yusdrums), is 142 miles, 17 rods, 23 poles, 5 perches in length, carries everything from rickshaws to electric buggies, and feeds on paint.’

  Actually, Sydney Harbour Bridge is 134 metres high, from the water to the top of the arch, its steel weighs 52,800 tonnes, which may well be 736,000 Persian Yakmans, and it is 1149 metres long, including the approaches. As Slessor proclaims, the Bridge has carried everything, perhaps even rickshaws. As an infant, it fed on paint. About 272,000 litres of paint were used in the first three coats applied to the structure. Contrary to Slessor’s assertion, the Bridge has never had to truculently force its presence on the city. A bridge has been there, in the imagination of Sydneysiders and visitors, long before there was the Bridge.

  Erasmus Darwin was a British man of many skills: naturalist, philosopher, physician and poet. His verse, ‘Visit of Hope to Sydney Cove, near Botany Bay’, written in 1789, just a year after the arrival of the First Fleet, suggested Darwin may have been a prophet as well. Darwin was inspired to write his poem after a friend and colleague, the master potter Josiah Wedgwood, showed him an engraving of a medallion he proposed to mould from the first clay sent back from the new colony. Wedgwood produced his renowned ‘Sydney Cove Medallion’, with its image of the figure of Hope being met on the harbour shores by Peace, Art and Labour. At that time, Sydney dirt could barely produce enough to feed the wretched souls sent to live here, but it could nurture art.

  In his poem, amid the lyrical description of Sydney Cove’s ‘lucid bosom’ swelling, Darwin foresees a great city rising by, and over, the harbour. He writes of ‘embellished villas’, ‘tall spires, and dome-capped towers’, ‘piers and quays’, and:

  There the proud arch, colossus-like, bestride

  Yon glittering streams, and bound the chasing

  Tide . . .

  Darwin imagined this harbour city from afar; he never visited Sydney. But his grandson did. Charles Darwin sailed into Sydney Harbour in January 1836, on board HMS Beagle, as part of its round-the-world surveying voyage. Australia, especially its wildlife, apparently had a profound influence on Darwin’s thinking towards his world-changing theory of evolution by natural selection. Comparing the strange animals to the fauna of the Northern Hemisphere, he mused they couldn’t have all been the work of one creator. The young scientist was also impressed by the evolution of Sydney, writing back to England that his grandfather had prophesied most truly in his poem. However, there was no proud arch bestriding the harbour. The Bridge was still almost a century into the future.

  In the early days of the colony there was talk of a harbour bridge. In 1815, Francis Greenway, the man who helped put Sydney on surer footings and spruced up its face with the buildings he designed, proposed a bridge to Governor Macquarie. A decade later, Greenway suggested a bridge from ‘Dawes Battery to the North Shore’, to encourage development on both sides of the harbour and as a symbol ‘that would have reflected credit and glory on the colony and the Mother Country’.

  Through the years, all manner of designs were drawn up and presented to the government. Politicians and major landholders on the North Shore, in particular, lobbed proposals over the water. A People’s Bridge League was formed, then a Sydney and North Shore Junction League, which suggested building a bridge or a tunnel, or both. And all the while, the ferries kept running, as more and more relied on water transport.

  By 1908, thirteen million passengers a year were being carried across the harbour by five major ferry companies. The ferries would line up in Circular Cove, awaiting a berth, as seventy-five vessels docked there each hour. A decade on, it was estimated that in one year, there were about 7,500,000 passenger journeys from the Milsons Point and McMahons Point–Lavender Bay ferry terminals alone. The pressure on the transport system had been the source of commuter complaints and was considered in a royal commission into the improvement of the city and suburbs in 1908 and 1909. Many passengers believed no bridge would be built until there was a ferry disaster and lives were lost.

  Yet while people despaired at the increasingly clogged harbour and the yawning gap between the shores, and as politicians kept talking, an engineer was looking at the possibilities. John Job Crew Bradfield had sailed into Sydney Harbour from Queensland in the 1880s to study engineering. As a draftsman and engineer, he tested the various designs for a bridge when the government called for tenders, only for the plans to never leave the paper. By 1912, Bradfield was the Chief Engineer of the Harbour Bridge, along with the city’s railway network. He pursued plans for a cantilever bridge. Yet a decade on, after overseas study trips, the shape of his plans was changing; he could see a great arch spanning the harbour from Dawes Point to Milsons Point. In 1922, the sum of Bradfield’s investigations and planning helped prod political will to finally pass the Sydney Harbour Bridge Bill. For Bradfield, this had been the unrequited love of his life, but, as he wrote determinedly in his diary, ‘I will see my Romance of the Bridge become a Reality’. Perhaps the romance was buttressed by the reality of being a long-suffering commuter. Bradfield lived on the North Shore.

  The following year, tenders were called once more, and work actually began on preparing the approaches to the bridge. On a drenched day in July 1923, thousands gathered in the rain in North Sydney to watch local and state politicians, and Bradfield, preside over the turning of the first sod. That slight irruption of soil was but the start of a swathe of destruction to tear through North Sydney, and a community on the other side of the harbour at Dawes Point.

  Life was thickly packed around Milsons Point, with terraces, boarding houses and flats, and small businesses. The clustering of commuters and workers around North Sydney had not impressed one sometime-local, the poet Henry Lawson. He wrote verses about the rush for the ferry in ‘The North Shore Business Girl’, while in ‘Old North Sydney’, he lamented that the area’s community spirit had been lost to accommodate more ‘busy strangers’:

  But the Spirit of North Sydney,

  It vanished long ago.

  No one listened to the poet. Old North Sydney kept shifting. As work on the Bridge picked up pace, hundreds of the area’s residents and shopkeepers received a letter telling them their lives were to be upturned: ‘Sir, I hereby, as Agent for the Minister Public Works, your landlord, and on his behalf, give you notice to quit and deliver up poss
ession of the house and premises . . . ’. Within a few years, nearly 500 houses had been demolished and businesses shut. Many locals received nothing to compensate them, other than ‘removal expenses’ for tenants pushed out. A community was being reduced to rubble and ghosts. The commuters lost their ornate terminus. By its very design and architecture, the arcade and ferry building at Milsons Bay had always looked less like a place where things came to an end but where something grand began. But for the building, and for many of the ferries which used the terminal, the Bridge spelt the end. The ferry arcade was demolished, disappearing under what would be the Bridge’s northern pylon.

  The grave of a community demolished is in a park just near the Milsons Point railway station. Sandstone kerbs that once defined a lane and a street cut across the park like scars. The footings of buildings long gone are also visible, and now that they’ve been inscribed with their street name and number, they look like headstones. Through the trees in the park, you can see what pushed the homes and businesses into the earth; the stone edifice of the Bridge’s northern pylon, and part of the arch. The ground in which these remnants lie is named after the man who oversaw the need for these buildings and their inhabitants to go: Bradfield Park.

  A few hundred metres away, Christ Church has fared better. The sandstone building has stood on the same ground since the 1870s. The harbour views from here are glorious. You can see the structure that carried so much change into this church and suburb. In the 1920s, the Rector of Christ Church, the Reverend Frank Cash, reflected on the change happening around him. The congregation was fast dwindling, as homes and businesses disappeared. A keen photographer, he captured on film what was being lost. Frank Cash turned his point of proximity into an opportunity to record history. As he later wrote, ‘A telephone call, that a fine wall was coming down in five minutes; or a demolisher coming soon after seven o’clock in the morning, with a hurried message, “come on, we are waiting,” speak plainly of the privileges of living on the ground.’