The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  As the dogs lope in the water, the women talk about Yaralla. They say locals love walking around here, the Walker legacy still providing convalescence from the pressures of daily life.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone about here,’ says one of the women. ‘Keep it secret!’

  Yet it’s not a kayaker who the women fear will spoil their secret. They, and other locals, are concerned the State Government will one day sell Yaralla, and this haven will be recrafted into just another peninsula on Parramatta River packed with apartments and marketing slogans about perfect living.

  As I paddle away before a dog jumps onto the kayak, one of the women reiterates, ‘Keep it secret!’ I know I won’t, yet I trust this is a secret that should be shared in order to keep it.

  As I kayak around the point into Majors Bay, I trace the ongoing outline of Yaralla. Filtered through the bush along the shore are the mansion and the grounds. They look like something lifted out of an English pastoral scene. It is an extraordinary juxtaposition. It is, in microcosm, the story of the British settling on the shores of Sydney Harbour. It looks faintly ridiculous, but somehow it works.

  On the other side of the bay, a few hundred metres away, is Mortlake. What those two women don’t want for Yaralla has already taken hold over there. The tip of Mortlake is a hive of residential developments. And more are on the way, with foundations being gouged into the earth.

  Long before a rash of new housing broke out over its skin, Mortlake was the site of the Australian Gas Light Company’s works. The complex was vast, with enormous storage tanks that could be seen for kilometres around. The AGL Company bought the land on the peninsula in 1884 and within a couple of years, the works were operating. As the city expanded, so did the Mortlake facility. Around the gasworks themselves, a community grew, with housing and businesses.

  The river was crucial to the works’ operation. The gasworks, and the surrounding community, was garlanded with coal smoke. Coal was the key material for producing the gas for many years, so shiploads of coal were delivered in colliers tracking back and forth from the Hunter River to Mortlake. The gasworks’ wharf accommodated the river, with landing stages for both high and low tides. The ships hauling the coal were known as ‘sixty milers’, the approximate distance by sea from Newcastle, at the mouth of the Hunter, to Sydney. The vessels wore the names of the places involved in producing the gas, including Mortlake Bank, whose bones I saw in Homebush Bay. When the Mortlake to Putney punt began operating in the 1920s, one of the main reasons was to transport workers from the other side of the river.

  The business that helped fuel a city also fed thousands of families, including that of Donald Chivas, whom I had met on the other side of the river, at Kissing Point. Donald was with the company through the change from coal gas to natural gas. He retired from AGL before the gasworks closed in 1990, and Mortlake’s transition began. Donald mentioned he didn’t feel the need to visit the site for old times’ sake.

  ‘Gasworks aren’t the prettiest of places,’ Donald said. ‘But it’s only a skeleton of what it was.’

  Those skeletons of the industrial past have been largely buried under the houses and apartments along the riverfront, which wears a name retrieved from the earliest days of the colony: Breakfast Point. The first journey of a British boat along this river was in February 1788, just a couple of weeks after the ships of the First Fleet dropped anchor in Sydney Cove. Captain John Hunter, later to be the second Governor of New South Wales, and his shipmate Lieutenant William Bradley were undertaking the exploration. In his journal, Bradley noted that on February 5 they stopped at a point to cook breakfast. The party made signs to a group of Aboriginal people on the northern bank to come over, and seven of them did, in two canoes. According to Bradley, the meeting was friendly, with the Aboriginal men leaving their spears in the canoe, and the British tying beads around the locals’ necks. The visitors offered to share their breakfast, but the Aboriginal group declined, instead waiting for the British to leave so they could use the fire to cook mussels. Hunter named the place Breakfast Point.

  Neighbouring where the punt hauls itself onto the Mortlake bank with a screech and grunt, there is an old slip and a marine business, River Quays. The business was started in the mid-1980s by an architect and keen sailor, especially of wooden boats, John Wood.

  John had lived by the harbour at Birchgrove and used to watch imported Oregon logs being unloaded from ships into the water near his home, herded into a raft and towed to timber yards up Parramatta River. After the mills had gone and the voyage of the logs had ended, John made the same journey, to Mortlake. He was looking for somewhere to lift his beloved historic wooden sailboat, Kelpie, out of the water for a major service. He found a boatyard between the punt and the gasworks, where he could work on his 30-foot yacht.

  ‘In the process, the more time I spent at Mortlake, the more I was convinced this was a brilliant site,’ John recalls.

  ‘I had seen around Sydney Harbour there were lots of little boatyards on prime waterfront land that was far in excess of the value of the yards themselves. I could see the writing on the wall for these little yards. You could make an income as long as the land and development costs weren’t prohibitive, so it was logical Mortlake was a good place for a marine business. And because it was industrial, you didn’t have the residential issues.’

  More than restore his boat, John bought the Mortlake yard and expanded it. Some of the fastest and best-known racing yachts of the 1980s made their way up the river to be serviced at the yard, much to the surprise of many who didn’t think elite sailing craft would venture west of Sydney Harbour Bridge.

  ‘John had a bit of foresight, because anything west of the Bridge then was considered a non-boating area; it was just for fishermen,’ says Ian Smith, who worked at River Quays.

  Ian is a shipwright and sailor, with a great respect for maritime history and an even greater passion for crafting wood into beautiful boats. He began the Sydney Wooden Boat School at River Quays in the late 1980s. As well as teaching traditional methods of boatbuilding and restoration, Ian, along with John, celebrated the results. They organised Sydney’s inaugural wooden boat festival, returning a flotilla of traditionally built vessels to the waters that once cradled many timber hulls.

  ‘We were basically trying to generate interest in that part of the river,’ Ian says.

  Wooden boat owners embraced the idea. On a weekend in October 1990, about fifty vessels were moored on the marina, and another twenty-five were displayed on trailers. While some queried, ‘Why Mortlake?’ John was confident the crowds would come. His faith was rewarded.

  ‘Word about the festival spread, so by the Sunday afternoon, there were about eighty craft moored out in the river; all these people had turned up by boat,’ says John. ‘We were flat out running a tender, and the ferries were having to slow down and weave in and out of the moored boats. It was absolutely incredible.’

  A second wooden boat festival was held at Mortlake before it was moved downriver to Balmain.

  John Wood misses the six years he spent by the river at Mortlake. What he doesn’t hold fond memories of is the water quality.

  ‘It was unbelievably polluted, it was toxic, horrendous,’ he says.

  ‘On the bottom, there was this crust, but underneath that was this oily, oozy mass, and that black ooze contained dioxins, oils, all the industrial pollution that had settled into the sediments.

  ‘So the river quality is pristine compared to what it was like then.’

  THE HOMES in the Breakfast Point development are a mix of detached buildings, townhouses and apartment blocks. Many are clothed in the colours that seem to be spreading across the peninsulas up and down the river and around the harbour: soft greys and browns, creams, yellows, apricot and salmon, pale terracotta. Paddling past, Breakfast Point looks like a bricks-and-mortar salad. A cluster of new homes are being built close to the point itself, and on many, the ‘sold’ signs are already up.

  In market
ing real estate, some things haven’t changed. Back in 1840, when land that would become part of Yaralla was being sold, the agents rhapsodised about the ‘enchanting’ scenery and the steamers, ‘as they glide through the romantic waters of the Parramatta River’. The marketing also assured the climate was ‘free from any humidity injurious to the constitution’.

  Almost two centuries later, a sign on the Cabarita shore across from Breakfast Point on Kendall Bay indicates there are other elements under the water that could be injurious to the constitution. The sign has a map and a warning that the marked zone is a contaminated land remediation site. It recommends the public not enter that area until investigation of the sediment in the bay is completed. The marked zone is along the Breakfast Point shoreline, which I’ve just paddled. Still, I reason, my blades are hardly going to stir up the sediment. I barely finish my thought when a RiverCat pulls into the Cabarita Park ferry terminal, its powerful engines swizzling the water into a fury. According to the map, the wharf is just outside the ‘sediment investigation area’. Still, the flow of contaminants probably doesn’t strictly adhere to a map.

  Cabarita Park has a long beach, which wears an apron of shells. There are thousands of them along the bank. It looks like a conchologist’s dream. For Pulbah Raider, it’s a nightmare. The kayak protests loudly, as its hull is scratched and picked at mercilessly as we land. From the beach, I walk up onto a grassy headland, where there is a memorial to William Beach.

  As the plaque on the stone obelisk proclaims, William Beach was an undefeated champion sculler of the world. Beach seized the world championship from Canadian Edward Hanlan on Parramatta River in 1884, before a crowd estimated to be 100,000. As the renowned bookseller and publisher James R. Tyrrell recalled in his memoir, ‘A sculling match, in those halcyon days, was not merely a sporting encounter; it was the big event of the moment.’ When Beach raced against Hanlan again the following year, Tyrrell joined the ‘swarms’ making ‘the pilgrimage’ to the river. When he defeated Hanlan a third time, after beating a string of other challengers, Beach retired. But his feats were not forgotten. Three years after he died in 1935, his ‘friends and admirers’ erected this monument. Long after his own marks on the water have fizzed into nothingness, long after the crowds who cheered for him have dispersed into history, William Beach still has a place by the river.

  Cabarita is an Aboriginal word, and it’s believed to mean ‘by the water’. The people of the Wangal clan collected oysters and mussels along the shores and caught crayfish in nets of woven bark. They headed onto the river and bays in canoes shaped from bark and sealed with the gum of Xanthorrhoea.

  The traditions and identity of the Wangal were disrupted and dislocated when the settlers and speculators moved in. Cabarita Point was identified relatively early, in the 1850s, as ideal for recreation. In 1880, almost ten hectares of the point was set aside as a public park. An entrepreneur, Thomas Correy, established a pleasure ground and dance hall next to the park. Until it shut just after World War One, Correy’s Gardens were among the most popular resorts in Sydney, attracting ferries filled with picnickers.

  The area remains a pleasure ground by the water, and on it. At Cabarita Point there is a large marina, poking its fingers deep into the mouth of Hen and Chicken Bay and providing berths for dozens of vessels, including some large private and commercial craft. The name of one cruiser I paddle past echoes across the river to Banjo Paterson Park. It is called Waltzing Matilda.

  I kayak around the marina, into the bay. My view is filled with the scrimmage of hulls and masts around the marina, so I miss the sandstone outcrop at the point that is believed to be the reason behind the bay’s name. On their voyage up the river in February 1788, Hunter and Bradley noticed the formation and apparently thought a large rock was like a hen, and a group of smaller ones like chickens. Others have surmised the explorers may have seen an emu and her chicks on the shore around the point.

  While the definitive reason for its name may have drifted off, there is no missing the bay, as the shoreline balloons. The bay is almost three kilometres long. Little wonder it has been a long-time drawcard not just for rowers but also boaties – and those hardy souls who enjoy being towed behind powerboats. The shallow waters of Hen and Chicken Bay were apparently the first in Australia to be slashed and cut by water skis. In 1934, 20-year-old Ted Parker was pulled across the bay, and into history, wearing skis his neighbour had made based on a magazine photograph.

  Hen and Chicken Bay has a series of inlets along its western shore that contain the names and legacies of faraway places.

  There is France Bay. When it comes to access to the water, there doesn’t seem to be much ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ going on. The water’s edge has been largely sliced up and cut off by private residences. In the bay, boats are moored, and the seagulls who have taken up residence on the vessels screech at me as I pass, seemingly giving voice to what the fences on shore indicate: ‘Go away!’

  I paddle around the peninsula festooned with fancy homes, where there once stood a number of industries, including a sheep dip manufacturing plant and the Wunderlich factory, famous for its pressed metal ceilings, and I arrive in Exile Bay. In the bay’s south-west corner, next to a golf course, is a towering reminder of what used to inhabit much of this area – a factory. With its stack looking like a defiant finger, it seems as though the plant is sending a message to the Johnny-come-lately residents, golfers and boaties surrounding it. However, the factory is also a monument to one of Sydney’s abiding obsessions. Coffee is roasted in there. So the building must still have a place.

  On the southern tip of Exile Bay is Bayview Park. Just metres away from the shore in the park, there is a small stone monument that explains the name of the bay, along with those of nearby France and Canada bays.

  In 1837, rebellions broke out in British-ruled areas of Canada. British forces crushed the uprising. One hundred and forty-nine of the captured rebels received sentences of transportation for life to the Australian colonies. Those of British descent were transported to Van Diemen’s Land, and fifty-eight French-Canadian rebels were sent to Sydney. When the French-speaking prisoners arrived in this far-flung British colony in 1840, they ‘gazed with horror’ from the ship’s deck. Their first impression, as recorded by one of the exiles, Leon Ducharme, was that they had sailed into one big prison. The exiles saw ‘miserable wretches’ harnessed to carts and dragging blocks, while others were breaking up stones.

  Their opinion of the place would not have improved when they were taken up Parramatta River, to a stockade in a marshy area near the shores of Hen and Chicken Bay, known as Longbottom. Being about half way between Sydney and Parramatta, Longbottom had begun life as an overnight holding area for convicts being marched along the rough road between the two centres. The stockade later housed prisoners, whose work included the dispiriting task of wading into Hen and Chicken Bay and collecting oyster shells to burn and create lime for the colony’s building projects.

  By the time the French-Canadians arrived at Longbottom, the stockade had shrunk in use and importance. Petitions for the exiles’ release were being sent across the globe. The group had the backing of the local Catholic clergy, along with the Governor himself, who said their behaviour had been exemplary. In November 1842, the French-Canadian prisoners were released on tickets of leave, and, by February 1844, they had received pardons. The Canadian exiles were finally free to leave. All but three returned to Canada; two had died, and one stayed, marrying a local woman.

  The Canadians’ saga would have a huge effect on lives across the British Empire. As a result of the rebellion, the British granted its territory in Canada ‘responsible self-government’. The same principle was applied to the Australian colonies. Consequently, long after the Canadian exiles had left the shores of Hen and Chicken Bay, their memory remains in ways far more profound than a small stone monument.

  AROUND PAST Bayview Park and into Canada Bay, there is another residential developm
ent, Phillips Landing. He may have spent less than five years in the colony but, based on the number of places that has his name attached, you’d think Phillip landed just about everywhere around Sydney Harbour. However, Phillip would probably bristle at what the path skirting this residential estate is called: Frenchman’s Walk.

  Prior to being the founding Governor of New South Wales, Phillip, in his long naval career, had fought against and spied on the French. In 1788, when the French expedition, led by Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, sailed into Botany Bay less than a week after the ships of the First Fleet had, it shocked the British, who hastily hoisted the Union Jack on the shores of the much better harbour just to the north. Phillip assiduously avoided meeting La Pérouse and worked at keeping the two French ships away from Port Jackson. Instead, Lieutenant Philip Gidley King did most of the talking with the French, sailing for several hours in a cutter to Botany Bay to pass on Phillip’s greetings and offer of assistance, before reporting back to the Governor. The French not only received King and his crew ‘with the greatest politeness & attention’, but La Pérouse offered additional stores for the fledgling British colony, since his two ships had plenty to share. The French commander also sent back a message to the Governor that a few escaped convicts had begged to be taken on board, ‘but he had dismissed them with threats and gave them a day’s provisions to carry them back to ye settlement’. After six weeks in Botany Bay, La Boussole and L’Astrolabe sailed away, never to be seen again.

  A gardener is trimming the edges along Frenchman’s Walk, as I paddle along Canada Bay. He sees me and points to something in the water. I offer to grab it for him. I attempt to pull it up out of the water, but it’s so heavy.

  ‘It’s a tent,’ I call out. He then utters what I’m thinking: ‘I hope there’s no body in it’. The tent contains nothing but water, so I drag and prod it to a large wharf, with a ramp, below Frenchman’s Walk.