Sydney
Page 24
For the first decades of its existence it was entirely an Empire town – a Navy town, in fact, since its first Governors were all naval men. Some scholars believe that its original purposes were more ambiguously imperial than London was ever to admit, and it was certainly not envisaged only as a penal colony. The first proponent of a settlement seems to have been the American-born James Matra, who had sailed to Australia as a midshipman with Cook, and who saw it, after the American Revolution, as a possible new home for dispossessed American loyalists. They should be accompanied, he suggested, by poor English emigrants, and supplemented by Chinese labourers, and in no time the new colony would be supplying timber and flax for the Navy, produce of all sorts for the markets of the east. Phillip, as we have seen, always foresaw Sydney as a free British city of the future, and is justly surrounded, in the Victorian statue of him that stands in the Botanic Gardens, by figures of Navigation, Commerce, Mining and Agriculture.
One thesis argues that a fundamental object of the New South Wales enterprise was strategic. For myself I still have to consult the globe to grasp the historical significance of Sydney’s geographical position – Mercador’s projection grossly misrepresents it. The city lies about equidistant from South Africa, one of the key staging-posts of British imperial trade routes, India, the centrepiece of the whole imperial structure, and both the east and the west coasts of South America – Argentina going one way, Chile the other. One can see that it could indeed have been yet another stronghold to reinforce British control of the oceans. From Port Jackson, strategists argued at the time, Britain might conveniently threaten all the rival empires of the Pacific: the Spanish possessions of South America, the Dutch colonies in the East Indies, even Russian or American outposts on the coasts of North America. When Alessandro Malaspina brought his ships to Sydney in 1793, ostensibly on a voyage of scientific discovery, he was really spying for the Spanish Government, and he went awayconvinced that perfidious Albion was establishing there a base for the extension of British power throughout the southern seas, from which armies of horrible convicts would be conveyed by the Royal Navy to fall in looting and rapine upon the colonies of the Spanish Main.1
In hindsight he seems to have misread the signs of the settlement, just as one feels sure that his artist Juan Ravanet must have been blinded by the sheer Britishness of the Sydney officials, who all look in his pictures supernaturally tall, slender and gentlemanly. If a military role for Sydney was plotted behind the scenes in London, it never came about, and no armed expedition set sail from Sydney until the Sudan War of 1885. In fact Sydney never did fit easily into the pattern of Victorian imperial expansion. It belonged really to an earlier Empire. When Sydney was settled the American colonies had only just been lost, while India, which was later to become central to all imperial affairs, was still hardly more than a field of adventure for private enterprise. Sydney was far from the imperial trade-routes, and in its early years offered little economic promise. It carried no evangelical banner, either: there was no urge to raise the local Aborigines to a higher state of civilization, or to reconcile them to the Christian God – it was many years before the missionaries advanced upon the indigenes‚ and by then all the Ioras of Sydney had gone.
Sydney certainly did not figure largely in the ambitions of imperial administrators – ‘My language fails!’ groaned Hilaire Belloc’s Duke, finally abandoning all hope that his lachrymose grandson Lord Lundy would ever make a success of life. ‘Go out and govern New South Wales!’1 For many years Sydney remained synonymous in the British mind with Botany Bay. Sidney Smith, ‘the wit of wits’, refused to believe that a colony founded as ‘a sink of wickedness’ could ever be improved, and it was an English journalist, Henry Carter, who wrote the most famously contemptuous lines about the convict pioneers:
From distant climes o’er wide-spread seas we come,
Though not with much eclat or beat of dram,
True patriots all; for be it understood,
We left our country for our country’s good;
No private views disgrac’d our generous zeal,
What urg’d our travels was our country’s weal,
And none will doubt but that our emigration
Has proved most useful to the British nation.2
But as the imperial pride swelled, the possession of Australia did become a rather hazy source of satisfaction to the British – it was so particularly far-flung. To Dickens’ Mr Micawber it was a place not of exile but of possibility; and by the end of the century a representation of Captain Cook, implanting the flag for the very first time on the shores of New South Wales, was a favourite illustration in children’s books about the glory of Empire, Kipling, in his ‘Song of the Cities’, had Sydney singing about a birth-stain ‘turned to good’. ‘Farewell Australia‚’ wrote Lawrence, remembering his departure from Sydney Harbour in 1922, ‘farewell Britain and the great Empire. Farewell! Farewell!’
In return many Sydney citizens cherished a revived pride in the Mother Country – not just a snobbish nostalgia, but a sense of comradeship in a great enterprise. The Imperial Factor, which had brought the city into being, powerfully affected its affairs for many generations, and is still apparent now.
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The oldest surviving European graffiti in Sydney are on Garden Island, the main naval headquarters – HMAS Kuttabul in service usage. This is not in fact an island any longer, but in 1788 it was still separated from the shore by a couple of hundred yards, and seemed a good place to establish a vegetable garden. Seamen were assigned to do the gardenings and it was presumably three of them who scratched their initials on a rock on the highest point of the islet, together with the date 1788 – FM, IB and WB, now protected by glass pyramids like garden cloches. I was taken out to see them one morning by a retired civilian employee of the base, who had spent most of his working life there, who knew every inch of the place, and who had for years been puzzling out the identities of FM, IB and WB,1 I shall always remember this delightful man’s comical consternation when I happened to see another set of initials – FP – on a nearby rock; through all those years of infatuated study, through hundreds of visits to the spot, he had never noticed them before!
Actually we came to the conclusion that they were a recent vandalistic addition (Sydney graffiti remain vandalism for a century or two, before they are protected with glass pyramids).1 I think my companion’s original dismay, though, concerned the defiance of tradition – that there should have been four pairs of initials, instead of the long-attested and Admiralty-approved three. Garden Island is soaked in the imperial tradition. For generations it was the Royal Navy’s principal base in the South Pacific, and some of Sydney’s most handsome buildings stand around the dockyard. Fine workmanlike structures in the Georgian tradition, they are the southernmost examples of the British dockyard architecture that dignified naval ports around the world – Simonstown and Bermuda, Bombay and Portsmouth itself. A succession of twelve British admirals presided over the fortunes of Garden Island, from their enviable Admiralty House at Kirribilli across the water,2 and it was men of the Royal Marines who, in the 1880s, laid out its tennis-courts above the sea.
Between the two World Wars it was decided that the imperial navies must be provided with a dry dock for their largest warships at the southern end of the Pacific, supplementing the vast installations at Singapore in the north – a first confirmation, it might be said, of Malaspina’s instincts. The Captain Cook Dock, which finally linked Garden Island with the mainland, was completed too late for the Second World War, but even so Sydney became one of the great naval ports of the conflict. Hundreds of allied warships frequented it, hundreds of thousands of troops passed through it. Fabulous liners like the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth and the Aquitania appeared as troopships camouflaged in its harbour.3 For men all over the world Sydney was to provide a lasting memory of romance, gaiety and hospitality – as Charles Causley remembered of his visit with the Glory:
O like maidens p
reparing for the court ball
We pressed our number-one suits,
Borrowing electric irons and starching prime white collars,
And stepped forth into the golden light
With Australian pound-notes in our pockets.1
Today much of the Australian fleet can be seen there at Garden Island any day – destroyers, frigates, repair ships, towered over by an immense cantilever crane which is one of Sydney’s best-known shapes.2 The grey mass of it all, cluttered about with masts and superstructures beyond the Botanic Gardens, gives central Sydney a clout that I rather relish.3
All around the harbour, too, the Navy presence is familiar. There are repair yards at Cockatoo Island, and various depots and training places are dotted on headlands, and an enchanting little naval chapel, high above South Head, is one of the very first buildings to welcome vessels of the fleet back home. Minesweepers lie upstream, moored in a blaze of lights at Berry Island, and most compelling of all is the sight that awaits you at Neutral Bay, in one of the most thickly populated parts of the harbour’s northern shore. A small park stands at the head of this cove, with shady trees and a cricket pitch. Pleasant houses stand around, and there is a yacht club. If you stroll down from the main road through the green you will probably find children playing, yachtsmen preparing to sail, pensioners eating sandwiches on benches, and even (I swear to you) an occasional lady in hat, coat and skirt practising her croquet shots. And down at the water’s edge, there in the heart of the great amiable city, a pair of black submarines is almost certain to be lying alongside a pier at their flotilla headquarters – sinister predatory boats, but by now almost disregarded features of a saunter round the bay.
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There are fortifications all over Sydney, but contrary to Malaspina’s suspicions they have been motivated more by fear than by aggressive instinct. Until 1870 this was an imperial garrison town. The New South Wales Corps, mustered in 1790 and nicknamed the Botany Bay Rangers, was ignominiously abolished in 1810, to be replaced by a battalion of Highlanders. Thereafter battalions of fourteen British regiments came out in rotation to the Sydney station. Their main barracks were on George Street, and are said to have been the Empire’s biggest: most imposing buildings, if we are to go by the old pictures, standing around a wide parade ground, with an officers’ mess said to be as comfortable as any the British Army possessed, and their own military windmill on the high ground above. They were demolished in 1848, but two fine examples of Victorian military architecture survive: Victoria Barracks at Paddington, which looks like a toy fortress, and has sentries stumping up and down outside it, and the Lancers’ Barracks at Parramatta, an elegant affair of sandstone and ironwork which has been in continual use since 1820, and is thus the oldest military establishment in Australia. The Sydney garrison church was Holy Trinity Church, in Argyle Place, and this pleasant and beloved building is rich still in military mementoes, flags, crests, pamphlets and miscellaneous ephemera that form, accumulated as they have been generation by generation, a kind of imperial palimpsest.1
In the beginning the convicts were the enemy. The original fort, on Observatory Hill, was built under Phillip as a refuge for the officials if a convict rising occurred, and all that remains of it now is a small uninteresting segment of a wall, outside the observatory garden. Vanished too is the pretty castellated fortress which Greenway designed for Lachlan Macquarie on Bennelong Point, which was partly a protection for Sydney Cove, and partly an architectural folly, but chiefly a watchpost to prevent convicts escaping by sea. Later defence works had the Empire’s foreign enemies more in mind. It is said that Napoleon himself conceived the idea of seizing Sydney, and a French squadron which turned up in 1802 is thought to have been making a preliminary reconnaissance – certainly its cartographer mapped the settlement with exquisite care. Sydney’s vulnerable isolation, however, does not seem to have worried the colonists much until one morning in 1830 the city woke up to the news that during the night four American frigates had sailed through the Heads, up the harbour and into Sydney Cove without anyone noticing, ‘Had war existed,’ helpfully observed their commander, Captain Charles Wilkes, ‘we might, after firing the shipping, and reducing the greater part of the town to ashes, have effected a retreat before daylight in perfect safety.’ Later Governor Sir William Denison imagined such an event even more graphically – a few frigates might come in at night ‘and the first notice I should have of their arrival would be a 32-pound shot crashing through the walls of my house’.
A fever of military activities ensued. Sydney was several thousand miles from the next British naval station and, in a world where almost every nation was a potential enemy of the British Empire, had nobody to save it but itself. The Americans were one possible threat, the Spaniards were another, the French a third, the Crimean War brought the Russian bogy even into these distant seas and in later years there was always the Yellow Peril. There was a rumour once that ferocious Irish Fenians were on their way from California, and during theAmerican Civil War it was thought that Yankee privateers, in what would surely have been one of the most exciting of all skulduggeries, might raid the city for the gold stored in its coffers. Successive administations, backed by the imperial authorities in London, accordingly turned Sydney into a fortified base. ‘I had no idea,’ wrote Anthony Trollope after viewing the works in 1871, ‘that the people of New South Wales were either so suspicious of enemies, or so pugnacious in their nature’: and to this day on almost every headland or islet there are militant remains.
The centre of the defence system was Pinchgut Island, which we first saw as a wooded mount with a gallows on its summit. This had been cut down to water level and converted into a citadel. Renamed Fort Denison, after that apprehensive Governor, it was equipped with a Martello tower, one of the last such fortifications to be built anywhere a plan to erect another on the reef called the Sow and Pigs, just inside the Heads, was unfortunately abandoned. For years the island–fort was armed with muzzle-loaded 8-pounder guns, during the Second World War it housed two anti-aircraft guns, and now it is one of the prime tourist sights of Sydney, looking very much like a surfaced submarine, or perhaps a monitor of the American Civil War, a few hundred yards from the Opera House. The daily one o’clock gun is fired from Pinchgut, the tide records are kept there, and since it is occupied as I write by a caretaker with a large family, it is equipped on its north side with a large rotary washing line, well-hung with the morning laundry.
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Until the Second World War, when Australia took up arms against Japan, nobody cared to test these works. By then the headland batteries had been reinforced by a boom across the harbour mouth, from Watson’s Bay to the Sow and Pigs and across to the northern shore. This had to be removed to allow the passage of any vessel, and a launch would hurry out to lift it whenever necessary – very frequently, during the daylight hours, if only for the Manly ferries.
In May 1942 an attack group of five large Japanese submarines arrived at a point some thirty-five miles out at sea, two of them equipped with aircraft, three with 46-ton midget submarines. On 31 May one of the aircraft was sent on a reconnaissance of the harbour, no doubt spotting the boom, and also noticing the presence of several warships, including the 9,000-ton American cruiser Chicago. That night the three midgets, each with a two-man crew, were launched from their mother ships and crept through the Heads into the harbour. One got tangled in the boom and blew itself up. One disappeared for ever. The third, I–22, sailed past Bradley’s Head into the inner harbour and, finding the Chicago in its sights, let loose two torpedoes, missing the cruiser but hitting the shore of Garden Island. One torpedo failed to explode, the other wrecked an old ferry-boat, the Kuttabul, which was moored alongside a quay as a floating barracks; nineteen sailors were killed – the only people ever killed by enemy action in Sydney, unless yon count those who died in skirmishes between whites and blacks in the early days of the settlement.1
Once Sydney realized what was happening, chao
s erupted. Guns were fired all over the place, small craft buzzed around the harbour dropping depth charges, the night was alive with flashes and tracer bullets. The Chicago, firing one of its 5-inch guns, chipped a small piece off the corner of the Pinchgut tower. Passengers on a ferry-boat, reported the Sydney Morning Herald later, ‘had the thrilling experience of seeing large-calibre guns blazing seemingly directly at them’. The artist Donald Friend, watching the racket from his flat above Elizabeth Bay, decided there and then to spend all his money and enlist. I–22 lay low, but in the small hours was sighted by three patrol boats in Taylor’s Bay, beside Bradley’s Head, and sunk with depth charges.2
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The Japanese claimed to have sunk two merchantmen and an American cruiser, but one takes it that the action was conceived chiefly as an attack upon morale, and six nights later another submarine, standing offshore in the darkness, lobbed ten shells out of the ocean towards Rose Bay, wounding two civilians. It appears to have worked. The morning after the submarine raid King’s Gross was full of removal wagons, taking nervous householders to suburbs further from the front line, and though most of these refugees soon returned the city seems to have remained jittery throughout the war. The firing of the midday gun was suspended, in case it alarmed the citizenry. Towers and belfries were removed from many buildings. Some (notably the Post Office Tower) were taken down because it was thought they would act as markers for Japanese bomber pilots, presumably unable to recognize the Harbour Bridge, others (the dome of Balmain Town Hall, for instance) because it was feared that in an air raid they might fall off and hurt somebody. The worst never happened, though. There was never another naval attack on Sydney, and the nearest air raids were at Darwin, 1,500 miles away. One by one, when the war was over, most of the towers and spires went up again; for years the Post Office Tower looked a slightly different colour from the rest of the building, because they had taken the opportunity to clean it while it was down.