The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  ‘I don’t exist without being around boats, around the water,’ he asserts.

  Sean has made a living working on boats around the harbour. And he has sailed them out of the Heads and into the wide blue yonder. Sean has competed in twenty-six Sydney to Hobart races so far. He has endured horrendous experiences, such as competing in the 1998 race, when six sailors died. But Sean Langman’s motivation for being part of the iconic race hasn’t dimmed. He loves the ‘have a go’ attitude that pervades the race. He points out you can come from nothing, and your fellow crew members may be multi-millionaires, but out in the ocean, none of that matters. As Sean says, ‘the sea doesn’t discriminate’.

  Sean Langman has run his Berrys Bay operation since 1994. He maintains not only boats but a tradition. For the business is literally built on the harbour’s past. This was where the Stannard family operated its large yard, building boats from the 1960s. Long before then, all manner of vessels took shape along the bay’s eastern shore. Wallaby, the first double-ended ferry on Sydney Harbour, was built in 1878 in a yard run by William Dunn. His yard built more than 400 vessels. Neighbouring Dunn’s operations, the Ford family built a yard in the 1870s. The Fords built colliers, trading ketches that sailed the Pacific, and luxury motor yachts, including Lady Hopetoun in 1902. She was built to transport VIPs for the Sydney Harbour Trust, but through the years, this graceful steam vessel has accomplished other roles with aplomb. She has been everything from a naval command post during defence exercises to a rescue boat when vessels ran into strife on the harbour. And ‘The Lady’ is still chugging around the harbour, as a member of the Sydney Heritage Fleet. She is still trim and lustrous, and the smoke she exhales from her funnel carries the scent of the Edwardian era. Having paddled in her wake, I believe there can be no finer backside to follow in Sydney than that of Lady Hopetoun.

  The shipbuilding that took place along the shoreline is officially commemorated by a plaque and steel walkway, which is known as Boatbuilders’ Walk. At the Noakes yard, Sean Langman and his team of about 50 full-time workers continue making, building and restoring history. In 2008, he bought Rosman Ferries, with its historic wooden boats. The ferries are moored outside the yard, when they’re not out on the water. They are popular for chartering, but for Sean the business is as much about the heart as it is the head.

  ‘We’ve got to hold on to some things we call iconically Australian,’ he declares. ‘We should keep those things that are at the core of us, and wooden ferry boats are part of that. Some of these boats are more than 100 years old, and that’s in a country not even 240 years old. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.’

  To pay for the passion for boats, there has to be profit. The yard has to survive, not just financially but also in the face of public opinion. He has had to contend with those who want their harbour to be little more than an adornment in their windows.

  ‘They like the romantic notion of it being a working harbour, but . . .’ Sean says, adding that some locals don’t want the sights and sounds that come with a maritime industry.

  Debate over how Berrys Bay should be used in the future has been chopping up the waters locally. On the bay’s western side is the site of a slipway and marina that operated for almost a century to 2011. The name of the marina – Woodleys Pty Ltd – remains in bold letters across the main shed. The noonday sun tattoos the letters in shadows onto the building’s corrugated-iron skin. The wharf out the front of the shed has all but given up and collapsed into the bay. Yet where old infrastructure sinks, developers’ dreams float. A plan for a marina capable of holding about eighty vessels, including super yachts, has been opposed by an action group which doesn’t want to see the western shore turn into a parking lot for big boats.

  Sean is confident about the bay’s future. He has seen seals in the bay, and sharks. He was once in the water, helping manoeuvre a racing yacht down a slip, while its crew of visiting European sailors watched from the seawall. One of them yelled out to ask Sean what he did when he saw a shark. Sean replied that he would wrestle the shark and throw it back in the water. ‘Well, what about that one?’ the European said, pointing to a fin cutting the surface nearby. Sean was out of the water in a flash.

  Sean Langman is adamant about one future use for Berrys Bay. It will be his resting place.

  In the harbour where Sean was born, works and sails, a place where every cove and bay holds a memory, Berrys Bay is to him the most significant. So when he dies, he wants his remains to be sprinkled into the bay off the Young Endeavour replica sailing ship, which he has done a lot of work on. Not that he’s thinking that far ahead. Just as he rarely stands on the shore and contemplates all that has happened for him around this bay. He hasn’t had time to count how many boats he’s worked on during his career – ‘thousands’ – let alone chart his place in the harbour’s history. Sean remains right here, in the moment, a man who is happy when he is on the water.

  A LOT of the waterfront around the bay has been opened up for enjoyment. On the western shore is Carradah Park. From the water, it doesn’t look like a park, with its faces of cut and sliced sandstone. Generally, faces record a life story, but here, the sculpted cliffs tell only part of the terrain’s tale. Alexander Berry’s storehouse was built on these western shores. A torpedo and seabed mine base was also here during colonial times. Berry’s warehouse was later converted into a distillery used by a local hotel. But from 1922 until 1993, the site was a major oil storage facility. Along the waterfront was a series of wharves. With ships no longer tying up to them, the older timber wharves have deteriorated, and paddling close to the time-silvered piers is like gliding through tree trunks in an ancient forest. When the terminal was operating, lumped around the curve of the bay towards Woodley’s slipways were more than a dozen storage tanks, and a few of them doubled as billboards for the oil company.

  The prominence of industry on the waterfront annoyed a few influential observers. C.E.W. Bean, the renowned war correspondent and author, complained about the ‘disfigurement of the harbour foreshores by oil companies and other industrial concerns’. Bean reportedly told a town planners’ meeting in 1931 that, ‘One could not blame the oil companies if they chose prominent sites with a view to advertising their products . . . Citizens were to be blamed for taking no steps to prevent them.’ One of those attending the meeting had an interesting proposal to tone the industrial structures into the landscape. He suggested they ‘could be castellated on top to resemble mediaeval castles’.

  As it is, the hill has the look of a fortress. The landscape is scabrous, and there are also the in-grown carbuncles of industry. The storage tanks have been removed, but their footprints remain, and grasping the rock are sections of the thick bund walls that were designed to contain spills and leaks. However, from the top of the hill, just near where tanker trucks used to be filled, there are platforms to soak in the view over the harbour. In some ways, the lookouts return the scene to how it was before the oil terminal was built, when famous artists who lived locally, such as Will Ashton and Roland Wakelin, would sit up here and paint. With their brushes and oils, they were creating art, but they were also recording history. Wakelin’s Down the hills to Berry’s Bay, painted in 1916, shows the boatsheds along the eastern shore, including one where the Noakes yard is today.

  On the ridgeline, a large sign has been erected by the local council. The sign stands next to the skeleton of a gum tree, and it barges into the view, with the declaration, ‘WARNING. Trees in this area have been wilfully destroyed by selfish vandals’. Just across the bay is a reminder of when trees were felled in huge numbers not by vandals but to build an economy. Sawmillers Reserve is a crescent of green pressed between the sandstone hill and the harbour. Casuarinas along the shore catch the sun and sprinkle the light onto the grounds. Every couple of years, the reserve becomes an open-air art gallery, when it hosts the ‘Sculptures at Sawmillers’ exhibition, the brainchild of a local resident. Crowds wander around materials recycled, reshaped and re
imagined into story-telling shapes. Where these sculptures are exhibited was once the site of a timber yard. It was started in the late 19th century by a merchant whose name suggests he was born for this business, John Wood Eaton. The forests of the globe, from Baltic pine to oak and kauri, were shipped into the bay and unloaded at the company’s wharves. The sawn timber would make its way around the city and even back out of the harbour, being exported as pre-fabricated buildings for the Pacific islands. The disembodied forest grew along the foreshore, as Eaton’s yard expanded through the 20th century. Large rafts of timber floated in the water, and wharves stretched for hundreds of metres along the curve of the bay. The company ceased operating at Berrys Bay in the early 1980s. Some of the land was sliced off for home units, the rest becoming Sawmillers Reserve.

  The frenetic waterfront activity has been replaced by a lone shipwreck lying in the shallows just off the reserve. I paddle into the wreck and pick my way among its bones. The vessel is gradually shedding its iron-plate skin, exposing its skeleton, while part of the concrete deck and a number of thick wooden planks cling tenaciously to the structure. The wreck is that of a Maritime Services Board barge. While the other vessels that berthed here are but ghosts and memories, this barge has kept its shape, trying to defy the incessant scratching of the water and the years.

  This stretch of the harbour could have held a vastly different look. It could have been ‘modernised’, according to the plans and vision of Australia’s best-known architect, Harry Seidler. When he moved to Australia after the Second World War, Austrian-born Seidler carried a head full of modernist ideas and influences in building design. He didn’t want to be part of a process that plonked people in dark boxes to live and work, as though they were still in England and stuck in the past. He desired to create buildings that respected the environment, helped build a sense of community, and encouraged its inhabitants to live in the here and now. While many were still grappling with what Australian architecture actually was, Harry Seidler had a clear picture of what Sydney needed in its buildings. On the serrated sandstone peninsula heaving out of the water from Blues Point and McMahons Point, Seidler had found a canvas on which to create on a grand scale.

  In the late 1950s, Harry Seidler envisaged a tiered residential development that followed the lie of the land: low buildings close to the water, medium-height buildings staggered up the slope, and high-rise towers along the ridge. Seidler saw this design as a practical way to approach high-density living, giving everyone access to public transport, open space, and a view of the water. He and a group of other architects drew up plans and made a model of how the peninsula would look. To Seidler, the development would be a harbour showpiece, demonstrating what could be done on other peninsulas. However, the proposal was about more than bringing contemporary building design to Sydney; it was also a bulwark against the local council’s plans to designate the McMahons Point area an industrial zone. Seidler railed in the media that no country in the modern world would allow such a beautiful harbour foreshore to be defiled by factories. Seidler’s vision for the peninsula had the backing of locals opposed to the idea of industry in their suburb.

  However, Seidler’s plan for the peninsula wasn’t realised, and in many areas in the years that followed, the opposite happened, with towers being built on the waterfront, blocking the view for all behind. From Seidler’s musings and hopes for the peninsula, only one apartment tower was built, in 1961. Blues Point Tower was then the tallest apartment building in Australia and, according to his biographer Helen O’Neill, larger than anything that was in his plans for McMahons Point.

  Blues Point Tower sticks up like a defiant finger at the local authorities who rejected Seidler’s ideas. But being a 24-storey building alone at the tip of the peninsula, Blues Point Tower also sticks out. Wherever you are, be it travelling over the Bridge, on a harbour ferry, standing on the shore, or kayaking around the reserve at its feet, you can see the tower. While architects and students rave about the building’s design, and Seidler himself said he liked its facades, to its detractors the tower holds all the aesthetic appeal of a public toilet. That concrete and brick finger has been viewed by many as a poke in the eye to all trying to appreciate the harbour’s beauty. Arguably more than any other building, Blues Point Tower has copped the blame for changing Sydney’s face for the worse.

  Still, it all depends on your perspective. For those on the inside looking out, it’s a fine building. A friend used to live in Blues Point Tower, and whenever I stood in his lounge room at the small ‘french’ balcony that faced south-west, I felt the unit’s windows were not big enough. But that is the problem with harbour views; they make you greedy to the point you’re never satisfied.

  Iconic buildings around Sydney that Seidler designed, from Australia Square to the Horizon apartment tower, reach for the sky, but the memorial to him is a small horizontal patch next to his old office at Milsons Point. From Harry’s Park, you can peer across to that architectural exclamation mark of his, Blues Point Tower.

  Harry Seidler was hardly the originator of big and bold statements around Blues Point. The man behind the headland’s name, Billy Blue, was, by all accounts, the master of the big statement. Billy Blue, believed to be originally from Jamaica, was working on the docks in London when he was charged with possessing a stolen bag of sugar and sentenced in 1796 to transportation to New South Wales. It wasn’t until 1801 that he sailed into Sydney. A decade on, the harbour that had been his prison was the making of Billy Blue. As well as being appointed a waterside watchman by Governor Macquarie to prevent smuggling, Blue had a private ferry service, rowing passengers across the harbour to the North Shore. His fleet grew from one rowboat to eleven, apparently prompting the Governor to exclaim that Blue should be called ‘Commodore’. After that, Billy Blue was widely known as the Old Commodore. He wore a naval uniform and top hat and insisted on being greeted in a manner in keeping with his rank of Commodore.

  Billy Blue was notorious for jesting with, and insulting, any passenger who tried to lord it over him, and for regaling those on board with tales about his long and apparently adventurous life. The Old Commodore was also loath to row. Alexander Harris wrote in his book, Settlers and Convicts, about being a paying customer of Billy Blue: ‘He told us, with quite a fatherly sort of authority, that he had been across a good many times that day; that we must pull him over to the other side, and he would take the boat back. The “Old Commodore” being considered to possess a sort of universal freedom of speech to everybody, no demur was made. We pulled him across in his own boat, and paid him our fares for pulling himself back again.’

  When Billy Blue died, there was much conjecture in Sydney about his age. Some claimed he was 100. What was certain is that he was a celebrity on the water. Around the time of his death, a poster of Billy Blue was printed and sold. The poster featured the words ‘True Blue!’ and a sketch portrait of him in top hat and uniform, and rattling the stick he was fond of carrying. The poster was also adorned with some of his favourite sayings, including, ‘No rows, my child’ and ‘Go along, you long legg’d brute’.

  The Old Commodore’s influence flows around Blues Point and McMahons Point into the next bay. It has such a pretty name. Lavender Bay. Yet it is not named after bunches of soft purple herbs but after George Lavender, a Royal Navy man who had worked on a floating convict barracks, Phoenix, that sat in the bay. Lavender made his way into local lore, marrying Billy Blue’s daughter, Susannah. Eventually, after being a ferryman like his father-in-law, Lavender was the owner of the Old Commodore Hotel up the hill in Blues Point Road.

  The bay itself is an intoxicating place, because it possesses more than a pretty name. And its Aboriginal name is even prettier – Quibaree, believed to refer to the fresh water spring that used to be here. No matter what it is called, this is a beautiful alcove, so near yet removed from the hurly-burly of the main harbour as it approaches the Bridge, a few hundred metres away. Even when it is being lashed by a southerly, and
its waters are tussled, the bay still feels serene.

  These days a few dozen boats are usually moored in the bay. Along its shores there used to be boatsheds and slipways, a ferry wharf and a grand bath house, owned by Fred Cavill. His son Dick, a champion swimmer, trained in the baths and is credited with inventing the stroke known as the Australian crawl.

  A wharf remains but hosts only the occasional charter ferry these days. Although it is a fishing platform. I chat with Reece, a young man who has caught the train from Ryde to cast his lines into the bay. He’s been fishing here for fifteen years, since he was a boy.

  ‘There are not many wharves left in Sydney where you can fish without it being packed,’ he explains. Not that his fishing rods have bent even slightly so far on this day.

  ‘There’s usually something around,’ he murmurs, peering into the clear green that darkens as the harbour drops away. ‘It’s pretty clean around this spot.’ As the water quality has improved in recent years, so have the stocks of fish, especially bream, in the bay. If he does catch a fish – and he remains confident – Reece will eat it, despite the official warnings about toxic levels.

  ‘I eat fish from here, but I wouldn’t from anywhere further up,’ Reece says, as he slices a fresh sardine for bait.

  If he doesn’t catch a fish, Reece can always cook the sardines – or wait until he returns to work. He has a job in a fish shop.

  On the steep slopes around the bay are a few historic mansions. But there used to be more; time and a city ever hungrier for land knocked them over. Further up the hill, with perhaps the finest views of the harbour, was a mansion built from gold. Bernhardt Holtermann had been scratching away for years at Hill End with little success. But then in 1872, a syndicate he was part of hit a massive lump of reef gold, the largest ever uncovered at that time. It became known as Holtermann’s Nugget. Using some of his fortune, Holtermann built a home on the heights above the harbour, with a 27-metre tower that included a stained-glass window portraying him standing with the nugget. Yet the tower was more than a shrine to himself and the source of his wealth. It was a mount for another of his passions: photography. From the tower, Holtermann and a photographer he had met in Hill End, Charles Bayliss, captured a panorama of Sydney. The pair would carefully carry large and bulky glass plates up the staircase to the camera Bayliss had installed at the top of the tower. A brief time in the history of the harbour city was preserved on the plates. Holtermann had performed alchemy of sorts, turning gold and light into a series of extraordinary images of Sydney.