by Susan Duncan
Belonging
Sometimes, if we are lucky, places find us and lead to joy, contentment and a glorious sense of belonging in a wondrous new world.
On a warm, late autumn day about five months after I began living on Scotland Island, I noticed a picture of a funny little house for sale in the local real estate office. For some reason – I will never know why because it was boxy, masculine and the antithesis of my flouncy dream home – I made an appointment to see it.
It was located in Lovett Bay and the agent, her assistant and I bumped across the water in an unstable, leaky tin dinghy for an inspection. It turned out to be a small, corrugated iron building, more like a shack than a home, with not even one of the features I thought essential – a deepwater jetty, winter sun, spacious rooms, two bathrooms and a glorious, whizz-bang kitchen.
I shook my head at the real estate agent. ‘No, thank-you. Let’s keep looking.’ Then on a sudden whim, I made a silly offer, acting more out of pity than desire. The eighty-four-year-old owner, designer Gordon Andrews, once a muscled, irascible bloke who wore Levis and tight white T-shirts, had grown too frail to live on these isolated shores any longer.
I had no idea as we took our leave, putt-putting past an aloof and mysterious house tucked sedately into the side of a hill, that my offer would be accepted and I would tumble into a new life in a tiny waterside idyll where time seemed to stand still.
We can never know, of course, what might have happened if we turned left instead of right at any given place at any given time in our lives. Or in this case, if my offer had been rejected. As it turned out, even though I initially thought I’d made the most expensive mistake of my life, in truth, I’d accidentally stumbled into where I truly belonged.
I discovered there was a waterfall in the south west corner of the bay that fell in foaming white torrents in heavy rain. Rainforests of rustling cabbage palms grew in the shelter of gullies, flanked by the rigid trunks of spotted gums, their roots splayed thickly like elephant feet in a bid to hold more tightly to precarious slopes.
A creek called Salvation fed into the estuary where white-limbed mangroves provided nurseries for fish to lay their eggs safely.
Near the ferry wharf there was a small beach of reddish sand where an elegant white-faced heron stalked prey with long-legged strides. Sinewy cormorants, swimming with their heads out of the water like periscopes, greedily scanned the water for baitfish. A pair of black ducks paddled by, looking for scraps. Sulphur-crested cockatoos shamelessly screeched from shore to shore, their pure white wings spread like kites. Beyond the beach, the coastline fell in a crumbled mass of sandstone. Slippery and beaded with seaweed and sharp-edged oyster shells.
Through the windows of my little shack, I could see boats swinging gently on their moorings. An old tug with a hull so svelte and sweeping, her beauty shone through the decay. The pirate boat, black and sinister. It’s sunk once or twice, when the winds have howled into the bay bringing confused seas and torrential rain. But it is always raised again from the sandy bottom and the seagulls rebuild their nests amongst the rotting ropes, sails and timber, hoping the oyster-encrusted hull will stay afloat until the chicks are old enough to fly. The ‘Fruit Box’ (pictured left), with its crooked sliding aluminium windows and wooden French doors, made me smile whenever I looked at it.
There were gleaming yachts too, but it is always the wrecks that intrigue. Who trod their decks? Sailed them far and wide? What adventures have they known and survived? How did they end up in Lovett Bay? Will they be left to sink? Or will someone, old or young and full of dreams, take on the job of resurrection? It’s not a futile hope because Pittwater encourages the dreamer in all we mavericks who come to live here.
It wasn’t the easiest transition from city slicker to boatie and if I’d railed against the difficulties of offshore living from the beginning, there is no doubt I would have quickly sold and moved on, as some people do. Instead, I found I thrived on the challenge of docking boats in bossy winds. I was utterly seduced by nights spent sitting on the deck watching storms fling shards of blinding light through swollen skies. And even the untamed bush, framed by forbidding escarpments and an empty sky, eventually lost its threat as I learned to look intently enough to see its daily miracles.
New neighbours
Not long after I moved into what I soon came to call the Tin Shed, I met the couple who lived in the grand, mysterious house that presided over Lovett Bay with a quiet but firm presence.
Bob Story, an engineer, and his wife, Barbara, had moved from a conservative suburb on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, trading a hectic life of running a business and raising four children for a cosy but comfortably challenging retirement of sailing and exploring the bush.
Most people who come to live at Pittwater have a story to tell about moving day. Rain. Hail. Sleet. Blasting southerlies. Unhelpful tides. Furniture overboard. Sinking tinnies. Anything can happen when you’re at the mercy of wind and water. For Bob and Barbara, though, it was almost catastrophe. On 9 January 1994, two weeks before their furniture was due to arrive from Melbourne, bushfires rampaged through the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. Like everyone else in the area, they’d been warned to stay away by authorities that threatened arrest if anyone disobeyed. They sat, helpless, at a Newport yacht club, watching and waiting while the sky turned blood orange.
By sunset on that day of horror, through the choking haze and heat, of leaves, branches and loose debris hurtling through the air in wicked westerly winds, it was impossible to tell where the water ended and the land began. Lovett Bay, they were told, had been hit hard.
That night, when not a single light shone from a house and the bays were pitch black, a strong sea breeze kicked in and turned back the westerly. At dawn, Bob and Barbara boarded Larrikin, their 33-foot yacht, and slowly motored through a charred, still-smoking landscape, dreading what they might find. In the ashen light they slowly cruised past skeletons of houses, burning jetties, straining to see whether the home of their dreams remained standing. Surrounded by blackened trees and powdery grey earth, but still grand and powerful against the naked landscape, Tarrangaua had survived. Even the timber workshed escaped without so much as a singe.
As they motored beyond the house and closer to the estuary where Salvation Creek runs into the bay they saw nothing but devastation. The remains of four homes lay twisted and crumpled on the ground. Corrugated water tanks, their timber platforms devoured by flames, had collapsed. All that remained intact were a single, cast iron bathtub and the upturned dinghy on two poles that forms an arch across the jetty leading to the Lovett Bay boatshed.
Gordon Andrews, the man from whom I bought the Tin Shed, was the first to rebuild – at the age of eighty.
Bob and Barbara’s priority, after they finally settled into their new home, was to train as volunteer fire fighters with the West Pittwater Volunteer Fire Brigade.
The Poet
She was rich, reclusive and would have been forgott en but for a single poem that fired the imagination of a brave new world.
Tarrangaua, an Aboriginal word meaning high, rough hill, was built in 1925 as a summer cottage for the rich and reclusive poet Dorothea Mackellar. Born in 1885 into a family of enormous privilege and wealth, she wrote three novels, one in collaboration with her lifelong friend, Ruth Bedford, and four books of poems, which were published between 1911 and 1926.
Although she travelled widely with her politician father, spoke five languages and moved in circles that included many famous and influential people, she lived a sheltered, chaperoned life until she was in her thirties, and never married.
Mackellar would probably have been all but forgotten with the passing of time except for one thing. She wrote a poem that captured the imagination of a brash young colony, a poem that was learned by heart by generations of Australian school children. Even today, more than a hundred years after its publication, the poem evokes an instant passion for a ‘sunburnt country’ and ‘a wide brown l
and’.
The poem, ‘My Country’, made her famous and she was invited to recite it over and over throughout her life. More than anything else, it gave her a sense of achievement and the belief that long after the power and wealth of the Mackellar family had dissipated, she would leave a worthwhile legacy.
Miss Mackellar, as she was universally referred to, was forty years old when she bought 9 acres on the south-facing shores of Lovett Bay. She engaged the Sydney architectural firm of Wilson, Neave and Berry to design the house and it was generally understood by her friends and family that the most controversial of the three partners, Hardy Wilson (1881–1955), whom the poet knew socially, undertook the commission.
She wanted Tarrangaua to be a summer cottage, a retreat from the steamy heat of Sydney summers where she could peacefully indulge her passion for swimming, reading and the bush. The construction of the house would have been fraught with difficulties.
Building materials had to be barged in on high tides, then transported up a steep incline to the site near the peak of the hill.
More than sixty-thousand bricks, eight massive columns for the verandah, thousands of fragile Marseille terracotta tiles for the roof, and tons of tallowwood and Queensland maple for the floors and cupboards. The sandstone foundations were quarried on site and stonecutter’s marks can still be seen in the remains of boulders near the shore. There was no electricity, no phone lines, and the ferry wharf was a simple, stone seawall with rough, oyster-encrusted steps that went under water at high tide. It was not an undertaking for the faint-hearted.
The only surviving details of designing the house are two undated drawings for the septic tank, numbered 16 and 17, which are held in the Mitchell Library. No-one knows what happened to the earlier drawings and plans – perhaps they were innocently burned by the school children who were hired to clean out the house after Mackellar died in 1968.
Some memorabilia of the poet’s time at Tarrangaua remain in the house. The cast-iron letterhead embosser. Her personal seal with its tiny ladle to melt the wax. A few books, collected over time, with her bookplates inside. There’s a calendar, too, that the poet created for the doctor who lived down the hill. It is filled with references to love and makes you wonder if she may have had a crush on him. A cigarette case and lighter in vivid green have her initials on them, although Dorothea Mackellar, I was told, gave up smoking when she was quite young. And there is a shawl made of black silk, heavily embroidered with flowers in pastel colours and with a long, glossy fringe as fine as hair.
Bob and Barbara Story, the third owners of Tarrangaua since it was first sold after the poet’s death, regarded themselves as custodians of the house as much as of the poet’s possessions.
Tarrangaua
‘There is a house on a high, rough hill that overlooks the tawny green waters of Lovett Bay. It is pale yellow, with three chimneys and a red tiled roof splattered with lichen …’
Salvation Creek
Shortly before I moved to my Tin Shed, Barbara became ill. ‘These have been the best years of my life,’ she said one day as we sipped tea and ate cake on the verandah. It was her way, perhaps, of telling me that she knew she was dying. She told me, too, that there was a lane connecting Tarrangaua to the Tin Shed. ‘It’s called Lover’s Lane,’ she said with a knowing smile.
I had no idea – how could I? – that one day I would live in the house on the high, rough hill. But Bob and I fell in love in the best of all ways. We became friends first as we helped each other through difficult times. As Barbara knew we would.
After Bob and I married, I insisted we live in my Tin Shed, so he rented Tarrangaua to tenants. One day, a couple of years later, I watched Bob make about six trips to his workshed to get tools and something inside me let go.
‘Should we give your house a go for a while?’ I asked him, handing him a cup of tea.
‘It wouldn’t bother you?’ he said, trying not to look hopeful.
‘No. Not anymore.’ And I realised it was true.
The tenants, by then, were in love with the bay. So we swapped houses on a fine day in late spring in 2003. I had one stipulation. My furniture had to come with me or I would feel like a guest.
‘Fair enough,’ said Bob.
For a while, I felt overwhelmed by the quietly grand sense of Tarrangaua, and I wondered if I should trade my boat shoes and jeans for brogues and twinsets. Then common sense prevailed. A house is a house, no matter who once lived in it, and comfort comes first. Coffee tables are for feet. Wine glasses shouldn’t have to come with coasters. Dogs, even visiting dogs, have equal (well, almost) rights to sofas and if you rise from your seat with clothes covered in fine white hairs, well, that’s okay. Life is for living, not worrying about dog hairs.
On our walls we have linocuts of Pittwater by a friend, Katie Clemson, and artist David Preston. They hang alongside paintings by local artists, all of them friends. Their vibrancy lifts the sombre works from the 1800s that my mother gave me as gifts on momentous occasions – my fortieth birthday, my marriage to Bob.
As the current owners of Tarrangaua, we are honorary custodians of a growing collection of Mackellar artifacts given to us by people who knew her. The Buddhist nun, Adrienne Howley, who nursed Mackellar for the final eleven years of the poet’s life, gave us the emerald green cigarette box and lighter. George Bennett, who once owned the Lovett Bay boatshed, kept the calendar that Mackellar hand-typed in 1927 for the doctor who lived down the hill. For many years, George and his wife, Thelma, also stored an old cane suitcase that belonged to Mackellar’s brother, Malcolm.
The original keys, letterpress and sealing wax set have been gifted from one owner to the next. I bought one of Mackellar’s brass and crystal inkwells at auction, along with a book of poetry by Patrick Chalmers called ‘A Peck O’ Maut’. Chalmers was the man she hoped to marry. Legend has it that her letter accepting the marriage proposal went astray when World War I was declared and Chalmers, thinking he’d been rejected, married someone else on the rebound.
For us, the key to life in Tarrangaua is without doubt the long, columned verandah with its magical views of ancient red escarpments, trickling waterfalls and a bay that changes colour from deep green to vivid blue – and every colour in between – throughout the day.
In summer, I make up a cane bed at the eastern end, Bob slings a mosquito net over a frame that he hangs from the ceiling and we sleep with the sea breeze blowing softly on our faces. The chiming of a knocking halyard, like a cow bell, drifts from the bay. The sounds of wallabies thumping past on their well-worn tracks, the mournful hoot of a mopoke owl and the rustle of a bandicoot in the hydrangeas, are night music.
In winter, we close the windows against the frigid southerlies and light the fire in the sitting room. Outside, the smell of woodsmoke lingers on the cold layer of air in the bay. When storms muster behind the hills of Salvation Creek and Elvina Bay, we move onto the verandah to watch the wind fling branches through the air.
Sometimes, I cannot believe my good fortune, my fortunate life.
The Spirit
Long, languid summer days, relaxing in the cool waters of the Bays, putting our crab pots out at dusk, kayaking at dawn– the pleasures are simple but intoxicating.
Pittwater is a unique little paradise where even though its pleasures are simple – swimming, fishing, boating, food, a rich social life and a wondrous environment uncomplicated by the need for pocket money and malls – they are the greatest privileges of all.
Weekends revolve around fun, food, an unassailable spirit of goodwill, kids, tinnies, yachts and lovingly restored old timber boats that shine with the patina of age and the beauty that comes from living long and well.
There are, however, two main elements. The water, which makes us all interdependent. And the community. Rich, diverse, engaging, funny, irreverent, kind, occasionally infuriating but rarely interfering. While we may squabble here and there – and we do – the desire to forgive, forget and move on prevails. Gos
sip is generally benign and neighbours prefer to handle their problems over a beer or a cuppa. The unspoken, underlying bond between us all is severed only if someone consistently and arrogantly steps a long way over the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. Even then, it takes a long time before offenders are quietly subjected to a turned shoulder, a curt nod instead of a friendly chat, or the withdrawal of invitations to participate in community events. Petty squabbling, anyway, fades to nothing when the day, fat with heat, ends in a fiery sunset and a cool breeze blows in from the south to refresh; when moonlight tiger-stripes the water. When the bay is tweaked with white caps, Pittwater reminds you, over and over, that we humans are here for a second and it is the land and sea that endures, sustains and must be protected. And nearly always, if life suddenly turns belly-up, even for your antagonist, if he or she needs support, the slate is wiped clean and the community gathers quietly to lend a hand.
Community is the constant heartbeat of offshore living and it is a fierce guardian of the fragile principles that make our small part of the world unique. We all strive to preserve the hallowed sense of stepping back into a slower, more gentle era when eccentricities were not just tolerated but encouraged.
Occasionally, I meet people who wonder loudly why no-one’s ever bothered to build a bridge linking us to Church Point. ‘It would make life so much easier,’ they tell us.
I tell them about a little film made by a group of locals as part of the H20 360º Scotland Island short film festival. It was called The Bridge.
‘Honey?’ the film begins. ‘Honey, we need milk.’
Sighing, honey closes his computer, walks down the long stairway to the shore, climbs into his boat and heads for the General Store at The Point. He buys his milk, checks his change and realises there’s not much left from five dollars, sighs and gets back in his boat. Halfway home, the engine stalls. A kayaker glides past and offers to help. ‘No thanks, mate.’ The paddling begins. He hits a yacht on a mooring. Falls in the water. It’s winter and it’s cold. Eventually he arrives home, shivering, his leather jacket dripping but with the milk intact. ‘What happened to you?’ asks his wife.
