The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  Chicaning amid the motley fleet of skygazers, time counters and pleasure seekers, Charlie guides us to Priority II. Once all aboard, we open a bottle of Hunter white and watch the procession of ships in the dark, outlined like ghosts by thousands of LED lights.

  On a cruiser neighbouring us, Charlie says, there are eight kids who have spent the day diving into the water and having a great old time. ‘You wouldn’t want to know what’s below you though, would you,’ says Barry.

  We look expectantly at the Bridge. On the pylons are screens with images projected onto them. We yarn away the minutes until the countdown begins on the pylon, the numbers getting ever closer to zero – and to 2016. At the count of two, the first of the fireworks fizz above the Bridge, and then it’s on for the next ten minutes. It is a fantastic display in the sky and, by reflection, on the water. When the curtain of fireworks showers down from the deck of the Bridge, lighting up the water, a silhouette armada appears before us. For the first time, I appreciate just how many boats are in the bay. It’s easy to imagine, when you’re looking skyward, that the harbour is all yours.

  The fireworks end, and Charlie declares this spot is better than Farm Cove. Anywhere on the harbour would provide a fantastic experience, I reckon, for I now realise fireworks are best enjoyed from the water. After one more drink, I step back into the supple but unconvincing embrace of the rubber boat, hold up the glow sticks, and we murmur our way back to the wharf. Crowds are climbing the steps, past Wendy Whiteley’s garden, leaving behind another year and a whole lot of rubbish.

  A few days after the big celebrations, I paddle into Lavender Bay. Strewn along the sand on the old slipway is a tideline of hedonism. Lying on the little beach are plastic bottles, party poppers, champagne corks, condom wrappers, glittering silver tinsel and spangled baubles. Floating in the shallows is a dead fish, as though it’s been asphyxiated by all the flotsam and jetsam of pleasure. For the harbour itself, all these good times come at a cost.

  PETER MANN works inside what he calls the castle. He is referring to Sydney Harbour Bridge’s south pylons, where the Roads & Maritime Services’ maintenance team is based. Peter is the Strategic Infrastructure Manager, which means he is in charge of keeping the Bridge in top shape.

  As we walk through the security door at the base of the stone pylons, Peter, a tall slender man with kindly eyes, welcomes me inside the ‘dungeon’. It doesn’t feel like a dungeon; it is a vast space, several storeys high. And it is also busy. Peter takes me into a workshop where a tradesman is using a large drill that has been here since the Bridge was built. He shows me some of the 132 Art Deco-style lamps to be mounted on each of the Bridge’s light arms. The originals were removed in the 1950s, so Peter commissioned the casting of replacements. It may not add up as a ‘business case’, he reasons, but there’s enormous social value in ‘putting the jewellery back on the Bridge, out of respect’.

  A train rumbles overhead. Since we’re in the bowels of the Bridge, it sounds like the icon has bad indigestion.

  ‘You get used to it; it’s ambient background noise,’ laughs Peter, who adds that, in peak hour, twenty trains in each direction travel across the Bridge.

  An engineering graduate, Peter says the motivation for his job is ‘to look after an icon’. There are about 100 workers in the Bridge maintenance team, including carpenters, metalworkers, and riggers, whose duties include operating the cranes on the arch and setting up platforms for the painters. Before his career as a comedian and actor took off in the 1970s, Paul Hogan was a rigger on the Bridge. He was apparently chasing the danger money, working at heights. As a primer for standing alone on a stage, telling jokes to an audience, balancing on beams without falling would have been ideal. Just as his former workplace has done since it was erected, Hogan also helped sell Australia as a tourist destination to the world. In one of the 1980s television ads he featured in for the American market, Hogan stood on the arch of the Harbour Bridge – and pretended he was the Statue of Liberty. Ironically, having done so much to attract tourists to Australia, Hogan has said he doesn’t know how anyone can work on the Bridge anymore, with so many gawkers going over the arch on tours.

  The biggest component of the workforce is the painters. The Bridge has about thirty painters, with fifteen support staff.

  ‘Most parts of the arch still have the original paint system applied in the 1930s,’ explains Peter. ‘It’s just been overlaid with layers of paint.’

  Contrary to popular belief, the painters don’t begin at one end of the Bridge and work their way across. ‘We’re leapfrogging all around the Bridge, chasing areas where paint breaks down the quickest.’

  The paint is called Bridge Grey, and while it is a light tone when applied, it darkens with age. Peter says that’s why there are so many shades of grey on the Bridge. The workers still use brushes to apply paint around the six million or so rivets. To prevent corrosion, the primer has zinc in it. That protection is sorely needed.

  The very thing that complements the Bridge’s beauty is unceasingly working to tear it apart. The harbour’s salt water, along with the sea breezes, rain, and sunlight, conspire to gnaw away at the structure.

  ‘The salt air is a major enemy of anything metallic, especially steel,’ explains Peter. ‘Steel doesn’t exist naturally in this environment, it wants to rust, it wants to go back to dust. The job of the paint is to stop it rusting, as a barrier, like a sunscreen, so the structure can live on.’

  Depending on how exposed the paint is, it can last between ten and forty years.

  In the quest to maintain the Bridge, the human team has been joined by robots, doing unpleasant, even unsafe, jobs. One robot, called Croc, inspects the structure by delving deep inside small chambers that are awkward ‘wombat holes’ for humans. Peter likes the idea that the state-of-the-art is being used to maintain what he calls ‘the matriarch of the harbour’.

  The annual budget for maintaining the Bridge is about $20 million. While no one likes paying a toll each time they drive south across the Bridge, most are content to see their money going towards the upkeep of something that not only helps them get from one place to another, but helps define who they are.

  ‘Because the Bridge is so iconic, they [the public] want it well preserved, they don’t want to entertain the prospect that the Bridge has a finite life,’ Peter says. ‘What we’re trying to do is to redefine what was intended in an engineering design sense.’

  Bridges, he explains, are generally designed for a 100-year life. Yet with the Harbour Bridge, he and his team are looking much further into the future.

  ‘What we’re trying to do is to defy the laws of engineering, to keep a bridge alive that wants to rust back into the soil.’

  Although a newspaper published an April Fool’s joke article about government plans to build an exact replica beside the original Bridge, Peter says that could not happen. For one thing, there is a heritage curtilage around the Bridge, to protect its integrity, and, from an engineering sense, it would be near impossible to exactly replicate it. If the Bridge were to be pulled down and replaced, Peter reckons the favoured design would be something that is cheaper to maintain.

  Yet you could never really replace Sydney Harbour Bridge. While its book value is about $1.3 billion, according to Peter, what price do you attach to an icon? Which is why Peter and his team are working towards the Bridge spanning the harbour for another thousand years. Surprised by that figure, I ask him could the Bridge last that long?

  ‘Yes, certainly,’ he replies. ‘That’s the sort of conversation I have with our senior management and our bridge engineering team. How do we keep this Bridge for another thousand years?’

  How to keep the Bridge alive is just one question Peter asks himself as he drives across it each morning and evening. Looking through the steel arcing over him, he asks, just as everyone else does, ‘How did they build this thing?’ As an engineer, he knows the answer. But even so, the Bridge remains, in his eyes, a wondrous thing.


  Paul Hogan may have misgivings about the Bridge being opened up to tour groups, but Peter sees the benefits.

  ‘If we were to be selfish, you could argue they get in our way. But holistically, it’s a good outcome for the Bridge.’

  ‘Having that accessibility to the Bridge feeds its popularity.’

  Even though he climbs the Bridge regularly for work, Peter is but one of many Sydneysiders who has paid to do a tour, along with his wife.

  ‘There’s that curiosity factor for people who live near the Bridge,’ he muses. ‘To see it from the ground or a car window is different to actually planting your flag at the summit, if you like, to conquer the Bridge or to feel the power of the Bridge by standing on top of it. It’s what you’d feel standing on any mountain peak.’

  I’VE NEVER felt the need to climb to summits. ‘Because it’s there’ doesn’t seem like a good enough reason to clamber to the top. A mountain looks awesome from its base and majestic from a distance. And so it has been with Sydney Harbour Bridge for me. I didn’t want to join a bunch of other overall-suited visitors and climb the arch. The view from the Bridge deck has satisfied me, and the structure itself has looked even more extraordinary from a kayak.

  ‘Oh, no,’ counters Peter Mann. ‘You’ve got to go to the summit. You can’t be living in Sydney and not have gone to the top of the Bridge.’

  Peter invites me to join him on an inspection of Sydney Harbour Bridge. But we don’t go directly to the top.

  We catch an elevator in the south-west pylon to the sixth level and step out just below the deck. The Bridge occasionally groans in response to all that traffic roaring and rumbling over our heads. The structure is designed to accommodate the contracting and expanding of the steel, and the weight of vehicles on its deck. But just to be sure, attached to the Bridge under the bus lane is a series of structural health monitors – ‘just like electrodes attached to the body,’ explains Peter.

  As traffic using the Bridge has increased through the years, steel cables have been installed in the hanger posts to share the load on the deck. What’s more, the pylons are not just pretty faces and play a part. They support the section of the deck above their footprint.

  We step out onto a walkway underneath the western edge of the Bridge. Just above us, only a few metres away, trains rush by, their steel wheels pushing down on the wooden sleepers and the rails. And about fifty metres below is the harbour foreshore and the water, its turquoise surface cut by vessels. What looks menacingly large from the cockpit of a kayak looks almost inconsequential when staring down to a boat from this height. Not that I look down very much; I look ahead, watching the walkway narrow into a thin line before it reaches the other side, on the North Shore. A BridgeClimb group appears on the walkway ahead. We shimmy past each other. It seems like an apt symbol for how the relationship between the tourists and the workers has developed. Peter explains that, during the high tourist season, the workers concentrate on the places where the paying customers can’t go, such as the Bridge’s north side.

  The workers also have to negotiate cruise ships’ schedules, moving out of the way the painting gantries that hang under the Bridge. We head down onto a gantry on the northern side, which is loaded with tins of Bridge Grey paint. For the painters, this is hard work, combating the elements. If Mother Nature revolts at the painters’ presence and the wind is blowing hard, then they have to retreat.

  ‘These are all the painting jobs that people don’t see,’ says Peter, as we head back up to the walkway and make our way past a recently coated section.

  ‘It’s nice to see freshly painted steel.’

  But there are always more sections waiting to be cleaned and painted. Along the walkway, there can be seen the bubbles and blemishes of rust, creating new projects for the workers. It is superficial rust, but it creates a deep and constant challenge for those who work on the Bridge. The rust blooms in places that are all but inaccessible, and the workers are rarely presented with a smooth beam or plate of steel to clean and paint. It is usually nubbly with rivets, which, Peter says, have been superb in holding the body together.

  ‘So far we haven’t had to replace any rivets,’ he says.

  ‘The rivet, once its head is formed into the rivet head shape, it cools down and it’s there to stay. With the vibration on the Bridge, and there’s a lot of that, the rivets don’t come loose. So they’re a great part of engineering, a part of our heritage.’

  The nuts and bolts now used on the Bridge do come loose, but, as Peter says, they are a lot safer to create and use than rivets. They used to be cooked on the Bridge and then were tossed, glowing, to the riveter, who often caught them in an empty paint tin or bucket. That sort of practice is no longer acceptable. Like so many of the work practices then.

  Sixteen men were killed during the building project. Eight fell to their death from the Bridge. Standing on the walkway and looking down, it is hard not to think of those men. And looking at the gantries and platforms, I feel admiration for where today’s workers go and what they do to keep the Bridge safe.

  When the Bridge was built, there was no safety net. These days there are nets to protect workers, and to catch any objects that fall off the deck. Peter points out a caught plastic bottle and says it was probably thrown from a passing vehicle above: ‘That way the bottle doesn’t end up in the harbour or hitting someone below.’

  Almost an hour since we stepped foot onto the walkway, we reach the other side and head up to the deck through the north-eastern pylon. We emerge through a hatch, leaving behind the Bridge’s underworld only to find ourselves in the midst of Sydney’s frenzied life. We are on an island between the traffic lanes.

  ‘I reckon we should walk over the arch,’ says Peter. We pass through a couple of security gates and climb steel stairs on the arch. They are on a surprisingly gentle gradient, so it feels merciful at first. But that fades. The view steals my breath, anyway. During the climb, I look at the slices of harbour encased between the steel beams. I look down at the deck, at all the cars dashing across the Bridge, driving over the girders’ shadows on the roadway. And I look up and follow the track of the arch, a sinuous curve, which is actually composed of straight beams of steel, and all those rivets. Then we reach the top.

  I may once have been satisfied with the view from the deck. But no more. The view from up here is incomparable. Which is why, near the summit, the BridgeClimbers are literally queuing and waiting their turn to shuffle to the top and have their photo taken with everything they need to show they have been to Sydney: Bridge, Opera House, and harbour. Then, with the moment recorded, if not fully absorbed, they shuffle down the other arch.

  I’m fortunate to be able to stand at the summit longer, to not only be seduced by the harbour but also to look where it’s headed. The distant sea is the colour of a sapphire, with a south-westerly ruffling its surface. Directly below, the harbour is serene. Just above me, however, is a gentle rustling, as the wind irons out the Australian and New South Wales flags.

  Peter confesses the arch is not where he loves to be the most on the Bridge. He prefers to be on the underside, looking up and within, rather than gazing out. He constantly looks for, and finds, repairs that need doing, but he also feels something more.

  ‘Under there, I feel like I’m a part of the Bridge,’ he says.

  Sydney Harbour Bridge has a humanity, which it seems to project; or perhaps it is what we project onto it. More than steel and stone, Sydney Harbour Bridge has a heart and soul. And more than provide an identity for Sydneysiders, the Bridge is one of us. As Peter says, ‘it represents how we see ourselves’.

  Indeed, the man who is in charge of maintaining the Bridge is studying its humanity. Peter is undertaking a PhD on the sociology of Sydney Harbour Bridge. He is trying to get under the steel skin that he and his team work to preserve.

  ‘It’s awe-inspiring,’ Peter murmurs. ‘I’ve grown to appreciate the Bridge for what it provides to the people. And it’s not just a b
it of steel that enables you to drive across the harbour, it’s an icon. Even to newcomers to Sydney, it has that symbolic representation of being a great place to live.

  ‘Without it, Sydneysiders would feel an emptiness. It’s symbolic of being home in Sydney.’

  IN A thick band of shadow cast by the Bridge, a piece of Australian naval history modestly pokes its head out from the stone seawall along the northern shore. It is part of the bow of the first HMAS Sydney. When the Royal Australian Navy was barely a few years old, Sydney was involved in a fierce battle against the German ship SMS Emden during the First World War. The German raider had been creating havoc with shipping in the Indian Ocean. After Emden raided the Cocos Keeling Islands in November 1914, Sydney was sent to the area and confronted the German ship. The battle lasted less than two hours, but when the badly damaged Emden ran aground on North Keeling Island, the efforts of Sydney’s crew reverberated around the nation and the British Empire. The young Royal Australian Navy had achieved its first victory at sea.

  HMAS Sydney was paid off and then broken up at Cockatoo Island in 1929. Given the enormity of what she achieved in the First World War, this memorial to Sydney seems insufficient. Dwarfed by the great grey bulk of the Bridge, and ignored by the boating traffic scurrying in front it, the only acknowledgement from the water that this innocuous-looking nodule of steel may hold some significance is a rust-streaked sign that states simply, HMAS Sydney. A larger monument to Sydney exists further along the harbour at Bradleys Head, so I look forward to passing it and quelling my disappointment at the lack of interest shown in this memorial.