The Harbour Read online

  The dioxin problem seeped from the bay into other parts of the harbour, and from the past into the present. Data collected by a state government department in 2008 indicated that dioxins were detected more than 10 kilometres upriver and down from Homebush Bay. Those findings affirmed what was already known. Due to the elevated levels of dioxins, commercial fishing in the harbour was banned in 2006. While recreational fishing is still allowed in most parts of the harbour, signs in popular places to cast a line deliver unpalatable dietary advice. Any fish or other crustaceans caught west of Sydney Harbour Bridge should not be eaten. And if you eat what you catch east of the Bridge, then you should restrict your intake to 150 grams a month.

  For years, Gavin Birch has been delving into the polluted soul of Sydney Harbour. As an adjunct associate professor from the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney, Gavin has studied and written about the pollutants in the harbour.

  He mentions the huge effort put into cleaning up the Homebush Bay area. The developers around Rhodes peninsula scraped back the earth to the bedrock, and the New South Wales Government remediated the eastern margin of Homebush Bay, using suction dredges to clean up to a metre through the bottom, then covered it with clean material. But Gavin says studies have indicated that with the movement under the water, dioxin-affected sediment from outside the cleaned area covers the remediated strip. While the problem has been lessened, it hasn’t been removed. He doesn’t know what the future is for cleaning up dioxins, because ‘the dioxins have been remobilised so comprehensively, including outside Homebush Bay’. As it is, he says, there’s no way he would eat fish from here, or from Parramatta River.

  Gavin and his teams have taken sediment cores throughout the harbour. In regard to heavy metals, those cores show the more recent deposits are much cleaner than in the lower, older layers.

  ‘For some areas, there will be natural remediation or relaxation, in other words, the concentration is declining, but I can’t say that for dioxins,’ Gavin says, although he points out that testing for dioxins has been limited because the research budget stretches only so far.

  The declining levels of heavy metals are ‘all very good news, which is attributable to the Clean Waters Act of 1978, and the removal of heavy industry from the foreshores of the estuary’, which is what Gavin calls the harbour.

  He considers the change along the banks of Parramatta River ‘a remarkable transition’.

  ‘It’s transformed from having high-polluting industries to high-rise, high-value communities,’ he says. ‘In one way, that’s good, but you’re coming to a situation where the sewerage systems are being overtaxed. While the high-rise developments create more sewage discharges, they’re much better than the factories that were there.’

  But the major problem for the harbour now comes not so much from along the shoreline, but from much further up, out of the webs of creeks bringing down contaminants from the catchment areas, and from stormwater drains.

  He cites the example of organochlorines, mostly no longer in use, but they were used for years to clear land and protect new homes from insects. They continue to leach from the soil and eventually end up in the harbour. Gavin points out that unless there’s an improvement in the catchment, ‘the potential for improvement at the bottom of the harbour is very small’.

  What comes out of the stormwater drains is also drugging the harbour. His teams’ testing has found surprisingly significant levels of pharmaceuticals in the water. The drugs dulling headaches and treating depression among the city’s residents are potentially creating a different kind of pain for water quality. He reckons it is an indication that the increasingly burdened sewerage system is leaking. And there is the issue of stormwater overflow.

  ‘A key to cleaning up the harbour is to clean up the stormwater going into the harbour,’ Gavin argues, which also means more money has to be poured into upgrading Sydney’s sewerage system. Because for too long, he cautions, what has poured into that system is the waste from multi-storey residential developments in areas that were designed for mostly single-family houses. And if you keep putting pressure on it, the system eventually craps itself. When that happens, the harbour is the toilet.

  DOWNRIVER FROM the Ryde road bridges, there is a distinct change of view on the water and along the southern bank. The homes have grown in size and luxury, and the waterway they preside over, Brays Bay, has its mouth filled with boats.

  The flotilla devoted to pleasure is also a job creator. Fluttering on a smaller boat is the code flag alpha, indicating there are divers below. The boat is tied to a cruiser. I notice a line snaking from the smaller boat, across the surface to the cruiser. It is attached to two divers, feeding them air. They are underwater boat maintenance workers, and they are cleaning the cruiser’s hull. One, in a black wetsuit, looks like a seal lolling under the boat, before he dives to check something, while his buddy breaks the surface. His mask-framed eyes widen at the sight of a bloke in a kayak watching them. I introduce myself, he pulls out his regulator and introduces himself as Marshall. Having seen his diving buddy doing a fine seal impression just a few moments earlier, I ask Marshall what’s been in my mind since.

  ‘Do you ever see sharks?’

  In the couple of years he’s been doing this work, Marshall replies, he’s seen only two sharks. They were bull sharks. I ask him did he see those sharks around here. No, Marshall says, they were down in the main harbour. He then smiles as he bobs around in the murky water.

  ‘You wouldn’t see anything up this far.’

  Marshall Michael’s dive buddy is Paul Nind. He owns the business, called Boat Buddies. When Paul dives under the harbour’s surface, he’s not just doing a job, he’s following his passion.

  ‘We see a very different harbour to what most people see,’ Paul says.

  Paul hasn’t always worn a wetsuit for a living. He used to wear a suit and tie, working for an international logistics company. Paul’s hobby was scuba diving, a skill that came in handy in 2006 when he was crew on a boat in the Sydney to Hobart yacht race. He was the yacht’s clearance diver. After that race, he was asked more and more to do underwater maintenance on yachts. Gradually, while under the surface, Paul saw the possibilities of a business and the makings of his future.

  These days, Paul and his team do maintenance work on between ten to twenty boats daily – ‘the record is thirty in a day’ – in all sorts of conditions. The working week is average, about forty hours, but the work environment is anything but. He has swum with dolphins, penguins, a blue marlin and fur seals, and he’s seen about half a dozen sharks.

  Through the depths, when the water is clear, he has seen sunken boats squatting like phantoms on the harbour bottom. And when the water is murky, such as in the upper reaches of Parramatta River, he works not by sight but feel.

  ‘And there are all sorts of things at the bottom there,’ he explains. ‘Bits of metal, concrete, cars.’

  Still, he believes the harbour is cleaner and healthier than it used to be.

  ‘When I was a kid,’ Paul says, ‘you wouldn’t swim in the harbour. It was disgusting. But now, in many places, you can see to the bottom.’

  Having changed careers in his early 30s, Paul intends to stay in the water for the rest of his working life.

  ‘When it’s great, it’s unbeatable,’ he says of the harbour. ‘But even on the worst days, it’s still good – even if it’s miserable and disgusting.

  ‘The harbour will remain my workplace in one shape or form. I love it.’

  THE CURVE of the shoreline explains why the waterway I’m paddling into was once called Horseshoe Bay. But deference to the family who settled this land, and whose progeny included the first Mayor of the local Concord Council, meant its name was changed to Brays Bay.

  The western side of the horseshoe was once studded with industries, and, during the Second World War, there was a shipbuilding yard tucked into the toe of the bay on reclaimed land. These days, the yard is commemorated with
a bitumen- and concrete-covered public reserve. The spare-looking memorial includes the remnants of the slip, with the names of some of the ships that slid down it embedded in the concrete. It may not be a classically pretty reserve, but it is a clear reminder of how stretches of Parramatta River’s banks once looked.

  Just beyond the skeleton of the shipyard and slicing through the riparian bush is a path that leads walkers back to another chapter of the Second World War. It is the Kokoda Track Memorial Walkway. The route is punctuated with information markers for key battles and sites from that critical campaign in 1942, when the survival of Australia seemingly lay in the jungles of New Guinea, and in the hands of young soldiers who were poorly equipped and up against two enemies: the Japanese and Mother Nature herself. The landscape was ruthless to all who stepped into it, irrespective of their uniform.

  What those men endured is hard to imagine, especially while standing on the shores of Sydney Harbour three-quarters of a century on. The well-formed path skirting Brays Bay is far removed from the treacherous muddy tracks, river crossings and ravines the soldiers contended with. Yet the path is but a conduit to the most evocative element of the memorial: the stories of men who were there.

  On most days, Reg Chard heads to the walkway and returns to his youth. He guides groups and educates anyone who listens.

  Born in 1923, Reg was a teenager when he fought on the Kokoda Track. As he tells visitors to the walkway, he was one of the more than 4000 Australians who became a casualty due to sickness during the campaign.

  ‘I collapsed with scrub typhus and malaria,’ says Reg.

  Sickness eventually ended the war for Reg. But all these years on, his service continues.

  With a purposeful walk and a mind full of facts and anecdotes that he readily summons from under his thatch of silver hair, Reg seems younger than he is, as he takes visitors along the path to a memorial, etched with iconic images from the Kokoda campaign. Reg lost a lot of mates in that campaign. That’s why Reg comes to Brays Bay most days; to honour ‘all the ones who didn’t come home’.

  Within sight of the Kokoda Track Memorial Walkway is the place where Reg Chard ended his war service: Concord Hospital. The collection of buildings presides over a sliver of land on the other side of the bay. The area was once known as Levy’s Folly, because one of the early landowners apparently built his house using mortar mixed with salt water from the bay. His house collapsed. Levy repeated the process, with the same result. The hospital, commissioned in 1940 as war crept ever closer to Australia, was evidently built to last. From the water, the main building’s conglomeration of glass and bricks looks like a Mondrian painting, as though a modernist idea has climbed out of the mud and mangroves at its feet.

  At the height of the Second World War, the 113th Australian General Hospital, as it was known, was one of the largest medical facilities in the southern hemisphere. It had more than 2000 beds, treating troops brought in from across the Pacific theatre. Private Reg Chard was one of them.

  Reg spent three months in the hospital in 1943, before returning to his unit. When scrub typhus and malaria ravaged him again the following year, Reg was sent back to Concord. This time his stay was for 14 months. The war ended, and Reg was still a patient when he received special leave to be married in October 1945.

  ‘I was known as the Malaria King of Concord,’ Reg chuckles.

  After the war, the facility became known as the Concord Repatriation General Hospital, or simply, the ‘Concord Repat’. The hospital’s services may have broadened, but it is still called that by many locals.

  ‘I sometimes still get a funny feeling looking at the hospital,’ Reg says.

  Concord Hospital is one of a string of health facilities in historic buildings along this reach of the river. Entwined around those facilities in one way or another is the Walker family.

  Thomas Walker was a highly successful businessman, politician and philanthropist in the middle and late 19th century. His only daughter, Eadith, inherited not just the family fortune but his generosity. As a result, paddling along this shore, I’m treated to a tour of how a pile of money can be converted into beautiful architecture and community service.

  Kayaking out of Brays Bay and around Rocky Point, I see a Dutch tower squatting on the river bank. The vision is fantastic, as though someone has picked up the building out of a fairytale and plonked it by Parramatta River. Yet this was the gatehouse to the large, stately brick and sandstone building on the hill behind, which was no place of fairytales. It was the Thomas Walker Convalescent Hospital.

  Walker had written in his will that he wanted some of his fortune to be used to fund a convalescent hospital, to be built on part of his estate, Yaralla. When Walker died in 1886, twelve hectares of land and £100,000, a fortune in those days, went to the hospital project. The building constructed with the endowment was designed by the renowned architect John Sulman and was dressed in fine features, including marble fireplaces and ornate woodwork. Indeed, it was so fine, the family had to contribute another £50,000 to its construction. The hospital opened in 1893. The following year, a children’s convalescent hospital, named in memory of Walker’s sister, opened nearby.

  Most patients arrived by water, disembarking at a jetty at the gatehouse, which was praised at the time as being ‘a veritable Paradise’. The air of paradise continued up the hill. The hospitals and their staff quickly garnered a reputation for being gentle and refined, and there was no charge for patients. The hospital, and Thomas Walker, was praised as being ‘the most magnificent charity created by the benevolence of one man in all the colonies’. Among those who sought refuge at the Thomas Walker Convalescent Hospital was the poet Henry Lawson, who spent a lot of time in the facility’s library. More than a century on, the Thomas Walker Convalescent Hospital remains a place of healing; it is a mental health facility for young people.

  Drifting past the little tower where patients once entered the facility, I can see through its arch and up the immaculately tended lawn to the main building. The ethereal look of the gatehouse, especially in the late afternoon, when the water soaks up the colours of the sky, fits in with the surroundings. For the grounds are now called Rivendell, the name of the elves’ haven in J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic novels, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

  I paddle into a sense of the ancient earth around the shoreline into Yaralla Bay. A thick curtain of mangroves skirts the bay. With a soundtrack of cicadas and birds, the trees help create the impression I’ve paddled into somewhere primordial. Yet the mangroves are like a magician’s trick; the sense of isolation is a mere illusion. I peer through the curtain and can see snippets of Concord Hospital. The illusion is further shattered when I look to my left; a small fleet of industrial barges is resting in the bay. The primacy of nature sharply returns. A mosquito has been having afternoon tea on my arm. It is the first mosquito I’ve been aware of while paddling Parramatta River, which is a relief compared with the amassed squadrons that used to patrol here. In her book written in the 1840s, Louisa Anne Meredith bemoaned how mosquitoes would rise in clouds from the banks, forcing her to retreat indoors.

  The Walkers had a majestic place in which to retreat from mosquitoes and just about any other annoyance. Thomas Walker had engaged the former Colonial Architect Edmund Blacket to design a ‘cottage at Concord’ in the 1850s. Beyond the mangroves on a nodule of land pressing into the bay, that ‘cottage’ still stands.

  Having climbed out of Pulbah Raider onto a greasy rock shelf at the shoreline, I know I’m at the right place. An old set of stone stairs and a wonky path are remnants of the grandeur that once greeted visitors. The Walkers had a private wharf here, and they would often have a band playing on a pontoon to welcome guests. I follow the stone path through a grove of groaning bamboo, and gradually Yaralla is revealed. It is a two-storey mansion with wide verandas and an Italianate tower.

  Eadith Walker had built on her father’s vision with Yaralla. After Thomas Walker died, his daughter commission
ed John Sulman to design extensions to the house, which became the scene of lavish parties and balls. Eadith Walker hosted royalty and stars at Yaralla. Yet she would also host events for returned and wounded troops, including setting up a camp in the grounds for soldiers with tuberculosis during the First World War. To Walker, Yaralla was more than a house; it was a self-contained estate. It even had its own power station, the first private electricity plant in Sydney. As it was, she had water on three sides of her home, but Eadith Walker had created an island of luxury, with a buffer zone of meticulously tended gardens. The Walkers had brought the world to Yaralla, with an Indian Room, a ‘Norwegian House’ in the gardens, and a stone terrace constructed by Italian masons. Yet it was a world unto itself. For all their contributions to the community, the Walkers lived like few others in the country.

  After Eadith Walker’s death, the Yaralla mansion and the land surrounding it were given to the State Government. The family home became the Dame Eadith Walker Convalescent Hospital. It retains the look of a grand residence. There is an extensive rose garden and a lawn adorned with urns and fountains leading down to Majors Bay.

  I leave behind the beautifully ordered world within the world created by the Walkers, walking back down the stone path to the shoreline of mud and mangroves and gouged sandstone. There is a public walking track around the shore, and no sooner have I set off than two Labradors leap off the rock shelf, sending arcs of water – and excited yelps – towards the kayak. Two women appear and laugh at their pets playing with abandon.

  ‘It’s great for the dogs here, except for the bull sharks,’ says one of the women.

  I ask has she seen any here.

  ‘No, but they’ve been sighted over there,’ the woman replies, pointing towards Meadowbank, a distant smudge well out of the bay and on the other side of the river. It seems the sharks are always somewhere else in the harbour.