The Harbour Read online

  Just as Arthur Phillip had ventured up Parramatta River in search of land richer than he could find around the main harbour, the politicians and planners wanted to lead the world up the river to Homebush, to show everyone that the city was about more than a bridge and an opera house. It would be where Sydneysiders would also learn a lot more about their own city.

  Debbie Watson still recalls her reaction when she heard where the heart of the Sydney Olympics would be.

  ‘I’m from Manly. Who goes to Parramatta, to Homebush? That’s a long way!’ she tells me.

  Debbie is one of Australia’s greatest ever water polo players. In the same year Sydney was announced as the host city for the 2000 Olympics, Debbie was voted the best in the world at her sport. She was the captain of the national team. She had helped win World Cup and World Championship crowns. Yet the dream of competing at an Olympic Games, especially in her home city, seemed more than just distant. Women’s water polo was not part of the Olympic program.

  Yet a couple of years later, women’s water polo was slated for the Sydney Olympics. Debbie was selected for the national team. She would be an Olympian, competing in her hometown – even if it was on the other side of town.

  The Australians tussled towards the finals, graduating from the aquatic centre’s water polo pool to the ‘big pool’ for the gold medal match against the United States on 23 September 2000. The home team knew that pool so well – ‘it felt like ourselves’ – but what the Australians had never experienced was the reception that awaited them.

  ‘It was super special,’ recalls Debbie. ‘It was unbelievable walking out to the pool. There were 17,000 people in there, and over the years I’ve met 18,000 of them.’

  This match was an ‘I was there!’ moment from the Sydney Olympics. It was a frenetic, water- and gut-churning experience for the competitors and spectators, with the Australians winning with just a second to spare.

  ‘It was like a dream,’ Debbie says. ‘We were just looking at each other. “We’ve actually won!”.’

  In the pristine waters of a pool set into earth that for so long had been sullied and shunned, the Australians had made Olympic history, becoming the first gold medallists in women’s water polo. They had turned water into gold. And Homebush would always be a place that held great significance to Debbie Watson.

  These days, Debbie is a mother and a teacher. But she gladly travels from Sydney’s Northern Beaches to attend events at Homebush, or to visit the aquatic centre – ‘it’s my son’s favourite pool’.

  ‘What I loved about it, and still love, when driving from home, was coming up over the hill at Ryde and looking down at the Olympic site and being able to see the venues. That was really beautiful. That’s now almost been lost with all the other buildings, which brings a tinge of sadness, but for me, it’s still, “There it is!”.’

  ‘I think it’s exceeded everyone’s expectations,’ Debbie says of the Olympic park. ‘It’s turned something that was ugly into something very vibrant. And the sporting facilities are great.

  ‘I love it. And for me, it’s still very special.’

  OLYMPIC GAMES leave their mark on lives and places, but the events themselves are ephemeral. The Olympics, and the grand circus of humanity attached to them, move on. An Olympic site has to become something else. Homebush was no longer a wasteland, but no one wanted to see it turn into a white elephant.

  In addition to the permanent sports venues, the Olympic Village was transformed into a residential suburb. As the firms behind building that precinct boasted, the opportunity of creating a new suburb on ninety hectares of land close to Sydney was a developer’s dream. What had been accommodation for 15,000 athletes and officials for a few weeks was to become home for about 5000 residents. In deference to a portion of the land’s history, the suburb was named Newington.

  Along with John Blaxland’s estate, another prominent name in the early colony, D’Arcy Wentworth, held extensive property on what would become part of Sydney Olympic Park.

  Wentworth was a doctor with a strong entrepreneurial streak. He was part of a rum deal struck with Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1810. Wentworth and his partners would build a hospital with convict labour in return for a monopoly to import spirits. The building project was allegedly dragged out, so the developers could import more spirits. The arrangement didn’t provide the healthy returns they had been hoping for, but it was beneficial to Sydney. ‘The Rum Hospital’ has been a distinguished part of Macquarie Street for more than 200 years.

  While he was busy in town, Wentworth also developed his land along Parramatta River. He called his estate Home Bush. The origin of the property name has been debated. In his memoir, Homebush Boy, author Tom Keneally told of his formative years in what was then a western Sydney suburb. Keneally thought Homebush had received its name because it had been a tangle of scrub in the early days of the colony. If that was the case, D’Arcy Wentworth set out to change that. Land was cleared to such an extent that a later resident on the property, the author and artist Louisa Anne Meredith, noted not a native tree, not even a stump, was visible.

  Wentworth was turning his bush home into a horse stud. He imported an Arab stallion from India that provided enormous service to Australian equestrian heritage. That stallion was behind the basic strain for many of the country’s racehorses, as well as for the animals that became a renowned breed known as the Walers, ridden by Australian Light Horse soldiers in Palestine during the First World War. Having bred the horses, Wentworth built a racecourse at Homebush. The Australian Jockey Club held its first meetings at the course from its foundation in 1842 until it moved to Randwick in 1860. Many punters travelled by ferry to the Homebush race meetings.

  For much of the 20th century, the land where horses had been bred became a vast killing ground of beasts. It was the site of the State Abattoirs. The slaughter of thousands of animals each day fed more than humans; sharks feasted on the abattoir’s effluent dumped into Homebush Bay. Another part of the former Home Bush estate was gouged when the State Brickworks was established in 1911. The brickworks closed in 1988, but the scars of an industry that produced about three billion bricks remain. A deep pit, where machines dug through the layers of Sydney’s geological life to obtain clay, has been remodelled. Visitors can circumnavigate the pit on an elevated walkway and peer into the great big hole that is now a reservoir as part of the park’s water recycling program, and a home to the endangered green and golden bell frogs. It seems appropriate these frogs have taken up residence, since green and gold are the colours predominantly worn by Australia’s athletes in the nearby stadiums.

  More than provide materials for homebuilders to construct the great Australian dreams, the brickworks helped create the perfect nightmare of a post-apocalyptic world. One of its pits was a location in the 1985 film, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The pit was transformed into the film’s trading community, Bartertown, which has a motto over its gates: Helping Build a Better Tomorrow. What was disturbingly ironic in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome was strangely prescient for the Homebush location. Indeed, most of the Homebush Bay area seems to be living out a line uttered by one of the film’s main characters, Aunty Entity: So much for history.

  Paddling out of the flow of the river and into Homebush Bay, I can see the past rusting into the water, and the future rising along the shores. Much of the bay’s edge was reclaimed from the water for industries; now much of that land is being reclaimed for homes. Warehouses and storage sheds are being nudged aside by the new apartment developments.

  Sitting in the bay, like a conscience, are a few old wrecks. In the 1960s, the Maritime Services Board granted permission to a number of companies to use the bay’s shore as a ship-breaking yard. While the shoreline now cradles infant communities, the waters are a cemetery for ships.

  Just ten metres from the shore, with a cluster of apartments dead ahead off its bow, sits the wreck of SS Ayrfield. She was built in Britain in 1911 and was launched as SS Corrimal. The foll
owing year, Corrimal was in Sydney’s waters. During the Second World War, she saw service in the Pacific, transporting supplies to American troops. After the war, she was renamed Ayrfield and was a collier for more than 20 years, operating between Newcastle and Blackwattle Bay in the harbour. In the early 1970s, her time was up. The 79-metre-long ship was sent to Homebush Bay to be broken up. She has lost much, Ayrfield. Her steel skin is rusting and is afflicted with barnacles, and in places the hull has withered away, exposing her old bones. Indeed, you can see straight through her, like a ghost, to the apartments on the shore. On part of the deck, there are still bollards that look naked without rope swaddling them. And yet she still serves a purpose. These days, Ayrfield carries a cargo of mangroves, which sprout out of her hull like hair out of an old man’s ears.

  About 50 metres away, sitting alone, is a chunk of SS Mortlake Bank. She was also a steam collier, built near Newcastle upon Tyne in 1924 and then, on the other side of the globe, spent much of her life transporting coal from Hexham, in the Hunter Valley, to the gasworks at Mortlake, just a few kilometres from where her corpse lies. Mortlake Bank has been here since 1972, meeting the same ignominious end as Ayrfield. Yet, in a way, time has whittled beauty out of the wreck. Plates at the stern have been rusted and sculpted into delicate filigrees of steel that filter the afternoon sun. And while she was brought here to be broken up, the former collier has been reincarnated as a playground for seagulls.

  Just across the way, on the other side of the mouth to Haslam Creek, are two wooden wrecks piled onto a nodule of land. Near the shambles of wood there is a clue as to what this place used to be. Along the shore is a tideline of old bricks. This small peninsula was created in the 1950s to load bricks from the nearby works onto barges. Hiding in the mangroves is the wreck of a barge.

  Around the point are two more wrecks lying side by side. The one on the left is listing onto its port side, leaning towards its water grave, but its funnel remains defiantly in the air. The wreck is that of the tug SS Heroic, which was built in the UK in 1909 for the Sydney tugboat operators Thomas Fenwick. It wasn’t long before the steam tug was dragged into military service. During the First World War, she was commandeered by the British Admiralty and was involved in rescue work. During the Second World War, Heroic was again involved in the military effort, including rescuing a freighter that had been torpedoed by a Japanese submarine off Sydney. Heroic continued to work as a tug up to the 1970s, before ending up in the bay. From the bow, with rope through one of the portholes, it looks like a sad, tethered elephant. Yet near a rusted, arthritic winch at the bow, a mangrove has sprouted. It looks like a figurehead, symbolising growth and life, while around it is decay and neglect.

  To the starboard of Heroic is the wreck of HMAS Karangi. She is sitting upright and still looking sturdy, while the elements are gradually taking shreds off her. Karangi was a boom defence vessel, to protect harbour entrances from enemy ships entering. Karangi was built downriver at Cockatoo Island and launched just a few months before Australia was at war against Japan in 1941. She helped defend Darwin Harbour from attack during the war. Karangi ended up in Homebush Bay in 1970. Over its steel hull, Karangi still wears a skin of wood in many places, and when you look through the barnacle-lidded portholes, it is like peering into a dragon’s eye.

  Only a few metres away from the wrecks, behind the mangroves along the shore are parklands and a waterbird refuge, with a viewing tower’s crown poking above the mangroves. No matter what humans did to Homebush Bay, the birds still came. A 1978 study noted that one of the remarkable aspects of the bay, even in its degraded state, was its diverse birdlife. The local environment has been much improved, and the birds have a more attractive home or place to visit, with some migrating from as far away as Russia. Birds with evocative names such as the Bar-tailed Godwit, the Chestnut Teal and the Red-necked Avocet can be seen gliding across the water or wading in the shallows around the refuge. And because those birds can be seen, the wetlands also attract birdwatchers.

  Standing still on the refuge’s shore, with his binoculars tracking a pair of black swans, is Simon Dobrée. Originally from Great Britain, Simon considers birdwatching an indicator of an advanced country. ‘There aren’t many birders in Australia,’ he says, with the hint of a smile.

  Simon tends to watch alone. But around here, birding is rarely a solitary pursuit. He usually has to share the surrounds with cyclists tearing along the pathways and children revelling in the outdoors. Still, Simon regularly travels from his home in the city’s north to Sydney Olympic Park.

  ‘There are places to hide,’ he says, both from the crowds, and to remain out of sight of the birds. Indeed, there is a bird hide perched on the refuge’s northern shore.

  Simon tends to make a day of it, arriving mid-morning and staying until dusk. He works his way around the park’s 500 or so hectares of public areas, all the while noting the species he sees, from the teardrop-shaped ponds in the Narawang wetlands – ‘you can see a Buff-banded Rail there’ – to the stretch along the river near the Newington Armory – ‘I saw a Mangrove Heron there once’.

  ‘I’ve never been around everywhere in the one day, so you have to be selective,’ explains Simon.

  He usually spots forty to fifty species in a day, and in his notes recording all his visits to Sydney Olympic Park, he can count more than ninety species. Simon has many more to see. According to the authority overseeing the site, more than 200 native bird species have been recorded throughout Sydney Olympic Park.

  ‘I’ve certainly found it a cornucopia for birds,’ Simon tells me.

  ‘My favourite one of all is the Pink-eared Duck. Even if it was pure luck when I saw it. It was sitting near Pacific Black Ducks.

  ‘It’s not just the numbers but the quality of what you see in a day.’

  Before us are a couple of birds wading and picking in the shallows. I ask Simon what they are.

  ‘Black-winged Stilts,’ he says without hesitation. ‘Pretty birds.’

  Mindful that Simon tries to see up to fifty birds each visit, and the shadows are lengthening on the fringes of the refuge, I wonder what his tally is so far.

  ‘Hmmm. Thirty-five.’

  I take my leave, to allow Simon to focus and scan the waters, which are beginning to take on the sheen of pewter in the afternoon sun and – to my eyes at least – making the birds harder to identify. But in his quiet way, Simon seems to relish the challenge. As he tells me, there is something deeply satisfying in being out in the open and observing nature. And, as he reasoned, this is an act of nation-advancing. It is surely a sign of a nation learning from its errors when it restores a part of the environment it all but destroyed, so that birds – and birdwatchers – have somewhere to find themselves.

  ‘I think for all round bird numbers and variety,’ concludes Simon, ‘this is the best place in Sydney.

  ‘It is good to see an area that has been so improved, especially for birds. It provides a local antidote to the problems that Sydney faces, with population growth and the rise in traffic and development, and the pressures on birds due to the loss of wetlands and other suitable habitat.’

  ACROSS THE bay from where the wrecks of historically significant ships rot in the water, barely noticed and all but forgotten, large residential and retail developments have sprouted at Rhodes.

  Thousands of people are living in the hundreds of units built on a peninsula that was once congested with, and polluted by, heavy industries. A large flour mill that perched on the Rhodes peninsula was converted into a stock feed factory. Its neighbours were chemical factories, including the Timbrol plant, which produced a range of chemicals, from timber preservatives to pesticides. In 1957, the plant was taken over by the industrial giant Union Carbide. The factory continued to produce pesticides and herbicides, including ingredients for Agent Orange, which was used by American forces as a defoliant during the Vietnam War.

  What was produced in Sydney would have a huge impact on not just the jungles
of Vietnam. The chemicals contributed to the reshaping of Rhodes and the poisoning of a bay, and beyond. The production process resulted in dioxins, which are carcinogenic. Dioxins have been linked to cancer and birth defects. Dioxins are also long-lasting in the environment.

  For decades, when the factories needed to expand and more land was required, the shore was extended into the bay. Contaminated soil and waste were used as fill. Dioxins were discharged into the bay and dumped into the wetlands along the shore. When regulations finally tightened in the 1970s, chemical waste was stored in drums. By the time Union Carbide shut down the plant in 1986, the legacy was a bay considered among the world’s most contaminated with dioxins. The New South Wales Government told the company to clean up the mess on the land. Ultimately, the remediation of the site to a level that made it acceptable to build and live on was largely done with public money.

  But what had happened in the water and to the bed of the bay could not be contained as easily. The dioxins don’t remain at the bottom of the harbour. They enter the marine food chain, as fish eat organisms in the contaminated sediment. As a result, in 1989, the government prohibited fishing in Homebush Bay and its tributaries, and that ban has remained. Perhaps that explains why I’ve seen so many fish jumping and plopping back into the water around me as I’ve paddled in Homebush Bay. These are the ones that got away; at least, from the fishing hook.