The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  A few steps further on is the headstone of Thomas Langford Snr, ‘native of Sydney, yacht & boat builder’. Like navigational beacons, more headstones mark the tidal zone of the harbour’s history, guiding you through the shoals and perils of another time. There are the names of ships’ captains, and the resting place of a coxswain, Robert Chambers, who ‘was drowned when diving in Farm Cove’ in 1880. There are the headstones of those who notated the shape and form of the harbour, such as the renowned colonial artist Conrad Martens, who had been a topographer on board HMS Beagle alongside a young naturalist named Charles Darwin, before he was beguiled by Sydney and stayed to sketch and paint it. There is the memorial for a Royal Engineer who reshaped the harbour, George Barney, who blew the top off the harbour island known as Pinchgut to build Fort Denison. Near Barney’s memorial is a plaque commemorating the descendants of William ‘Billy’ Blue, a convict who became a notorious ferryman and raconteur, rowing passengers from the North Shore to the town – that is, when he wasn’t cajoling the passengers to row him. For his efforts and wit, he had a headland named after him, Blues Point.

  The most prominent monument in the park is a neoclassical stone pyramid, built by Alexander Berry. He had arrived in the colony as a ship’s surgeon. Berry and his business partner, Edward Wollstonecraft, made much of their fortune from the harbour, particularly in shipping. Berry married Wollstonecraft’s sister, Elizabeth, who wrote regularly to her cousin back in England, the author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley. When his wife died in 1845, Berry gave this land for a cemetery and built the monument. Beneath the pyramid is a vault containing the remains of his wife and his brother-in-law, as well as his own. In keeping with the grandeur and faintly Gothic air of the monument, an instruction is etched along the pyramid’s base, indicating the ‘ENTRANCE to the VAULT 4 feet below this face’, along with an arrow pointing down. The symbol is reminiscent of the broad arrow that was imprinted on convicts’ clothes, which marked both the fabric and its wearer as property of the British government.

  The rest park is stubbled with the memory of explorers who voyaged out of the harbour, into the Pacific, into the unknown, and, finally, into the earth. Captain Owen Stanley, who was surveying the New Guinea coast when he died of malaria in 1850, is commemorated here. Buried underneath a shared monument to the early colonial judge Ellis Bent and his good friend, the explorer Major John Ovens, is the skull of Lieutenant Bower. The Royal Navy officer was killed in the Solomon Islands in 1880. His skull and a necklace fashioned from his teeth were handed over by locals to the crew of a visiting British warship the following year and brought to Sydney.

  The largest and perhaps most poignant memorial for lost mariners is the gravesite of Commodore James Goodenough, who was in charge of the Royal Navy’s presence in the Pacific, the Australian Station. He died on board HMS Pearl in 1875, after being pierced with arrows on the island of Santa Cruz, which, his memorial says, he was ‘visiting for the purpose of establishing friendly relations with the natives’. On each side of Goodenough’s memorial is the grave of a sailor killed in the same incident, and neighbouring these are headstones commemorating other seamen from Pearl, who died on duty between 1873 and 1876. This cluster of memorials is fenced off with chains and symbols of crossed anchors. The site is a few kilometres from the harbour, too far for the scent of salt to lace the air, but for many years, sailors would traipse up the hill to pay their respects. Almost a century and a half on from the enormous funeral ceremony for Goodenough that brought the city to a halt, I would often deviate from the path to stand in front of the crossed anchors and the cold stone commemorating the officer and his men. I would read the inscriptions, and those words that were so redolent with adventure and drama and tragedy would feel so removed from this somnolent suburban park, and from me. The earth united all these souls now, but I wanted to write about what had connected them in life, the harbour. However, I didn’t have time. Having disrupted my routine for a few minutes, I would return to the path and walk to the train.

  On the rail journey along the lower North Shore, I would catch glimpses of the harbour squeezed between the buildings or cradled in the yacht-speckled coves. As we trundled across the northern approach to the Harbour Bridge, I would peer down at Milsons Point, where Commodore Goodenough’s body was brought ashore before a crowd of thousands in 1875, and where, for many years before the Bridge was opened in 1932, commuters would pile on and off ferries for the journey to the opposite shore. I would look at the famous clown’s face entrance to Luna Park. Its manic grin reminded me of occasional childhood visits to the amusement park, my stomach flitting with excitement on the ferry ride over, and churning with fried food mushed by the Big Dipper roller coaster on the way back.

  Crossing the Bridge, I would look to the right, watching the harbour wriggle in and out of coves and inlets, and pirouetting around Goat and Cockatoo islands. I would look down at the press of terrace houses and hotels in Millers Point, for so long the rowdy domain of sailors and wharf workers. I could see Gladesville Bridge arcing through the sky in the distance, as the harbour squiggled on towards Parramatta.

  Then I would look to the left, towards the surreal sails of the Opera House, down to the calligraphy of ferries’ wakes, as the craft cut in and out of Circular Quay, and at the office towers rising from ground that was once swamps and mudflats. I would see Lieutenant Colonel Barney’s Fort Denison, with its stone Martello tower, like a fairytale fabricated in the middle of the harbour, and the grey warships docked around Garden Island. My gaze would bounce across the headlands, each packed with billions of dollars in real estate, until it reached South Head, crowned with the historic Macquarie Lighthouse. When it was lit by the morning sun, the lighthouse gleamed like a white exclamation mark, punctuating land’s end and the beginning of the blue immensity of the Pacific. Then the harbour would sink and disappear, as the train slipped into a tunnel.

  Seeing the harbour, and the life on it, never failed to bring me pleasure as I headed to work. It was a necessary part of my routine. And it often made me think of those I had walked around and over half an hour before, the dead mariners. Perhaps it was because I was thinking of them, and how the harbour enriched life and took it away. But I do remember it was while I was travelling over the Bridge that I was slapped with the realisation, ‘I hardly know anything about this harbour’.

  It wasn’t as though I had been estranged from the harbour. I thought I had engaged with it, and often. I had criss-crossed it on ferries. I had sliced through it in cruise ships, tall ships, and warships. I had dined and jogged along its shores and waded into its shallows at quite a few of its many beaches. Yet the closest I had felt to the harbour was when I kayaked on it.

  I usually kayaked on my own, paddling the same nine-kilometre return route along the length of Middle Harbour. I would also regularly paddle on the inner harbour and the lower reaches of Parramatta and Lane Cove rivers with two friends, Bruce Beresford and George Ellis. Commuting over the Bridge, I could see the stretches of the harbour where the three of us would paddle, and the patch where we would meet. Bruce and George would kayak from the south, from Birchgrove, and I would paddle from the north, out of the bushy crescent of shoreline behind Berry Island, having agreed to ‘see you in the middle of the harbour’. Our meeting area was usually off Manns Point, which is considered a marker of the border between Parramatta River and the inner harbour. From there, the three of us would set off and, punctuated by the paddle strokes, we would talk, learning what each of us had been up to. Our friendship has been grouted with water. It is more solid because of water. Being together on the harbour would encourage us to talk, to confide and to laugh. And being on the harbour would encourage us to not talk, to simply immerse ourselves in the joy of being there.

  Water is a conductor. It gives you energy, and it makes you feel connected. At least, that’s how I feel when paddling. When you just look at the harbour, it is often as a diversion, an escape, from life. It breaks the rhythm of whate
ver you’re doing. When you are on the harbour, you become part of its life. You sink into its rhythm. And you feel more alive. The sensation reminds me of a famous speech by US President John F. Kennedy. Addressing a dinner for America’s Cup crews in 1962, President Kennedy said it was an interesting biological fact that we had the same percentage of salt in our blood as what there was in the sea. And so, he argued, when we headed to the sea, we were, in a sense, going back to where we came from.

  That moment on the Bridge when I realised I knew so little about the harbour arrived not long after I had decided to resign from my job as a television presenter. I needed a break from wearing a suit and tie and reading an autocue. When I quit, I knew it was not so much about disconnecting from a job but reconnecting with who I am. I resolved to play more music and to kayak on the harbour as much as I could. I would get to know the harbour better, and me. I resolved to get back to the water.

  NO ONE has observed Sydney Harbour more closely than Kenneth Slessor. He did the closest thing to capturing lightning in a jar. He spun the rhythm of water into the metre of words. Slessor was the harbour’s poet laureate. His stipend was a fathomless sea of ideas. He was rewarded handsomely.

  My favourite Slessor poem is ‘Captain Dobbin’. When I read the poem as a young man, I wanted to be like Captain Dobbin and have great adventures in life. When I read the poem after quitting my presenting job, I wanted to be sure I didn’t end up like Captain Dobbin. In the poem, the retired South Seas captain ‘Now sails the street in a brick villa, “Laburnum Villa”,/In whose blank windows the harbour hangs/Like a fog against the glass/Golden and smoky, or stoned with a white glitter’. Slessor has Captain Dobbin riding the ebb tide of his memory, surrounded by his artefacts and mementos of ‘mummified waves’, reading of the places and cultures he once voyaged into. I wanted to be Captain Dobbin in reverse. I wanted to get out on the harbour and journey upon it. Leaving behind the water and merely reading about it is a kind of death for Captain Dobbin, as he sits in his room, ‘In his little cemetery of sweet essences’. For me there was renewal, even rebirth, in stepping away from news reading, no longer feeling tethered by tightly constructed sentences, and heading out onto the water for a while. I would find what Captain Dobbin was grieving for.

  I decided to take my time exploring the 316 kilometres or so of the harbour’s shorelines, to delve into its dozens of bays and inlets, and to circumnavigate each of its islands. I would get to know this waterway that was ‘many lobed’, as D.H. Lawrence described it in his novel Kangaroo. And that description suggested to me, contrary to Tim Freedman’s lyrical observation, that Sydney did have a brain. I wanted to get inside that brain, and learn about its soul.

  The vessel for my voyage of discovery – and re-discovery – was to be my long-time paddling companion, my kayak, Pulbah Raider. I didn’t give the kayak its name; its maker in the Hunter Valley did. The Pulbah part I love, as it is a word from the Awabakal people of Lake Macquarie, 90 minutes north of Sydney, and it means ‘island’. However, the Raider part of the vessel’s name makes me a little uncomfortable, for the implied aggression in that word is diametrically opposed to the gentle passage you experience in a kayak. That gentleness takes you a lot further than aggression ever could; the kayak allows you to nudge into other places and lives, causing barely a ripple.

  When I bought Pulbah Raider in 2004, I chose a colour for her deck that could have been seen from space. It was a radioactive green, creating the impression that the kayak had been paddled around Fukushima. Over the years, the colour has softened, until now it is like the milky turquoise of a tropical lagoon, or of the waters off a sandy harbour beach. Pulbah Raider has aged into a vessel that looks like it belongs on Sydney Harbour. Actually, it is suited to Sydney Harbour, because it was designed for lakes and rivers. So Pulbah Raider can usually handle estuarine conditions, where the rivers and the sea meet, mixing the different characters of their water to become one. And as marine scientists keep telling me, Sydney Harbour is an estuary. Although the name ‘Sydney Estuary’ somehow makes the harbour sound less beautiful, more pungent, and kind of swampy. Even if it had been known as Sydney Estuary, some tourism marketing wizard would have decided long ago that it had to be grander and more inviting. It had to be Sydney Harbour. Just as Norma Jeane Baker had to be Marilyn Monroe. After all, icons of beauty can’t have plain names.

  Pulbah Raider, I knew, would take me where I wanted to go, and where I needed to be. From its cockpit, I could see the harbour from a different perspective. While out on the water, I would imagine what all those sailors and paddlers before me – from the original inhabitants in their canoes, or nawi, to the captains of ships – had experienced as they interacted with the harbour.

  But even from the water, you can’t learn just by looking. So I planned to pull up on the shore and talk with people who lived by the harbour, worked and played on it, dived into its depths, and drew inspiration from it to create art. I wanted to meet those who fought to preserve the harbour, who worked to repair and regenerate it, and those who were determined to reshape and redefine parts of it. I would drift into the lives of those who had travelled great distances to be on the harbour, and those who had delved into its character and past, before bobbing up with insights into our character. I would try to understand how this body of water has divided us and made us different, and how it has united us and made us who we are. I would get to experience this beautiful, complex, wilful harbour through the beautiful, complex, wilful souls who are bound to it. I would find more than shelter in this harbour; I would find knowledge.

  Water can create the intoxicating illusion that you are the first to scratch its surface, by quickly rubbing out the wakes of all the boats that have been before you. However, any library will quickly smack down any notion that you’re treading – or paddling – into uncharted territory when writing a book about Sydney Harbour.

  ‘So much has been said and written about Sydney Harbour that he must be a bold man or a specially well-informed man, or otherwise well-equipped above the average, who will undertake at this time of day to add to the literature on the subject.’ That is what the Sydney Morning Herald published more than a century ago, in 1903, in a review of a book on the harbour by a Mr E.J. Brady.

  I am not a bold man, nor a specially well-informed man. And clearly I’m not a man to take the hint that a subject has been already covered. But I’m a curious man. And there is no better way to satisfy my curiosity than to accept I can look only as far as the eye can see, slip into Pulbah Raider and paddle around the next headland to find what is there.

  1

  FOLLOWING HENRY: UP PARRAMATTA RIVER

  THE OBVIOUS place to set off on a harbour journey is under the Bridge or in the shadow of the Opera House. But the appropriate place for me to begin paddling is beside a broken stone column holding the sky off the water in Parramatta River.

  For the column is a symbol of just how far a paddle can take you.

  About a kilometre upstream from Gladesville Bridge, and just off the northern bank in water that has the character of cloudy tea, the column appears to rise out of the river. But it is actually sitting on one of a trio of rocks known as the Brothers, which only show themselves at low tide. The column is out of the way of boating traffic and all but out of sight of those sitting on the fast catamaran ferries rumbling upriver and down between Circular Quay and Parramatta. The RiverCats’ wake washes past the column like time itself.

  The column is a memorial to a young man who rowed this reach of the river, and into immortality. His name was Henry Searle, and, as a plaque facing the river reads, he was ‘Champion Sculler of the World 1888-89’.

  Henry Searle was born to row. He had to. Searle grew up on an island in Clarence River on the New South Wales north coast. He would row himself and his siblings more than ten kilometres to and from school. Having dominated local regattas, Searle headed to Sydney, where a talented oarsman could make both a name for himself and a good deal of money.r />
  In the later part of the 19th century, sculling was a very popular sport in Australia, and Parramatta River was the main course. And like just about anything else involving competition in Australia, the river provided a platform on which to gamble. Professional scullers heaved and pulled 3 miles and 330 yards (just over 5.1 kilometres) from near the present-day Ryde Bridge downriver to the Brothers rocks. Where this column – and the memory of Henry Searle – rests was the finish line. This was the point where history was made, and so was money, as the betting on the races was huge.

  Australians’ interest in professional sculling had surged in 1876, when Edward Trickett travelled to England to take on the Mother Country’s champion for the world crown. Trickett had lived by, and trained on, Parramatta River. He won the race, becoming the first Australian to be a professional world title holder.

  From then on, those around the globe would learn what many Australians already knew. The colonials were a powerful force on the water. Never mind rule Britannia; Australians ruled the sculling world title for twenty-two of the following thirty-one years. Parramatta River became a stage for intense competition, with forty-five world professional sculling championships held on its waters between 1876 and 1914. When the champions took to the water, so did the crowds. Fleets of launches and ferries, packed with spectators, moored in the river. People lined the shores, filled the wharves, and pushed onto pub verandas along the course.

  Searle, in particular, was lionised. He looked like a champion. The illustrations and photos of him show a handsome young man, with a groomed moustache and eyebrows arching over sharp eyes. He was criticised for having a crude rowing action. Even so, Searle literally left other champions in his wake. He became known as the Clarence Comet. What made Searle extraordinary was not just how quickly he rowed, but how it took him such little time to row to greatness.