The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  Didier Joubert, one of the developers of Hunters Hill, bought the property in 1847, and he set about converting the two stone cottages into the heart of one house. His son, Numa, added the tower in about 1890, and it was built by a shipwright. Didier had constructed another home on the property, St Malo, which was a single-storey sandstone home with a deep veranda. The home wore the trimmings of affluence, with marble mantelpieces imported from Italy.

  Didier and his brother, Jules, began a ferry service on Lane Cove River in the 1860s. The first of the Joubert fleet was a paddle-wheeler, Kirribilli, which would churn its way along the river, stopping at wharves owned or leased by the Jouberts. Their fleet expanded to about a dozen vessels, and a few of the ferries were built on the property at Figtree Farm. The ferries not only transported residents to and from the city but also brought day-trippers upriver. The Jouberts developed a recreation area near the wharves at Figtree in the 1880s. Hundreds of passengers dressed in their finery would pour off the ferries to visit The Avenue Pleasure Grounds, with its luncheon pavilion and dance hall. In the 1930s, the old dance hall was converted into a film studio, then it was a storage depot for the Royal Australian Air Force during the Second World War, and when Hunters Hill High School opened on the site in 1958, it became a gymnasium.

  Although the Jouberts made money from ferries, they pushed for bridges to be built, to further develop the peninsula. In 1885, the first Fig Tree Bridge was completed. Yet as the Jouberts would have known, progress comes at a price. Almost eighty years after the first Fig Tree Bridge opened, it was replaced with a concrete girder structure. The approaches to the new bridge cut through what had been Joubert land, and some of the most important houses they had built were demolished, including St Malo in 1961. The loss of the developer’s home ironically galvanised the push for the preservation of Hunters Hill’s most significant buildings.

  From the river, Figtree House looks like a wonderful conglomeration of structures that rambles through different architectural styles and eras. And there is still a fig tree between the house and the bridge, its presence helping ensure Hunters Hill’s most historic home stays true to its name.

  Under the bridge, a sandbank emerges from the river at low tide. Bruce, George and I have run our craft up onto the island and claimed it for the Gentleman Kayakers. Actually, we’ve had no such thoughts of triumphalism when we’ve landed on the sandbank. We’ve just been grateful to find somewhere to stop and stretch our legs. Which is why we’ve been disappointed when the tide has been high or, worse, against us. With our cherished territory, The Island of Caught Breath, submerged, we’ve been reduced to being three cranky old buggers pushing against nature itself.

  AS SOON as I kayak under Fig Tree Bridge, I notice a change of environment. Along the left bank, in the outside bend of the river, the houses have retreated and the bank is lined with mangroves. Paddle in close, and the river’s edge looks primordial. It seems as though time itself is trapped in there, stuck in the mud and dank air. A large pile of oyster shells rests on the mud, like a cairn marking where the original Australians sourced food for thousands of years, and where some of the early colonists eked out a living. The Aboriginal people sought the oysters; the new arrivals wanted the shells.

  Alexander Harris, who wrote a series of books based on his experiences as an ‘emigrant mechanic’ in New South Wales in the early 19th century, described how men journeyed up the river to collect oyster shells. They would shovel the shells into their boats then transport them downriver, where they would be sold and burnt to create lime, for building houses. While the money was good, Harris said this was filthy, hard and perilous work, especially if a boat ‘loaded down to the very gunnel’ was hit by bad weather. It could easily sink on the journey across the harbour, taking a living and lives to the bottom. Harris wrote about his brief time as a shell-getter, and a tense episode when his heavily laden boat was caught in a storm.

  ‘Before we got through the rough water we could hardly work the long oars to make any headway, so deep did we lie between the short, broken swells,’ Harris recounted.

  The water close to the muddy banks is murkier and more furtive. When the water takes on this character, it is easier to imagine there are sharks about. Old newspaper reports don’t help quell that uneasy feeling. Along this reach there was a string of attacks in the early 1900s. One report breathlessly recounted how a young man was bitten while collecting oysters in shallow water. One of the victim’s companions grabbed him by the arm, ‘and for a moment it was a tug-of-war as to whether he or the shark should have him’. The man was saved but not before the shark tore a chunk of flesh from his thigh. Others weren’t so fortunate. In one fatal attack in 1912, a man was taken as his girlfriend watched from the bank. Only moments before he was attacked, the 21-year-old victim had reassured another swimmer there was no need to fear sharks in this part of the river, because ‘it’s too far up’. Two bystanders risked their own lives to bring the man ashore, but he died from a ‘frightful’ wound, which ‘bore eloquent testimony to the power of the monster’s jaws’, as the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

  Sharks are still in Lane Cove River. They are all over the harbour. Scientists have shown that through programs following tagged bull sharks. These creatures have a reputation for being vicious, and they tolerate lower salinity. Tracking of their movements has also indicated bull sharks tend to be in the harbour during the warmer months, when they are breeding.

  Professor Bill Gladstone, a marine biologist and Head of the School of Life Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, points out that improving our understanding of sharks is a way of managing what is already a minimal risk: being attacked.

  ‘If we know there are certain times of the year when sharks are around, and also under what conditions you’re more likely to be attacked or encounter a shark, then you can manage a risk with that understanding.

  ‘The risk [of attack] is very, very small, but still it’s a primal fear that people have and respond to in very emotional ways. And sometimes it’s difficult, or impossible, to rationalise a fear with what the reality of the risk is.’

  What’s more, we need sharks in the harbour for ecological balance.

  ‘If we take sharks out of there, the ecosystem would look very different,’ Bill argues. ‘You could predict that if you took out a big predator, that would then influence the numbers of other animals that are normally preyed on. If the next level down is a slightly smaller predator and it goes up because there’s no bull sharks, and its food is bream and whiting, then the numbers of those species would go down.’

  Along this reach, the river is still a couple of hundred metres wide, but the curtain of mangroves, along with the ceaseless soundtrack of cicadas, gives the feeling the waterway is closing in. Slithering out of the mangroves along this reach are spindly watercourses. Waterbirds are pecking and drilling into the mud and sandbanks close to shore. Perhaps I’m too preoccupied watching the birds because I run onto a sandbank. It is only then I notice the navigational markers for boaties to remain in the channel and avoid the shallows. I take heart that I’m not the first to miss the signs or misread the river. Picnic parties used to transfer at Figtree from ferries into smaller boats. Even so, the little craft would frequently be grounded, and the operators would have to pole the vessels off the mud, or if they were really stuck, lead the passengers in ‘sing-songs’ until the tide rose. I don’t have to sing, just grunt and curse, as I heave and push the kayak out of the clutches of the sandbank.

  The buoys and signs along the river, with one advising what I had already learnt – ‘Navigation Past This Point May Be Hazardous’ – indicates pleasure boats still make their way upstream. The river traffic used to be heavier. One of the newspaper stories on the fatal shark attack in 1912 reported a witness saying the water was muddy because it was stirred up by launches ‘that were going up and down all the time’. It wasn’t just recreation that brought boats up and down the river. So did industry. />
  These days, you can see warehouses and offices set back from the river, raising their heads above the riparian zone and clumped together in business parks, but few occupy the banks. Just downstream from Epping Road Bridge is an industrial plant, and while it is tucked away on the inside bend, it is conspicuous because it is so close to the water. I paddle right past it, while listening to the groaning of machines and sniffing at the suddenly malty air. The scent is a reminder that around here there has been a mill since 1894, when the Chicago Cornflour and Starch Mills opened. The river brought materials and people to the mill, transported in small lighters.

  The mill was far from a lone presence. Along these banks and beside the creeks feeding into the river there has been a string of industries, and not all of them welcomed. In the 1880s, when a wool-washing business was proposed on Wilson’s Creek, just downstream from the modern-day Epping Road Bridge, there was uproar. Local councillors and residents protested, arguing the waste water would destroy the oysters and poison the fish, bathers would contract diseases, and, one declared, it ‘would be the means of carrying death and destruction along the banks of the river’. Another conceded while this sort of business was necessary, Lane Cove was not the place for it: ‘Lane Cove was a favourite pleasure ground for boating parties, and the establishment of a factory such as this would go very far to destroy it for recreation purposes.’

  Industry won out; the wool wash went ahead. About twenty-five years later, when a paper mill was established in the same area, it received a warmer welcome, at least in the press. The Cumberland Paper Board mill, the Sun newspaper declared, would ‘materially improve the Lane Cove River, and add another beauty spot to that already charming waterway’. In particular, the building of a dam across Wilson’s Creek to supply water to the mill was applauded as a wonderful improvement, ‘converting what was an unattractive rocky creek into a pretty and expansive sheet of water’.

  As more industries were built upstream, those further down the river were not impressed with the outfall. One resident, who had lived by the river for many years, complained in 1920 about the shocking state of the water, which was often soapy, and that ‘dirty masses of black slime are now to be seen floating about’. The resident lamented that the authorities had been unsuccessful in getting the river cleaned up, and ‘it would be impossible to prevent the factories from emptying their waste’.

  It was a complaint that flowed through much of the 20th century. The river and its tributaries were badly degraded, and there were reports of fish kills. In recent years, the river has been cleaned up, through tighter laws and the efforts of environmental groups and volunteers. And there are fish to be caught. That’s evident not just from the occasional angler on the banks. I paddle past a bird wrestling with a mullet in its beak. For human fishers, there are restrictions, including catch-and-release rules, for sections of Lane Cove River. But this bird pays no heed to rules. While the mullet puts up a fight, flapping and floundering, the bird ensures this is not the one that got away.

  BEYOND EPPING Road Bridge, the river narrows and the world hushes. The sound of vehicles subsides and is replaced by the call of bellbirds. I can finally hear the river murmuring in its soft voice. The water’s complexion also changes. It is less flushed by sunlight and takes on colours seen along the banks; olive and khaki, and browns. There has been a change along the banks as well. The mangroves have been largely left on the other side of the bridge, and now the bush pushes between sandstone boulders to the water’s edge. The entanglement of tall trees and thick undergrowth is what enticed some of the colonists up the river in the first place.

  Convict gangs were sent in boats to cut grass for hay to feed livestock, and the timber was keenly sought. Teams worked their way along the river and up the gullies and valleys, felling the ancient blue gums, stringybark, turpentine and blackbutt trees. During Lachlan Macquarie’s time as Governor from 1810 to 1821, his vision for more impressive buildings resulted in the axes being swung with greater conviction. While the trees were disappearing from the landscape, they made their way onto the map; the waterways were named in recognition of what was once there, with titles such as Blue Gum Creek.

  If the trunks of those trees were tough, those hacking into them could be even tougher. Many went into the bush to not just exploit it, but to escape what or who they once were. Alexander Harris, who wrote of his experiences in the book, Settlers and Convicts; or Recollections of Sixteen Years’ Labour in the Australian Backwoods, went up the river and into the bush in the 1820s. He quickly became aware that ‘the whole bush in this part of the country was then thronged, as indeed it was almost all round Sydney, with men who get their living by various kinds of bush work’. To get the timber to town, Harris explained, they relied on the river. The author himself travelled in one of the ‘snug little 2½ or 3 ton boats that the Lane Cove settlers manage to stow with top-heavy loads of wood, and yet bring safely down the stream to Sydney’. The craft had a sail, but sometimes the boatmen used blankets, and Harris saw one even using his jacket to try to scoop up more wind.

  Other boatmen relied on their own muscles rather than the fickleness of the wind. In another book, Harris recounted meeting a nuggety bushman who pulled ‘long heavy oars with three tons of wood in the boat’ from his camp at the head of the river to Market Wharf in Darling Harbour, ‘a journey of eleven or twelve miles’. On top of that, he chopped, loaded and unloaded the wood.

  Apparently some didn’t ply the river in such a strenuous way. A journalist in the early 1900s wrote about a fleet of ‘Lane Cove Varnishers’, which, despite their name, were not varnished but were ‘commodious craft’.

  ‘It was no unusual thing for the “skipper” to be accompanied on his journeys up and down the stream by the members of his family, who occupied quarters aboard, much in the same way as the Thames barges provide for a home afloat,’ the journalist wrote. At the time of the article being written, the Varnishers had long disappeared off the river. As the land was cleared, the river silted up and the boats could no longer navigate their way as easily to the timber camps and sawpits.

  In those camps, life was far from commodious. Alexander Harris noted there were few women in the world among the trees. He visited a homestead serving as a de facto public house. One of the patrons was an old boatman who ‘had never slept in anything other than his day clothes for years’, and often bedded down under the overhanging rocks along the river.

  Those working in the bush may have helped build Sydney into a more substantial town, but they had a poor reputation among those enjoying the finer life downriver. Before the developer Jules Joubert had even arrived at his future home in Hunters Hill, he had heard about the area’s dubious characters, such as old convicts and runaway sailors, who made a living by stealing timber and transporting it by boat to Sydney. After being confined in prison or in the bowels of a ship, life by a river, and on it, may well have felt like freedom. After all, in the words of a famous river adventurer, Huckleberry Finn, ‘other places do seem so cramped up and smothery’.

  Just as Huck Finn revels in ‘the lonesomeness of the river’, I always appreciate being alone on this reach. Even when I’ve been paddling here with my fellow Gentleman Kayakers, I let them plough ahead, so that I can listen to the river and let my eyes wander along the banks. At the end of one stretch, a sandstone escarpment scooped out by floods and time gathers up the water’s whisper and amplifies it, so that by the time it ripples back to me, the river sounds like it is chuckling. I smell the scent of the bush sprinkled over the water and marvel at how nature has regenerated through here. It hides the scars of all those years of timber-getting. There is the occasional reminder that humans have had their way in here. A solitary palm tree pokes its head above the canopy of eucalypts. The bush also largely disguises the fact that just beyond its fringe there are vast tracts of suburbia, which, with a dash of indifference mixed with run-off down the drains and gutters, can easily flush modern-day environmental threats down to
the water. Yet the further I paddle along this reach, and the more the bush presses in on the banks and the river narrows, the further away in distance and time the city and suburbs feel. That’s a gift of a river. Its waters can carry you to where you least expect.

  Yet this reach of the river also holds a mystery. Along the right bank downstream from Fullers Bridge, two bodies were discovered on New Year’s Day, 1963. Only hours earlier, Dr Gilbert Bogle and Margaret Chandler had been at a party at nearby Chatswood. Margaret had arrived with her husband, but when he headed off to another party and Dr Bogle had offered to drive her home, the pair ended up together by Lane Cove River at a place renowned as a lovers’ lane. Sometime in the early hours of the brand new year, they had died. Their bodies were found in the morning by a couple of boys.

  The deaths had a city talking and speculating. The theories about what or who killed them ranged from murder by a jealous lover to an accidental overdose of LSD, and even assassination, because Bogle, as a scientist, had been working on secret projects tied in with the Cold War. When the massive police investigation and the coroner couldn’t provide a definitive answer, the theorising about the pair’s deaths continued through the years.

  One hypothesis was the river had killed Bogle and Chandler. A 2006 documentary explored the possibility that the pair had died from accidental poisoning due to hydrogen sulphide gas. The residents had been complaining for years about an odour like rotten eggs rising from the river. In the 1940s, the government commissioned a major study, and the tests discovered that the muddy bottom was saturated with the gas, believed to have largely come from a factory that had pumped waste into the river. The worst affected section was where Bogle and Chandler had been found. The speculation was the couple had been lying in a hollow beside the water, and that a lethal amount of the gas, which had erupted from the river, had accumulated in that area. Without knowing it, they breathed in the hydrogen sulphide, and their systems shut down.