The Harbour Read online

‘And I think it should remain an open parkland, somewhere you can walk your dog,’ Peter says, looking down at a panting Chloe.

  ‘But the river links it all.’

  LEAVING THE bay cradling the former hospital grounds, I stop at Bedlam Point for a drink of water. But I’m hardly the first to pull in along here for a break.

  ‘We stoped [sic] at a Neck of land to Breakfast,’ wrote Lieutenant William Bradley in his journal, on 15 February 1788. Bradley was among the crew in boats journeying up this river with the colony’s founding governor, Arthur Phillip.

  It had been less than three weeks since Phillip had stepped ashore at Sydney Cove with almost 1500 other souls to found the penal colony. In that time, the Governor had barely scratched the surface in establishing a transplanted community. But scratching the surface of the soil around the cove was enough to convince Phillip he had to find more suitable land for farming.

  The exploration party’s breakfast spot by the river had been a place of nourishment for thousands of years for the Wallumedegal people, who lived on the river’s northern side. The men speared fish from the bank, and the women guided bark canoes across the river and used hooks and lines to catch a feed.

  The original inhabitants and the explorers met on the headland just across from Bedlam Point. Those two headlands marked the entrance to a bay off the river. Bradley recorded their meeting with a ‘Native arm’d’. He noted how the Wallumedegal man was very curious and carefully examined the boats and their contents.

  ‘The Governor gave this Man a hatchet & a looking glass,’ Bradley wrote, ‘which, when he looked into, he looked immediately behind the Glass to see if any person was there, & then pointed to the Glass and the shadows which he saw in the water, signifying they were similar.’

  As a result of that meeting, both the cove and the western neck of land at its entrance received new names: Looking Glass Bay and Looking Glass Point. As for the other knoll at the bay’s entrance, it would become known as Bedlam Point. This point was part of a vital link across the Parramatta River, and in the development of the colony. As settlers pushed further north, the Hunter Valley was opened up. That heightened the need for a land route between Sydney and the Hunter; relying on shipping was not enough. From 1826, gangs of convicts hacked and picked through the bush to form the Great North Road. In spite of toiling in terrain as tough and indifferent to suffering as many of their overseers, the gangs managed to bend the will of Mother Nature and built a road. But in places along the 264-kilometre route, nature was not about to be bowed by the lash of human endeavour. Parramatta River brought the road to a halt. Planners plotted a way across the river, so that travellers didn’t have to journey upriver to present-day Ryde, or as far as Parramatta, to cross. The colony’s Surveyor-General Thomas Mitchell searched for the best place to operate a punt and determined the narrowest part of the river along this reach was from Bedlam Point to Abbotsford, a distance of 220 yards (201 metres). Yet even when so short a distance is involved, it can still take a long time to turn a recommendation into reality. It took more than three years and many complaints from farmers beyond the northern bank of Parramatta River before the punt was operating.

  But it was rarely a relaxed crossing. The puntman had to haul the vessel across by pulling on chains or rope tethered to the banks. The work was so heavy that passengers usually had to help. Occasionally the punt was left stranded in the stream. W.S. Campbell, the son of the Medical Superintendent at the nearby asylum, recalled how passing steamers or large sailing boats would sometimes snag and snap the punt’s haulage rope, ‘causing great delays and much strong language and worry, until the ends could be fished up and spliced’.

  Protruding from the point into the river is a low wall of old sandstone blocks. They are the remains of a wharf built in the 1830s. The blocks wear the marks of their makers, for the stone would have been cut and the wharf built by convicts. Walking up the track from the bank, I’m roughly following the route taken by travellers almost two centuries earlier. Over the rise is a stone cottage, restored and resplendent above Looking Glass Bay. The cottage is called Rockend. The building looks sturdy; its origins are shaky. Just when Rockend was built, and why, is debated. It may have been an inn at one stage, trying to lure travellers on the Great North Road. It could have been built in the 1840s, perhaps the 1850s. What is certain is that Rockend was a boyhood home of one of Australia’s best-known poets, Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson.

  Paterson’s maternal grandmother, Emily Mary Barton, owned the property. She gave the house its name, and she developed her grandson’s love of literature and told him stories about the wider world. Rockend became a gathering place and home for her children and grandchildren, including Andrew. He was a country kid, growing up on Illalong Station, near Yass in southern New South Wales, and he had attended bush schools. From the age of twelve, Andrew was sent to Sydney for schooling and lived with his grandmother. Andrew would catch the ferry at the bottom of the hill to Sydney Grammar. He was keen on sports that allowed him to be on or by Parramatta River – boating and fishing – for, in a way, it connected him to the country life he missed. As he would later write in one of his poems, ‘the man who’s born a bushman, he gets mighty sick of town’. Paterson returned to the farm on holidays. But the city was where he lived for many years, working as a solicitor after completing his education. However, Paterson’s imagination would go wandering in verse. Andrew, in print, became ‘The Banjo’, taking his nom de plume from the name of a horse back on the farm. Inevitably he would be drawn to the rhythm, imagery and stories of the bush, creating not just characters in verse but sketching what his readers perceived to be the very character of Australia in poems such as ‘The Man from Snowy River’ and ‘Clancy of the Overflow’. And Banjo helped turn the tale of a sheep-stealing swagman who kills himself into a rallying cry that metamorphosed into an unofficial anthem in ‘Waltzing Matilda’.

  While his words roamed the Australian countryside and were recited far and wide, the writer himself had been exposed to a broader education at Rockend. It helped lead him out into the world, as a journalist and Boer War correspondent. So no matter where he went and what he wrote, it’s interesting to try to read between the lines the lessons learnt in his grandmother’s house. And perhaps what also helped open Paterson’s ears to the cadences of life was the environment below the cottage. Or, to use the poet’s own words:

  The song of the river

  That sings as it passes

  For ever and ever.

  While Banjo’s ballads were assured of immortality, the cottage where Australia’s best-known poet had lived and had developed some of his ideas seemed doomed.

  The view from the back of the cottage had been radically changed in 1923, when a linseed oil producer, Harold Meggitt, bought Rockend and established a factory along the eastern shore of Looking Glass Bay. It was one of the few factories built on Parramatta River’s northern bank. The historic cottage was used as the company office. A 30-metre high silo, emblazoned with the company’s logo, was built on the waterfront. Land was reclaimed and a wharf built. The factory operated until 1974.

  The plan was for the 2.5 hectare site to be cleared for an apartment complex and marina. The cottage was to be demolished. But residents and the local council fought the proposal and eventually won. In 1979, the State Government agreed to buy the property, and it was to be parkland. At a time when battles to save historic properties from developers were raging on many fronts, this was seen as a watershed in public and official attitudes towards conservation. Physically saving the cottage was a longer battle still. Rockend had become, according to the committee which had joined the fight to save it, a burnt and ragged wreck. The cottage’s interior had been stripped and vandalised, and its grounds overgrown.

  As Rockend was restored, the cottage’s future use was uncertain. In the end, it became a restaurant, but the building is also a museum of sorts. And in its very name, it is a monument to its famous former resident: Ba
njo Paterson Cottage Restaurant. Ross Pitts, who secured the restaurant sublease in 1986 and has been running the business ever since, is passionate about history and Banjo’s writing.

  I meet Ross at the cottage door, in the shade of the veranda. He wears a jovial expression, but Ross’ face is not the only one that grabs my attention. In the front garden, a bust of Banjo peers at passers-by. The sculpture is of an older Paterson, with a pipe in his mouth and a roadmap of life experiences in the wrinkles and creases etched across his face. He is looking at the sky, lost in his thoughts, as he contentedly draws on his pipe. Ross commissioned the sculpture of the ‘Singer of the Bush’ to acknowledge not just the poet, but also how Paterson used his writing to help make Australians ‘who they are, what they are’.

  In the foyer hangs Paterson memorabilia, including a photo of Banjo at the front gate of Rockend in the early 1900s.

  ‘He used to come back to stay with his grandmother,’ explains Ross.

  We walk through the cottage, tracking thick sandstone walls that keep at bay the heat of the day and the noises of the 21st century. Ross guides me to an enclosed veranda offering a terrific view of Looking Glass Bay, the river and life along the opposite banks. From here, for more than thirty years, Ross has watched the elements of the past disappear and the character of the area change. He shows me a photo he took in 1986. There are large storage tanks in the background, at Mortlake. The tanks have long gone. In the photo, in the bay below, there are only a few moored boats; there are more now, and the spaces between the buildings on the opposite shore have been largely filled in with yet more structures or larger houses. The promise of open space on the old Harold Meggitt factory site has been realised. It is Banjo Paterson Park. When he arrived at Rockend, Ross recalls, the foreshore looked neglected, saying ‘it was pretty rough’.

  We wander out into the cottage’s garden, past the bust of Banjo, to another sculpture. It is of Governor Phillip, holding the ‘looking glass’ or telescope, and the Wallumedegal man. Both are peering out over the bay named after the looking glass, taking in the landscape that has been so dramatically altered in the years since.

  Ross commissioned the sculpture because the event it commemorates ‘puts this part of the harbour into the very early history of the first settlement’. Ross mentions that just behind the statue are strewn more reminders of the river’s history: stones that were used as ballast in ships, along with lumps of coal and coke.

  Paddling away from Bedlam Point and looking back into Looking Glass Bay, I note what remains of the past, what has returned, and what has gone. Rockend is a gracious presence from the mid-19th century on the slope of the hill. The building looks so solid, and so embedded in the landscape, it is hard to believe it was ever under threat. Below the cottage is the band of green honouring Rockend’s famous former resident. Little evidence of the linseed oil factory remains, other than a commemorative plaque under the trees. Yet for all the changes, through what has been and what will be, the song of the river flows on.

  AS I KAYAK up Parramatta River, I’m pushing against both the tide and the direction that generations of competitive rowers took on this waterway. Amateur rowing regattas had been held along this part of the river since the mid-19th century, and for more than four decades from the 1890s, these waters were the venue for competitions between the Greater Public Schools. The schools’ crews raced for up to 2.5 kilometres down the river, in front of thousands of spectators, and finished around here, where the water blooms to the south into what’s called Hen and Chicken Bay. The GPS Regatta was moved to Nepean River, near Penrith, in 1936. The traffic on Parramatta River had forced the rowers to look for another waterway on which to compete. The regatta, known as the Head of the River, has remained in Penrith but is now held at the Sydney International Regatta Centre.

  Parramatta River remains a training ground and nursery for champion rowers. Nestling along the banks and bays around this part of the river are many of the schools’ boatsheds. Although they are hardly sheds; they are testament to how prized rowing remains in the private schools system – and how much money is committed to the sport – for they are beautifully appointed buildings.

  The most distinctive and elegant boatshed along this reach of the river belongs to Scots College. Built into a steep slope on the northern bank at Gladesville, the building, from the water, has the look of a country club. On the ground level is the boats storage area, and, on the storey above, the building’s face is dominated by large windows. From the outside looking in, I can make out an honour board flanked by photos, and displayed in the centre window are two crossed oars. The building’s weatherboard exterior is painted a blue-grey, the colour the sky can turn when a squall is approaching. I’m told later it’s called garter blue. The front wall also wears the college insignia, along with the declaration that the boat club was established in 1914. The clubhouse is one of those places that by its very appearance speaks of tradition and arouses a desire to gain access, to stand in front of that honour board and look out of those windows. Yet I figure that’s wishful thinking for someone who isn’t an old boy, doesn’t have sons at the school – and paddles a kayak. Pulbah Raider simply wouldn’t fit in here; its milky turquoise colour would clash with the garter blue.

  However, wishful thinking – and perhaps being a paddler – can open doors. Steven Adams, the college’s Director of Property and Works, kindly arranges to guide me through the boatshed. I’ve made it into the club, at least for an hour or so.

  The Chinese general Sun Tzu, in his Art of War, advised that if you are far from the enemy, make him believe you are near. The members of the Scots College Boat Club don’t have to make believe they are near. All they need do is stand before their front windows and they can see a few of the other schools’ boatsheds and watch their crews training on the river.

  Not that Steven Adams views the competitors as the enemy; they are all part of the rowing community, and the river unites them. That, and the pain.

  ‘It’s so devastatingly debilitating,’ says Steven, of competitive rowing. And he should know; he rowed on the river as a schoolboy in the early 1970s.

  ‘It takes so much out of you. I think it’s the ultimate team sport. You need to work completely in sync with the rest of the crew. An error by one can affect everyone.’

  Steven explains the Scots College boathouse was built in 1936. Beyond the champions developed in this club and celebrated in the memorabilia on the walls, Steven views the walls themselves as a trophy. For this building that shelters the future generation of champion rowers is also upholding the past.

  ‘The timber shed has largely disappeared from the harbour,’ says Steven. ‘The texture of the waterfront has changed from wood and steel to residential developments. And if you look at the texture of the waterfront, these sheds add interest.’

  Steven looks up and down the river, at the neighbouring houses sprouting extensions and architectural ‘features’, and at the residential developments on the opposite bank. As he sees it, the loss of texture means a diminution of interest, and of character, along Sydney’s waterfront. Steven doesn’t really like what he sees.

  ‘The whole morphology now smacks of maximisation. You can’t get a pizza box between them [the buildings].

  ‘I like dishevelled waterfronts.’

  The character of the waterfront was not only about what you saw but also what you smelled. Rowing in the 1970s, Steven could navigate by his nose. When he had a whiff of chocolate, for instance, he knew he was passing the Nestlé factory at Abbotsford. There was the scent of linseed oil, the gas odour near Mortlake; each peninsula emitted a clue as to where the rowers were.

  ‘But you can’t navigate by smells these days,’ he says almost ruefully.

  Perhaps it is because rowers face backwards, looking at where they have been. Perhaps it is because Steven used to be the Collection Manager at the Australian National Maritime Museum. Whatever the reason, for Steven, the beauty of rowing on Parramatta River
is shaped by history.

  ‘You are retracing the steps of those who have raced before you. Essentially the river hasn’t changed since Henry Searle rowed here.’

  Little wonder, then, Steven Adams loves the Scots College Boat Club house. It may not have a dishevelled look, but touch the walls and you can feel the texture, and the tradition. Beyond retaining the building, Steven and his colleagues battled to protect the colour scheme. Some bureaucrats wanted the building painted in ‘recessive colours’, so it blended into the landscape. Steven insisted it be garter blue, so that it told all who saw it that this building belonged by the water and was deeply connected to it.

  Of course, the shed is more than a blue trophy; it is a training centre and home to dozens of young rowers. Steven introduces me to the shed manager, Garry Elliott.

  When the river is glass and its surface is cut by few other boats, when there is barely a light on in the neighbouring homes, Garry is at his busiest. Each morning of the rowing season, from September to March, Garry ensures the rowers are on the water. Up to twenty of the students have stayed overnight in the shed.

  In the pre-dawn, the rowers shuffle down to the shed’s lower level, where about forty boats are stored. On the racks is a stack of money pressed into carbon fibre and moulded into racing shells. A boat for a crew of eight can cost up to $75,000. Once the shed’s doors are open and the morning chill claws its way in, urging the boys to get paddling, it’s just a few metres down the ramps, onto the pontoons and into the river.

  By 4.45am, the crews are cocooned in their shells, heaving and huffing as one, all the while watched over by coaches in tinnies following them. Garry says the training sessions tend to be finished by 7am, because after then, ‘it gets pretty busy on the river’. The rowers then head off to school and return in the afternoon for more training, before turning in early, preparing to beat the sun, other boats, and their own racing times.