The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  The panorama was displayed at major exhibitions in Philadelphia and Paris. Holtermann and Bayliss opened the eyes of the world to a city still straggling out of the scrub, and with buildings shaped out of the sandstone on which they stood. What binds the foreground and background is the great anguine shape of the harbour slithering through the middle of the panorama. In the images, the harbour cradles ships, under sail and steam, from the wharves of Sydney Cove to the distant bays to the east. The viewer’s eyes drift from left to right, pushing against the journey of the harbour from the rivers to the sea. And the harbour seems to flow on, beyond the margins of the panorama, from another time into ours. It is an extraordinarily important series of photos, exposing how much a city has developed, and regressed, around the harbour.

  In one of the photographs is Lavender Bay, with a couple of sailing ships and a steamer in its embrace. The image also showed the bay had a longer reach than it does now. The cove was shaped like an arrowhead piercing the land, but it softened the blow with a sandy tip that was a popular beach. From 1890, the cove was filled in and the bay’s shoreline was sculpted for a rail line to the nearby Milsons Point ferry terminal. It is no longer the main line, but the rails remain, running like an old scar close to the shore.

  While the rail line partially cut off the water from those living up the hill, a viaduct it ran over did provide a nest for one harbour tradition. For more than a decade, a renowned wooden boatbuilder, Bob Gordon, had a workshop under the arches. Before then, he built boats out in the open on the bay’s shores.

  Life jogged by the graffiti-marked brick walls with barely a sideways glance. But if you stopped and peered into the space under the viaduct, it was like following the white rabbit into a wonderland. You were treated to the scent of wood and the sight and sounds of time-seasoned skills being practised, as Bob and his son, Robert, used hand-tools to whittle and plane, saw and shape timber into elegant boats. It felt as though you were observing something you had presumed was extinct.

  At the front of his workshop was a slipway. Boats had taken shape there since the late 19th century, and it was once used by the Neptune Engineering and Slipway Company, which pioneered the design and building of marine diesel engines in Australia. When that business closed in the bay in the late 1980s, much of the land had housing piled on top of it, but the slipway remained. Bob Gordon considered it an insult for the historic slip to be left decrepit.

  He bemoaned how heritage was allowed to fade away.

  ‘No one is interested until it’s too late,’ he said.

  Bob Gordon launched his last boat in 2005, and he died the following year. The arch was sealed, and so was a window to the past. The world kept jogging past, largely unaware that the city, especially the harbour, had lost yet another character. All that is left as a reminder of the bay’s boatbuilding past is the idle slipway. It may have a plaque in front of it, but that doesn’t mean the historic landmark is accorded the respect it deserves. Once when I paddled onto the small beach that has formed at the slipway, I noticed a used syringe floating in the shallows.

  But regeneration can occur in the unlikeliest of places.

  Just up the hill, peeking out from behind the gangly limbs of a massive old Moreton Bay fig, is a white Federation house with a fairytale tower. It is the home of Wendy Whiteley. She is half of a formidably creative couple. Wendy was the wife, muse and painting subject of the acclaimed artist Brett Whiteley.

  Wendy and Brett Whiteley, along with their daughter Arkie, moved to Lavender Bay in 1969, after visiting a friend here.

  ‘We’d never been in Lavender Bay before, we didn’t even know of its existence, and, of course, we instantly fell in love with the harbour,’ recalls Wendy, as we sit in the kitchen of her home.

  In those days, the baths and its wooden change sheds were still on the shore, and the Whiteleys would swim in there. Early in the morning, they would wander down to the wharf in their pyjamas and buy fish directly from the trawler of an Italian–Australian fisherman.

  When they moved here, the Whiteleys rented a flat in this house. Like many older homes in the area, it had been carved up inside. The Whiteleys’ flat was on the floor where we are chatting. It is now a gleaming space, opened up to the view of the harbour and the Bridge, which is perfectly framed by the branches of the Moreton Bay fig. But before the Whiteleys bought the house in 1974 and renovated it, the harbour was effectively locked out.

  ‘All these houses were built to keep the light out, and therefore the view, because they didn’t want all that sun coming in and bleaching their red velvet curtains,’ Wendy explains, while managing to keep a straight face. ‘This had stained glass and everything. Why would you want stained glass between you and the harbour? We got rid of all that crap very fast.’

  Brett also arranged for the quirky tower to be built, partly for the view, but it was also functional, encasing a spiral staircase that linked the house’s floors. I ask Wendy does she often go to the top of the tower.

  ‘No. There’s a perfectly good view out there on the veranda.’

  In the mid-1970s, Wendy could see straight over the Moreton Bay fig, but it has doubled in size since then. Not that she has ever sought a clear view; she finds it less interesting. That attitude puts her at odds with many in Sydney.

  ‘I love the tree!’ she says. ‘I looked after it. A lot of people who have come here have said, “Oh Christ, why didn’t you kill that tree!”, and I’ve said, “Why do I need to have a completely open view of some rather mediocre buildings on the other side of the harbour.” I love the Bridge, but I can see the Bridge perfectly well, and Luna Park.’

  The view from the Whiteleys’ windows has become our view of Sydney Harbour. The palm trees, the wharf prodding at the bay, the smears and slashes of boats’ wakes, we’ve seen it all through Whiteley’s eyes. For the artist was seduced by the harbour, in all its moods and colours. When the sun was shining, he used his favourite colour, French ultramarine blue, to create a glazed harbour; when it was rainy and subdued, he made the water creamy, like a rock oyster. Just as the harbour’s response to the weather could be capricious, so could the artist’s be to the harbour; he even painted it orange. What was constant was his love for this slice of the harbour at Lavender Bay.

  The way he responded to the curves of the shoreline, the headlands, the water itself, resulted in images that are very sexual, I suggest to Wendy. She pauses, before replying diplomatically, ‘Yeah, sensual maybe.’

  ‘Of course, the harbour’s sensual, because it’s beautiful, so it’s sensual – and sexual, in that sense of it being beautiful and interesting, and alive. But you’re not going to look at it simply because it’s got a curve in it and you see a tit or a bum every time, otherwise you’d go nuts, because that’s so clichéd in a way.

  ‘The fact is Brett used that kind of abstraction in his early paintings, and he loved the curve, he didn’t like straight lines. He wasn’t a straight-line person.’

  ‘So, he didn’t look at the harbour and see a tit or a bum?’

  ‘He saw visual ecstasy, as he described it. So is that sensual or sexual, or both?’ Wendy asks in a way that sounds like more of a statement.

  ‘Both.’

  She smiles, as though she has finally got through to a none-too-bright student.

  ‘There you go,’ she says quietly.

  Between the visual ecstasy and the house lay an eyesore. The gully filled in for the railway line had become a dump over the years, descending into a tangled mess of weeds and rubbish, impenetrable to all but a few homeless people.

  But the wasteland was to be a place of healing for Wendy Whiteley. In an area that had been given up for dead, she nurtured life, and a purpose for living. When Brett died in 1992, Wendy dealt with her grief by wandering into the wasteland and began hacking and clearing. As a little girl, her favourite book was The Secret Garden, about an orphan and her cousin transforming a neglected patch of earth – and themselves – into something beautiful
and healthy. Just as in the story, Wendy Whiteley did the same with the harbourside railway land. She created a ‘secret garden’. Wendy and a gang of helpers became ‘guerrilla gardeners’. They recycled materials; old railway sleepers became steps, the sandstone rubble that had been used as landfill was the key material of drystone walls, and discarded objects were turned into little sculptures. And there was a lot of planting. The garden was not formal in design, nor was it officially on the books.

  ‘I’m not a horticulturalist, I wasn’t a gardener,’ Wendy explains. ‘I did it by eye and hard work.’

  The garden again became a place to work through grief and loss for Wendy, when Arkie died from cancer in 2001. Through the years, the garden was not just a place for Wendy to find peace. More and more people wandered in, looking for somewhere beautiful to have lunch, to meet with friends, or to gather their thoughts. The secret was out. For Wendy’s garden offers not just visual ecstasy but also qualities increasingly hard to find in Sydney, serenity and joy.

  You don’t walk into Wendy’s Secret Garden; rather, it seems to invite you in. More than enchant you, Wendy’s garden embraces and envelops you. You observe the sudden change in environment, as you can’t see too far ahead down the squiggly paths for the profusion of trees and plants. But that is how the garden changes you. It calms you down and gently encourages you to enjoy the moment. Don’t look for the wide view, or gaze too far ahead; just revel in what is right before you. It is a magical garden.

  Little wonder this place is now very much on the map, even if there are no physical signs pointing to the garden. Tour groups and wedding parties traipse in, it features on visitors’ websites, and it is the subject of a beautiful coffee-table book, Wendy Whiteley and the Secret Garden. Even the State Government has had to acknowledge its existence, and priceless community value, with a long-term lease. Wendy’s secret garden is now everybody’s haven.

  ‘I can’t get my knickers in a knot, can I, when I look out there and see people are loving it and enjoying it and writing in the [visitors’] book, because that’s what it’s for,’ she says.

  Wendy still loves wandering down into the valley, getting her hands dirty and, in effect, being that little girl in The Secret Garden.

  ‘Somebody transforming something,’ she murmurs. ‘Alchemy.’ Which happens to be the title of one of Brett’s best-known paintings.

  The garden has given Wendy a greater sense of belonging and an even deeper love of Lavender Bay. She calls it her heart and soul place.

  ‘I love the bay. It’s just spectacular. It has a very, very special thing about it, Lavender Bay, that I haven’t felt in any other bay in Sydney, or anywhere else.

  ‘There’s something very protected and heart-warming about this place. People feel it when they come here, and it’s not just the garden. They feel it’s very peaceful, and it’s not dangerous, and it’s just got a very good feng shui. And that’s got nothing to do with me. I’ve just made it accessible.’

  6

  MILSONS POINT AND THE BRIDGE

  THE ENCHANTMENT of Lavender Bay wends its way out of Wendy’s Secret Garden and down to the water. A boardwalk meanders for a few hundred metres towards Luna Park. On the right is the boat-dotted harbour. On the left, playing hide-and-seek in the vegetation, are cute little statues of characters that have shaped many an Australian childhood, including Blinky Bill, Bib and Bub, and Ginger Meggs, along with sculptures of local icons – a ferry and the clown’s face entrance to Luna Park.

  The procession of characters is mostly from the hands of artist Peter Kingston. From his nickname, ‘Kingo’, to his love of comic books and his passionate approach to conversations, Peter is like a kid. But that’s not why he created what he calls ‘The Comic Walk’. Rather, it was out of a sense of atonement, Sydney Harbour style.

  Peter Kingston lives just above Lavender Bay, in an old house neighbouring Wendy Whiteley’s. From his lounge room and veranda, Peter has a view through coral trees to Luna Park and the Bridge. The trees are bursting with red flowers, which look like a wig plonked on the amusement park. It looks somehow appropriate, given Luna Park’s catchphrase is ‘Just for Fun’. Yet there was a time when the red wig was too shaggy, and the trees blocked the view. So Peter gave them a trim.

  ‘To sort of compensate for doing that, I put in those sculptures,’ Peter explains. ‘If you do something, you’ve got to give something back a bit more.’

  Peter Kingston loves preservation. He helps preserve childhood memories with his little sculptures along the boardwalk, which has been officially named Peter Kingston Walkway. And he’s helped preserve Luna Park.

  When Luna Park opened in 1935, that big mouth at its entrance offered what was missing on so many Sydneysiders’ faces. After years of privation during the Great Depression, a North Sydney alderman, James Street Stanton, noted the city needed brightening, and that the park would supply ‘a big want in the lives of Sydney and North Sydney’. Alderman Stanton’s comment underlined a separation between his side of the harbour and the other, as though something other than the kilometre or so of water was between them. But the city had a common desire for fun, so it seemed Luna Park would achieve what has always been a challenge ever since the British sailed into Port Jackson; pulling people to the opposite shore.

  Even before it opened, Luna Park had its critics. Some were worried it would attract undesirables and threaten the morals of the good people of North Sydney, while others believed it would be another eyesore on the foreshore. Yet the criticisms were trampled under the rush to the new face beside the harbour. Like moths, Sydneysiders were drawn to the lights of Luna Park. During the Second World War, the park was an escape for soldiers on leave, along with the young women they took out on the town. The harbour was incorporated in the fun. There were speedboat rides on Lavender Bay and to the Bridge. For a time after the war, a decommissioned Dutch submarine was moored next to the park, with customers shuffling through its cramped interior. The excitement of Luna Park pressed itself onto the pages of literature, including Dymphna Cusack and Florence James’ best-selling novel set in wartime Sydney, Come In Spinner, and it crackled through the lives of boys and girls growing up in a world juggling a precarious peace.

  ‘Luna Park was always the place we loved to go to as kids,’ Peter Kingston recalls. ‘Luna Park’s heyday was the 1950s, ’60s; that’s when it had all the great rides, like the River Caves, and the roller coaster was a proper roller coaster, the Big Dipper.’

  The harbour also added to the sense of adventure for Peter.

  ‘It was like Luna Park was on an island. You’d get the ferry from Circular Quay, and that’s how you’d approach Luna Park. And on beautiful heritage ferries as well. It was so magic.’

  The magic threatened to fade. The fun park occupied land where serious money could be made with development. Yet it was saved. In the mid-1970s, artist and Luna Park enthusiast Martin Sharp was commissioned to put colour back into the place. Sharp assembled a team of artists, including Peter Kingston, who had moved into the old house above Lavender Bay, which is now his home. Back then, it was a jumble of flats.

  For Peter, the job was not just creating artworks, but restoring what had fed his imagination as a kid. Arthur ‘Art’ Barton was an artist and Luna Park’s chief decorator. He had been there virtually from the outset and helped give the park its irresistibly quirky look. On the walls and around the rides, Barton painted faraway places, fantasy scenes, and wide-eyed characters in a colourful, comic style.

  Peter says he was ‘besotted’ by the paintings, because Barton absorbed ideas from other cultures yet in what he created gave it ‘an Aussie twist’. Barton’s paintings were among ‘the jewels of the city’.

  Barton also devised what Peter considers the best of the grinning faces at the entrance. The years and the salt rubbed away the smile, so there had to be facelifts, about nine by Peter’s count. In recent years, he urged the park’s management to return the face to the Arthur Barton design, �
��which is sort of like old King Cole’. Yet it’s still not quite right, Peter argues, before pointing to a model he has made of Luna Park’s entrance.

  ‘That’s the right face,’ Peter says, picking up the model. ‘That’s Arthur Barton’s mouth.’

  Peter Kingston worked mainly in Coney Island, which was adorned with Barton images and housed simple pleasures, such as slippery dips and the spinning ‘Joy Wheel’. Coney Island is still there. Peter points to the building’s crown of a silver onion dome. It looks at once exotic, like something plonked onto Coney Island from the steppes of central Russia, and familiar. It has been there by the harbour for eighty years.

  On a winter’s night in 1979, the fun was replaced with tragedy. A fire tore through the Ghost Train. A man and his two sons, along with four other children, died. Peter Kingston was away, so didn’t see the blaze that horrified Sydney.

  To honour those who died, Peter, along with cartoonist Michael Leunig, designed a small sculpture atop a plinth with the seven victims’ names etched into it. The memorial is near the other little statues along the waterfront.