The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  After more than half a century, so many questions about what happened to Bogle and Chandler still linger. Time, and perhaps the river, has kept the secret. As I sit in the kayak, near where the mystery began, the river looks serene, even innocent. And yet the knowledge that two people died on the bank sullies the atmosphere.

  THE CONTEMPORARY world dashes out of the bush and across the river at Fullers Bridge. The vehicles are relying on a crossing that has been here in one form or another since 1918. Locals had been pushing for a bridge for many years before then, so they could be better connected with the rest of the world. But when the bridge was finally constructed, it was so people could also be better connected to the after-world. They could reach the Field of Mars with greater ease. The Field of Mars sounds like it has sprouted from ancient mythology, but it was the name given by Governor Phillip to an area on the western side of the river, where land was granted to a couple of marines who had served in the colony. A century on, the ranks of the dead were assembling in the area, with the opening of the Field of Mars Cemetery. The bridge was initially intended to enable trams to cross the river to take mourners to the cemetery.

  The bridge’s name also connects to the area’s past. The Fullers were one of the pioneering families who established orchards near the river, and they would transport their fruit in boats to the Sydney markets. The original farmer in this part of the valley, William Henry, even planted a vineyard in the early 1800s. If only Henry’s vines had survived to provide something medicinal to those who have paddled as far as they can up the river.

  A few hundred metres beyond Fullers Bridge, a weir straddles the river. Of course, it would be possible to porter a kayak around the weir and keep paddling deeper into the bush, which is part of Lane Cove National Park. The spillway looks benign and the incline gentle enough to carry a kayak up. But the fine algal coating ensures the slipway is true to its name, and so I slide without a shred of dignity into the water.

  Long before the weir was built in the 1930s, residents had been pushing for this sort of infrastructure along the river, not to ward off kayakers but to shore up the local economy. As early as 1900, the New South Wales Government had considered a weir or lock near Fig Tree Bridge, so that the river was navigable at all times for its 15 kilometres upstream. The pleas kept coming, with a letter writer to the Sydney Morning Herald calling for the locking of the river, ‘in the interest of the orchardists and settlers, to enable them to start irrigation and thereby earn a living. The river flats would produce any fruit or vegetables with the assistance of water.’

  The orchards and market gardens withered and were turned into parks, residential plots, and playgrounds. In the early 1900s, a little downstream from here, the Fairyland Pleasure Grounds flourished where vegetables once had. For a couple of generations, Fairyland was an enormously popular destination. Old photos show a flotilla of small ferries and launches lined up across the river. Such was the attraction of a river journey to the pleasure grounds that it wound its way into Christina Stead’s novel set in the 1920s, Seven Poor Men of Sydney. The characters ‘made tea and ate fish just caught in the river’, then ‘going back in the launch they sang sentimental songs’. The pleasure grounds exist now only on paper and in memories; the site is part of Lane Cove National Park.

  Sydneysiders still head up the river in pursuit of relaxation. The national park, which was opened in 1938 in response to community demands for some bushland to be retained along the river, is an escape from urban existence, if not from other people. While I gingerly crab my way up the slipway with the kayak, on the other side of the weir families in hired paddleboats gently churn the water. Cyclists plough across the top of the weir, their wheels tossing out fans of water, and walkers head for tracks threaded through the national park, or for the picnic area by the river. We’re all interacting with the river in myriad ways, but no one is actually in it. A sign just beside the weir cautions against swimming in Lane Cove River, due to the potential of submerged logs and pollution, especially after heavy rain. The setting may look idyllic, but even in this national park, there can be no real escape from the city and all the pressures and problems that we who live in it bring upon ourselves and the environment.

  Yet a couple of hundred volunteers and a group called the Friends of Lane Cove National Park help to reverse the damage of the past and present. Margaret Reidy is both a Friend and active supporter of the river and the national park.

  ‘When I retired, I was looking for something significant to do,’ explains Margaret. ‘And I’m a bushwalker, a birdwatcher.’

  Margaret found what she was looking for in the park. Since 1992, she has been a volunteer worker, helping improve the bushland, and the river and creeks that meander through the national park. In that time, Margaret has seen, and been part of, some ‘noticeably huge improvements’ to the environment. Sites along the river have been cleaned up, with weeds removed and native vegetation planted. What happens along the banks has an impact on life in the water. The native bass living in the upper reaches, for example, have a better habitat and a greater chance to breed.

  Yet while Margaret and her fellow volunteers work along the river, new challenges are frequently washed down. The river is integral to the beauty and health of Lane Cove National Park, but it is also the carrier of outside threats to that very integrity.

  ‘What happens above and comes down, the health of the river will always be dictated by that. Urban run-off is always our problem,’ Margaret says. She is confident that more Sydneysiders are becoming aware of the impact their actions may have downstream.

  ‘The significance of having a national park so close to Sydney is enormous,’ Margaret muses.

  ‘We have to fight to maintain it.’

  IT MAY be the same stretch of water, but a river can markedly change in look and feel, depending on whether you’re paddling upstream or down. And what felt easy on the way up can be painful on the paddle down. Kayaking out as the tide is coming in, Lane Cove River feels loath to let me go. The narrowness of the river heightens that impression. Yet gradually the banks loosen their embrace, the river broadens, and, back at Fig Tree Bridge, its course turns and unravels towards the east, towards the sea. Downstream from the bridge, the land along the northern bank keeps grasping at the river; locals refer to the handful of peninsulas along this reach as the five fingers of Lane Cove.

  Between the fingers of Linley Point and Riverview is Burns Bay. Where factories and tanneries presided there are now houses and blocks of apartments jostling for a water view. The water looks turbid, probably due to run-off down a creek that has been effectively transformed into a stormwater drain, with concrete walls and a small weir. However, there are fish in the bay. A mullet leaps beside the kayak, almost landing in the cockpit with me.

  The bay’s eastern shore is largely untamed, and its chipped and flaky sandstone face looks ready to stare down any developer. Close to the waterline around the point are a couple of caves, which would make ideal hiding holes for those who have occupied the top of this landform since 1880. For up there is the Catholic school for boys, St Ignatius’ College, better known as Riverview.

  ‘You can see why it was out of bounds to the boys. The things you could get up to down here,’ says David Mort, grinning. Despite that mischievous look, David is no schoolboy; he’s an old boy.

  David attended the school from 1962 to 1968. The river would carry him to Riverview. He lived a few hundred metres across the water at Hunters Hill. As we stand on the northern bank, David guides me through his school days. He points out a historic mansion, called ‘The Haven’, one of the grand residences of Hunters Hill. It was built in the 1850s and through the years was home to a couple of the suburb’s mayors. The grounds of ‘The Haven’ stretched down to the river. No, he didn’t live in ‘The Haven’, David adds, but behind it. He was allowed to keep his dinghy beside the stone boathouse at the bottom of the estate’s garden, so that he could row to school.

  ‘It’
d take only five minutes – as long as the wind wasn’t against me. And if it was raining, well, I just got wet.’

  Occasionally, when the tide was very low, David would have to drag his dinghy over mudflats in the middle of the river.

  ‘Hard to believe you had to drag your boat over part of what is the harbour, isn’t it?’

  Some students still arrive by water, with a daily ferry service to and from the city, and a few boys even travel across the river in their tinnies. But these days, the obvious point of entry to the college is by road, and the drive into the grounds takes you past sporting fields and impressive buildings. But the river remains the more interesting, if more demanding, approach to Riverview.

  From the water’s edge, it is a chest-heaving climb to the college, past a sleek modern building and up a stairway cut through rocks and picking its way through bush. They are called Whitfield’s Stairs, named after George Whitfield, who in the mid-19th century owned part of the land on which Riverview stands. Jesuit Father Joseph Dalton bought a parcel of the Riverview Estate in 1878 on behalf of the Society of Jesus to build a school. In less than two years, classes were under way in a cottage on the old farm, with just a couple of pupils. The college has grown to be one of the largest in the country and has about 1500 students.

  Near the top of the hill is a rose garden, which is on the site of the original Riverview Cottage. The garden is adorned with a small octagonal pavilion called the Teahouse. It was constructed by a Brother Thomas Forster, who had been a builder. Gradually revealing itself through the foliage is the college’s main building. This edifice in sandstone presides on the rise. It was gradually built between 1885 and 1930 and was to be just one side of a huge square. However, only this part of the main building, facing south, was built. The building’s gaze is firmly fixed on what has defined this college and helped bring it into being: the river.

  As we stand at the top of the hill, David Mort’s gaze extends beyond the river to the main harbour, and to the history of his own family. For Sydney Harbour shaped his family. In turn, the Morts shaped life around the harbour. David is the great-great grandson of Thomas Sutcliffe Mort, a commercial giant of the colony, whose broad business interests ranged from dock-building to wool and mining. Mort’s Dock was downriver and across the harbour from where we stand, at Balmain. When that dry dock opened in 1855, it played a huge role in developing Sydney as a port and trading hub. He also built some magnificent buildings around the harbour, especially a beautiful multi-storey wool store near Circular Quay. His memory remains on the map: Mort Bay.

  David and I turn away from the view and head into the life of the college. We step on the shadows of the colonnades as we walk along the main building’s arcades, out of the sun and sheltered by history. The sense of the past grows stronger as we head into the basement. The corridor is lined with photos of rowing champions past, and with oars, their blades wearing the names of triumphant crews. The school has had a rowing club since 1882, barely two years after the college was founded. One of the first buildings constructed on the campus was a boatshed.

  We step out of the corridor and into a series of rooms holding the college archives. Catherine Hobbs, the college’s archivist, explains that this was the air-raid shelter during the Second World War. These days it’s a bunker from the 21st century, which can be spied in slivers through the narrow windows set into the stone walls that are almost a metre thick. Catherine has set up the rooms like a museum. Among the memorabilia are references to the river and rowing, with one of the key exhibits the Riverview Challenge Cup, a golden trophy splendidly isolated in its own glass case. The first Riverview Regatta was held in 1885, and crews have been competing for this cup since 1893. Catherine points to another trophy and explains there’s a competition for girls as well.

  The archives not only chart the changing nature of the landscape around the college, but also highlight the character and achievements of those who have studied here.

  The poet Christopher Brennan, born in Harbour Street in the city, was a Riverview student in the 1880s. In one of his best known poems, ‘The Wanderer’, the character reflects,

  So I sit and muse in this wayside harbour and wait

  till I hear the gathering cry of the ancient winds and again

  I must up and out . . .

  Through lessons he received here in the Classics and literature, Brennan heard those ancient winds whistling through the college’s colonnades and out across the surrounding bushland, calling him far away to Europe. He returned to Australia, crafting beauty and drama in verse and life. He died poor in 1932. But Brennan’s memory has been returned to his first muse; Riverview’s library is named after him.

  Another alumnus who used words to help make his way beyond Riverview was the author and art critic Robert Hughes. His way of seeing the world, and writing about it, was nurtured by his schooling at Riverview, and by the harbour itself. Hughes grew up in an old home overlooking Rose Bay on the harbour’s south-east shore. As a little boy, he watched with wonder the flying boats taking off and landing on the bay. Hughes learnt to swim in a harbour pool, and its waters fed his lifelong passion for fishing. He would fish from the Rose Bay pier, waiting to catch the elusive. In the process, he also developed the skills to be a writer, particularly one that can be as difficult to hook as a fish: how to embrace solitude.

  In 1951, the teenage Hughes was sent to a distant shore, following the trail of other males in his family, to become a boarder at Riverview. His harbour view had changed. ‘You never had the feeling that Riverview was part of the great city of Sydney,’ Hughes wrote. ‘Riverview straddled its hill in isolation, a self-contained and monosexual world of boarders and priests against whose limit the bungalows of Lane Cove pressed in a suburban tide.’ Yet while cloistered in that isolation, Hughes was educated in how to make his mark in the world. A few key Jesuits encouraged him to broaden his reading, to look more deeply at art, and to speak up in public. Those lessons remained with him.

  Having seen the trophies and photos in the archives, David and I head back down to the river, where the college’s boatshed is located. It is a fine building sprawled across the point between the river and the western shore of Tambourine Bay. On the lower floor are dozens of racing shells. The name of one craft honours the roots of the college – Spirit of Ignatius – and another acknowledges the people on whose traditional land the college stands – Cammeraygal. On the upper floor is a gym with large windows that allow views of the river and of the distant high-rises in the CBD to wash in. On the back wall are more old photos of past champions and glories. In one 1970s photo of a victorious Second Eight crew, third from the back, is A. Abbott. The former Prime Minister Tony Abbott is a Riverview old boy.

  The boatshed and pontoon provide direct access to the scene of the Riverview Regatta; the finish line is just around the point. David can virtually see the invisible line in the water; he explains he used to roughly follow it when he rowed to school. For the rest of us, there are indicators on the bank as to where the races are held. Just above the water is a small but ornate octagonal building. It is another Brother Thomas creation. The pavilion was the bandstand for the musicians playing at regattas. On a higher point overlooking the river is what’s called the Vice Regal Pavilion, built in 1892, for very important guests to sit and watch the rowing. Yet irrespective of importance, thousands would pack along the banks, and on the water, for these events.

  ‘The attendance of visitors, always strong at these regattas, appeared to be more numerous than on former occasions, and the fleet of steamers, yachts and smaller boats gave the river quite an animated appearance,’ wrote ‘The Referee’ in his report of the 1890 annual regatta.

  That much has not changed. The regattas still attract large crowds, and the competitors still strain and train in the hope of holding the golden trophy and having their names etched into history in the college archives.

  Yet the environment in which they train has dramatically changed. As we
stand on the boatshed’s pontoon, David looks into Tambourine Bay, which is knotted with moored boats. Yet he notes what has gone. Next to the boatshed, he says, there used to be tidal baths where he and his mates would swim. Now there is just the ghost of the baths, with the remains of a stone wall and a few blocks in the water. On the shore, the ruins of an old shelter are being gradually reclaimed by the bush. Soon the shelter will be bush rocks once more.

  TAMBOURINE BAY may have received its name because a woman who sang and played a tambourine in Sydney streets lived in a cave along this shore. At the head of the bay, where mangroves cluster around a creek mouth, there is no sight of a cave, let alone the din of tambourines; rather, there’s the more subtle sound of ticking and clicking rising from the mud, which looks as though it is trembling. Thousands of soldier crabs are scrambling across the squelchy shore. The mouth of Tambourine Creek seems to be a busy place for nature. Wader birds are picking around in the mud. Only the fish seem to be taking it easy. Rather than darting away when I approach, the fish sluggishly sway and swish to move just a little.

  Paddling into the next cove, Woodford Bay, I’m in the midst of a boating playground. There are hundreds of vessels moored in the bay. When you paddle into a waterway where you could virtually walk across the water from one deck to the next, and you realise this is replicated in one bay to the next, the dry statistics of almost 5000 private moorings and about 17,000 recreational vessels on Sydney Harbour form into a staggering reality. If the surface looks cluttered, the harbour bottom looks increasingly scarred. The moorings’ chains and blocks are cutting a swathe through seagrass beds. Scientists have been surveying the harbour floor and the impact of moorings on marine life, and it’s estimated about half of Sydney’s seagrass beds have disappeared in the past sixty years. This is worrying for the harbour, for seagrass plays a vital role in maintaining its health. Seagrass slows down water passing over it, so that not only decreases erosion on the shoreline, it also means fine sediment drops to the floor. That makes the water clearer. Seagrass also provides vital nurseries for fish, and it has an algal coating that absorbs nutrients, so it is like an underwater filter. For environmental and economic reasons, scientists argue, seagrass has to be maintained.