The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  ‘It was a great experience, I just got so much out of it myself,’ he explains. ‘And I was leaving something beautiful behind.’

  ‘Sydney got an icon. It also got a freeway, after the bottleneck of the little old bridge. I reckon it’s equal to the Harbour Bridge really.’

  The city never did get the north-west expressway that was planned to improve traffic flow, but at least it got the bridge that was intended to be its gateway. And if it weren’t for that other bridge about six kilometres downstream, this construction would perhaps feature more prominently as a symbol of the city. It might even have been accorded that most Australian of honours, a nickname, just like ‘the coat hanger’. Gladesville Bridge did inspire the poet Les Murray. He crafted into verse his impressions of the view of the ‘flooded valley, that is now the ship-chained Harbour’, the surrounding suburbs and ‘the new city standing on its haze above the city’, and he marvelled at the construction, all the while sitting in a car that had run out of petrol,

  on the summit that exhilarates cars, the concrete vault on its thousands

  of tonnes of height, far above the tidal turnaround.

  More than half a century after Gladesville Bridge was completed, Ossie Cruse still experiences joy when he drives over it. Only where most of us look around, he thinks about what went into building the bridge.

  ‘It’s what’s on the inside, it’s not just what’s on the outside, that’s the strength of it,’ Ossie concludes.

  ‘I remember when we took out all the stuff from underneath the bridge, it was awesome to look at it from below. And it still is an awesome sight, a beautiful sight.’

  AS I paddle downriver past a line of homes, the compensation for living in the shadow of a bridge is revealed. The thrum of traffic above subsides, and the harbour view rises. The skyscrapers of the CBD appear over the headlands, while further around to the west is the top of Anzac Bridge. The bridge’s pylons, threaded with supporting cables, look like a pair of Bedouin tents being erected above the Balmain peninsula.

  Straight ahead is the suburb of Hunters Hill. It was once known as a ‘garden suburb’. But as successive booms and busts rolled over the ridgeline, some gardens were ripped out and the grand properties they belonged to were subdivided. The later arrivals, especially close to the waterline, grab the attention. Actually, many demand attention, with their large display windows. But if you look carefully up the slope, you can make out the more subtle symphony of sandstone, slate and cast iron in the older colonial homes. What bonds all that architecture – the historic and the modern, the dignified and the ostentatious – is the grout of green. While the number of grand gardens has shrunk, from out on the water, Hunters Hill still looks like a finely treed suburb.

  Before I paddle over to Hunters Hill, there’s another diversion (that’s another pleasure of kayaking; there are always diversions). Tarban Creek flows in from my left through a canyon of mansions. A couple of hundred metres up the creek is the mini-me of Gladesville Bridge. Tarban Creek Bridge was built around the same time, opening in 1965. The design isn’t quite the same as Gladesville Bridge, but it does have a large arch that spans the creek, giving the impression this stretch of water is more significant than being just another barely-noticed tributary feeding the insatiable hunger of the main harbour. Tarban Creek Bridge is apparently more than a vital piece of transport infrastructure. It is also an arts incentive program, a blank surface on which philosophers and painters can make their mark with graffiti.

  Just as the work of the subversive bridge painters is all but out of sight, so was life along Tarban Creek in the early colonial days. Perhaps it was made to feel all the more so by the presence of the asylum, which took its name from the creek. There were few homes neighbouring the Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum, according to W.S. Campbell, the son of one of the facility’s superintendents. Walter Campbell wrote about one Tarban Creek couple who put their marriage vow of ‘for better, for worse’ into action. Whenever the husband made the journey by water to Sydney, he apparently drank up to the point he couldn’t walk by the time he returned. His wife would be waiting at the wharf with a wheelbarrow. Then, when she travelled to Sydney, he did the same for her.

  In 1847, the creek meandering out of the bush became a path of spiritual guidance. When two Catholic priests voyaged from France to establish the Order of the Marist Fathers in Sydney, their quest led them up Tarban Creek. The order bought a property just near where the creek tasted the first lick of salt water. The priests extended the sandstone farmhouse and named it Villa Maria. This was to be their base for missionary work in the Pacific. The Tarban Creek property held the promise of home comforts to fortify the Fathers in preparation for long voyages and arduous work in the Pacific. One of the founding priests, Father Rocher, wrote to his superiors in France how the orchard and garden were magnificent, and that the ‘vines are coming along very well, already it seems that there will be sufficient to provide everyone in the procure with wine for one year’. When the Marists later sold the property, it received a more ecclesiastic name, The Priory, before it was bought by the New South Wales Government to become part of the asylum.

  By then, the Marist Order had firmly settled on higher ground on the other side of the creek. The Fathers had built a new home and the Villa Maria Church, with its stunning bell tower that continues to thrust its way into prominence on the local skyline. In 1872, the teaching brothers of the Order arrived in Sydney, and they bought a plot of land near the church to build a boys’ boarding school. St Joseph’s College opened in 1881. What began as wooden huts in a clearing created by the Brothers’ own hands grew into the multi-storey sandstone solidity of the college’s main building. Just as the college grew, so did its population, until it was the largest boarding school in Australia.

  From the creek, there’s no sign of the college buildings, but the influence of Joeys has flowed down the hill. Skimming across the creek’s surface, powered by the staccato orders of a megaphoned voice and their own youthful ambitions, are the school’s rowers. Their base is a two-storey brick and weatherboard affair on the creek’s northern bank. From the rowing club’s pontoon, there is a beguiling view of an arch within an arch, with the top of Sydney Harbour Bridge framed by Tarban Creek Bridge. But only a kayaker with no one barking orders at him and no hope of paddling a competitive time can relax and enjoy that view. As the creek upstream constricts and is clotted by the bush on the northern bank, I turn around and paddle into the view.

  TRACING THE Parramatta River shore of Hunters Hill, where the air is almost fragrant with money and gentility, it is hard to believe that it was once described as the place where ‘the very worst characters find an undisturbed place of abode’. The ‘very worst characters’ may have gone, but from the water Hunters Hill still looks and feels like an undisturbed place of abode – if you can afford it. Many of the homes around here have private slipways, private wharves, even private beaches. The only thing not private is the display of wealth.

  While much of the harbourfront land along this reach is off-limits to all but those who hold the title deeds and their friends, there are still slivers where anyone can access the water. One of those spots is at the end of Ferry Street. However, the ferries no longer stop here. What has been the passengers’ loss is the fishing enthusiasts’ gain. On the weekends, there can be a row of anglers standing above the seawall. But on this weekday early afternoon, there are only two older women fishing. Vicky and Hayat are friends and neighbours from up the river at Parramatta. Hayat has been fishing for five years. She was taught by Vicky, who has been fishing for more than twenty years.

  The friends travel to Ferry Street about once a week to fish. They like it here, especially when it is quiet and there are few lines in the water, but Hayat reckons some of the locals would prefer they stay away.

  ‘Sometimes they’re not happy with us,’ she says.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Don’t know. Maybe they have too much money!’

/>   As Vicky threads a pilchard onto the hook, she explains they normally catch up to five fish each session.

  ‘Bream, flathead and trevally mostly,’ she says, as she flicks the rod, sending the pilchard-weighted line curving through the air.

  ‘Sometimes here, you put the line out and the fish catch themselves.’

  Vicky and Hayat say they eat the fish they catch. Nearby, on a power pole, is one of the signs issued by the government and erected at popular fishing spots around the harbour, particularly west of the Harbour Bridge. It provides ‘dietary advice’ for fish caught locally. Basically the advice for this part of the harbour is, don’t eat the fish. The women have their backs to the sign.

  I ask Vicky does she worry about eating the fish she catches here.

  ‘No, no problem,’ she replies. ‘I don’t know about the future. But for now, all right.’

  As for this day, Vicky and Hayat have nothing to worry about.

  ‘We’re safe, because we haven’t caught anything. Terrible!’

  Even so, it’s relaxing, adds Hayat.

  ‘It’s better than being at home. At home, you have to work.’

  AS WAS often the case, the British didn’t see things clearly when they named Hunters Hill. The original Australians were more descriptive of the landscape in their name for it; Moocooboola or Mukubula, which means ‘meeting of the waters’. For Hunters Hill is a peninsula, with the land in pincers between Parramatta and Lane Cove rivers.

  By virtue of having rivers on either side of it, Hunters Hill feels self-contained. It could well be another island in the harbour. All of which makes it very desirable to those wanting to be close to Sydney’s centre but feel removed from it, and for those seeking something that can be often hard to find in a city: a sense of community.

  ‘You come here, and you don’t need to go anywhere,’ enthuses David Ward. And David should know. He came here in the 1970s to sell real estate, and four decades on, he isn’t interested in going anywhere else. David loves historic homes, which is what brought him to Hunters Hill, since there are so many here. Over the years, he has sold dozens of the landmark properties along the peninsula.

  The day I meet David, he and his son Matthew are holding an ‘open for inspection’ at a gracious two-storey mansion, Woodbank, which was built in 1879. Just before Woodbank was built, its land was valued at £100. David and Matthew expect to sell the house, on a much smaller allotment now than in the 1870s, for about $6 million.

  Resplendent in a blue blazer and a tie adorned with a flotilla of colourful yachts, David shows me the pocked sandstone blocks of the original building and explains that over the years the house has been extended. The older homes, he explains, were built up high for the views and the cooling breezes, and their land stretched down to the water.

  David reckons buyers’ interest in historic homes is diminishing. People love the views but they also want direct water access and preferably somewhere to put their boat. Wealthy Chinese are a growing part of the local market, David says, and buyers often come from Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs.

  ‘Although the young ones sometimes feel it’s too much like the country here; too quiet.’

  But the quiet and sense of distance are what attract many to Hunters Hill.

  Woodbank neighbours Bulwarra, another sandstone mansion and the former home of the actor Cate Blanchett and her director-writer husband Andrew Upton. ‘She was part of the community; their kids went to the local school,’ David says, as he guides me outside.

  What is viewed by many now as glorious – and highly marketable – isolation was once seen as a drawback to Hunters Hill.

  ‘The water was both a blessing and a curse for the development of Hunters Hill,’ explains Graham Percival. Graham has lived on the peninsula since 1963 and is a member of the Hunters Hill Historical Society. ‘It’s beautiful, but it also meant a lot of people didn’t want to settle in the area, because it was reachable only by boat from the main part of Sydney.’

  The area remained largely untamed and unknowable to Sydneysiders until two brothers originally from France recognised the potential in Hunters Hill.

  Didier Numa Joubert was a wine and spirit merchant from Bordeaux. He arrived in Sydney in 1837. His younger brother, Jules François de Sales Joubert, arrived in Sydney a couple of years later. Like many before him and since, Jules was smitten with what he saw as he came through the Heads into Port Jackson. After visiting some of the great ports of the world, Joubert declared after his first glimpse of Sydney that ‘all other harbours dwindled down to almost insignificance’.

  In 1847, Didier Joubert bought a property on the north side of Hunters Hill from the convict-turned-businesswoman, Mary Reibey. She had been among the first to invest in Hunters Hill. But her farm on Lane Cove River was not productive enough to supply her business in town.

  ‘She used to come up on a Sunday to visit the farm, but it was a waste of time for what she brought back by boat,’ Graham Percival says. ‘People knew what Hunters Hill was like as a farming area – a dead loss.’

  Yet Joubert didn’t see the peninsula’s future in farming. When his brother joined him in Hunters Hill in 1855, they became, according to Graham, ‘a formidable force’ in developing the area. They began slicing up the peninsula into housing allotments. When Italian stonemasons arrived in the colony, the Jouberts arranged for them to build a string of cottages and villas, using locally quarried sandstone. The Jouberts established a ferry service. They argued it was necessary, for the service provided by the passing Parramatta River ferries was so haphazard, some locals resorted to rowing all the way to Sydney. Both brothers also served as Mayor at various times after Hunters Hill was proclaimed a municipality in 1861.

  Hunters Hill was named after a British officer and gentleman, John Hunter, the First Fleet naval officer who surveyed the harbour and was the second Governor of New South Wales. But under the influence of the Jouberts and other arrivals from France, including the Marist Fathers, the area came to be known as ‘the French village’. Even France’s official representative in Sydney took up residence in Hunters Hill. According to Graham Percival, the Consul, Louis Francois Sentis, visited the Jouberts, who convinced him this was an ideal area for the French to make their presence felt in the midst of a British colony. The brothers arranged for the purchase of a parcel of land that stretched all the way from the top of the hill to Lane Cove River, and a fine two-storey stone house was built for the Consul. The mansion was named Passy, after the precinct in Paris, and when the tricolour flew from the roof of the house, it could be seen from both Parramatta and Lane Cove rivers. In recent years, the historic landmark has been seen far and wide in the media, for Passy has been the home of the notorious former politician Eddie Obeid.

  The Jouberts were not the only ones threading the look and feel of Europe through the sandstone and gums on Hunters Hill in the mid-19th century. A young Swiss immigrant, Leonard Etienne Bordier, imported a handful of prefabricated wooden houses, along with German workers to assemble them, in 1854. One of these buildings, called The Chalet, has survived on the southern side of Hunters Hill. For almost half a century, from 1954, it was the home of artist Nora Heysen. I visited Nora at The Chalet in 2003. That Nora Heysen lived in a house that was both pioneering and unique was in keeping with her character. With her talent and resolve, Nora had worked her way out of the public shadow of her famous landscape artist father, Hans, and, with those steely eyes of hers, she had stared discrimination and adversity straight in the face. She was the first female winner of the Archibald Prize for portraiture, she was the first woman to be appointed an Australian official war artist, and, throughout her career, she steadfastly pursued her vision, painting what she wanted, no matter what trends and ‘isms’ in art swirled and eddied around her. Nora Heysen wasn’t fashionable. She was a classic. Little wonder I was nervous at the prospect of meeting her in her pre-fab chalet by the harbour. Yet neither the artist nor her home was anything like what I had imagin
ed. Nora was a warm and generous soul, especially with her memories and her whisky. And her house was not some austere Baltic log cabin out of joint by the harbour, but a beautiful resonant space with broad verandas and potential Nora Heysen still life painting subjects wherever you looked, both in the house and out in the garden. Like its owner, the house was comfortable in its own skin, and it belonged. Nora died in late 2003, but her art lives on, as does The Chalet.

  Hundreds of old buildings peppered along the peninsula are not just reminders of another age. They’re also testament to the residents who fought to conserve them. By 1960, many were concerned their quiet and historic garden suburb was about to be concreted over with high-density housing. As the Town Clerk of Hunters Hill prophesied at the time, ‘it seems likely the face of the district will change considerably in the next decade’. To residents, that would be an intolerably ugly face. As progress pushed its way towards the peninsula, some older homes in Hunters Hill were demolished, and others seemed doomed. The residents pushed back, forming the Hunters Hill Trust. Their efforts helped save many of the suburb’s buildings. Hunters Hill has more than 220 places listed on the Register of the National Estate.

  As a result, Hunters Hill is a wonderful place for wandering. The historic commercial buildings and houses, with their stone fences draped in leaves along tree-lined streets, make for an enriching yet disorienting experience. The sandstone from which many of the buildings have been constructed is quintessentially of this land, as it glows from the light of the eucalypt-filtered sun, and yet it has been sculpted and assembled in accordance with the memories and influences of distant lands. The suburb of two rivers provides two experiences at once.