The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  ‘The water around here is clean, so it’s perfect for labs,’ says Professor Bill Gladstone, a SIMS member, as well as being Head of the School of Life Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney.

  As a marine biologist, Bill’s workplace is the harbour. It serves as his study and laboratory for his research, including into seagrasses and sharks. But the harbour is also his playground. It has been since he was a kid. He has been scuba diving in the harbour for almost half a century.

  ‘To me it’s just as beautiful underwater as it is above water,’ he says, as we look out on Chowder Bay.

  Having been diving since he was thirteen, Bill need only look through his mask to determine the water is cleaner. What’s more, fish numbers are strong, which he says reflects good management.

  ‘The numbers of people [in Sydney] have skyrocketed, and there are lots of people fishing around the harbour, but the fish population appears to be pretty healthy,’ he says.

  ‘There are other huge changes, like whales coming back into the harbour, and the seals. We never saw those things ten years ago. So there’s been a major shift in what people can experience in a pretty short period of time.’

  A key to Bill’s enjoyment underwater is not just the numbers of fish but the different species he sees. About 575 fish species have been recorded in the harbour, which is more than twice the number of those around the entire coast of the United Kingdom. Yet he warns the types of fish appearing in Sydney Harbour are also a concern for the future. The rising temperatures and acidification of the water mean the harbour could be increasingly ‘tropicalised’. Bill says tropical fish arrive in the harbour in the summer months and die off during winter. If the water temperature doesn’t drop, and those species survive, they will become permanent residents. So Finding Nemo won’t be just a movie; there could be all sorts of tropical fish in the harbour, but that is not necessarily a good thing.

  ‘It changes the ecosystem, it may lead to competition with the existing species,’ says Bill.

  One fish Bill is not concerned about seeing when he’s diving is the shark. Not that he sees that many, he adds. ‘The occasional grey nurse, and the Port Jackson shark.’

  Although he explains that the shark whose name is taken from the waterway we’re looking at is not strictly a Port Jackson shark.

  ‘They’re Port Jacksons for only a couple of months of the year, then they’re either Eastern Australian, or Bass Strait or Tasmanian sharks,’ he says.

  For Bill Gladstone, the harbour continues to be a place of research, and of fascination.

  ‘I’ve dived all around the world, and worked all around the world, but the fact we can still enjoy Sydney Harbour, and the way it is in such a beautiful state is amazing.’

  WHERE SCIENCE is now housed, along with the cafés and restaurants, the military once ruled. Some of the buildings around Chowder Bay were the base for the Submarine Mining Corps from the early 1890s to 1922. As part of the defence of the harbour, mines were attached to cables from Chowder Bay to the southern shore. The plan was to detonate the mines if an enemy ship reached this far into the harbour. It was incredibly dangerous work, as the Mining Corps members demonstrated in 1891. They were showing off their skills before a crowd of thousands, when suddenly there was an explosion, killing four servicemen. Changes in technology led to the cables being pulled out of the water, and the Corps was disbanded.

  Playing hide-and-seek among the trees all the way up the hill at Georges Head and on the heights that they dominate are more old military installations and buildings, which were integral to the defence of the outer harbour. Many of the buildings were constructed in the 1870s, beautiful structures crafted from sandstone and blending into the setting. Yet what is remarkable is how these defences were furnished with their firepower. In 1870, a road was hacked through the bush from North Sydney, and a band of 250 soldiers rolled the gun barrels on skids to the emplacements on Georges Head and further along on Middle Head. A newspaper reported at the time how the ‘military road’ was an impressive 66 feet (20.6 metres) wide. That dimension would sound woefully inadequate to anyone who has been trapped in the daily vehicle chokehold of Military Road. If only they had bigger guns in the 1870s. Still, it did take three months to roll the guns to the emplacements, which is only slightly longer than it takes to drive from Mosman to North Sydney in peak times these days.

  Georges Head became the command post in the 1890s for all the defences around Sydney Harbour, and it maintained that role until the 1930s. The army stayed much longer, until the early 21st century, when the land was handed over to the public. In their time at Georges Head, the soldiers didn’t just build on it, they burrowed into it. For a tour of the shafts and tunnels worming under the headland, I meet with a Vietnam veteran and former sergeant in the artillery, Ron Ray. He trained around here in the 1960s, staying in the spartan First World War-era barracks. However, the views from Georges Head and Middle Head were a revelation, and even being here was amazing to young Ron, ‘because, being a Western Suburbs kid, the harbour, especially the North Shore, was toffy stuff’.

  These days Ron is a volunteer guide for the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust, which is based at Georges Heights. The Trust also renovated and leased out the buildings that Ron would have used as a soldier. Ron has a jovial face, a friendly manner, and an authoritative voice that by its very tone commands you to listen. Vocally, at least, he is still a sergeant.

  We meet at the lookout at nearby Georges Head, where a battery of large guns was once embedded. A plaque at the lookout makes it clear that long before the army occupied the site, this was an important meeting place for Aboriginal people. What made it so significant to them, and so strategically vital to the military, is what makes it a joy to visit now: the views. Unlike the soldiers and their guns, with their attention largely trained to the east, I can look back to the south-west. A sailing ship leans around Bradleys Head, and that sight makes me wonder what the Borogegal people would have thought the first time they stood here and saw vessels cutting across their space and into their world.

  We march down the hill and past the sandstone Gunners’ Barracks, built in 1872 and made more gracious in recent years by its restoration and conversion into a restaurant. As we trundle by finely-clothed diners enjoying high tea, Ron mentions that as part of his military training, he used to run down the steep slope to the shore more than 50 metres below then clamber up again, while wearing a full pack – and all before breakfast.

  Beyond the barracks, we enter the tunnels. The sun is locked out, the temperature drops, and the air thickens and clings to me, as we walk through the zig-zagging tunnels, designed to prevent any blast from travelling too far. The 19th century underground construction was still used a century later, as Ron explains. He takes us into a larger, concave-ceilinged room that was once a magazine, but in his day was used by the officers for parties. Further on the tour, he tells another story about his former superiors. He points to a pit where the submarine cables to protect the harbour were coiled and stored, but many years later, it had been fashioned into a fishing pond for the officers.

  The tunnels lead out to a large gun facing the south-east. Ron says when it fired, the gun had a 4-kilometre reach. The battery was another installation constructed in the frenzy after the British left harbour defence to the colonials, as evidenced by the ‘VR 1871’ etched into the stone. The rigidity and discipline of the military past on Georges Heights are softened by the harbour views that wash across the grounds. Perhaps the views always did soften this place a little.

  ‘I like the way the government has given the military sites to the public, and made them accessible,’ Ron says, smiling.

  ‘I would’ve hated to see the harbour built out and it being sold off.’

  WALKING ALONG the peninsula to Lower Georges Heights, I’m passing through Aboriginal land, not just in the traditional sense that it belonged to the Borogegal clan, but in the British understanding of property. For around here was Bu
ngaree’s Farm. Bungaree was a Garigal man, from Broken Bay, about thirty kilometres north of Port Jackson. He was also one of this country’s great sea explorers. In 1799, he accompanied the navigator Matthew Flinders on a voyage to Moreton and Hervey bays along what is now the Queensland coast. When Flinders set off the following year to circumnavigate the continent, he included in his crew Bungaree, who often acted as liaison, if not interpreter, as they encountered Indigenous groups on their marathon voyage.

  Bungaree journeyed further into the ways of the colonists in 1815, when Governor Lachlan Macquarie granted a plot of land on Georges Heights for a group of Aboriginal families to farm. It was the first time land was allocated by the colonial authorities to Aboriginal people in Australia. Macquarie anointed Bungaree the leader of the group, and the Governor presented him with a breastplate inscribed with his name and the words, ‘Chief of the Broken Bay Tribe’. The farming venture failed, despite two attempts. Bungaree returned to the water, joining the expedition of Lieutenant Phillip Parker King in 1817 to chart the coast of north-western Australia. Later in life, as his health declined, he was often seen on the harbour, boarding ships or rowing over to Sydney Cove. As an Irish sailor and actor, James O’Connell, described him, ‘King Bungaree’ was ‘boarding officer, and official welcomer and usher of newcomers’. O’Connell also observed that ‘King Bungaree’ was ‘better entitled to his rank than the English to his land’.

  When he died in 1830, Bungaree was buried across the harbour at Rose Bay. While there’s no trace of his farm on Georges Heights, Bungaree’s memory was illuminated on the headland in 2015, the 200th anniversary of the land allocation. Mosman Art Gallery held an exhibition in his honour, and it included images projected onto a Second World War fuel tank. Yet there is an unofficial memorial to Bungaree on the peninsula. Stand on a high point, gaze between the Heads, and think of him sailing out to sea, away from his people and into the unknown. For his voyages of exploration alone, Bungaree should be better known.

  The practice of former military assets being reinvented and recycled continues further along the peninsula at Lower Georges Heights. Buildings that had been erected in the late 19th century for soldiers in the artillery became part of the 21st Australian Auxiliary Hospital during the First World War, as more and more casualties returned from the Western Front. By mid-1918, this military hospital in the most peaceful of locations was the third largest facility in Australia, treating some of the 152,000 Australian soldiers wounded during the war. Here, men, smashed and shattered, gassed and broken, and ‘taken off strength’, as their personnel files read, were put back together to resemble, as closely as possible, their peacetime selves.

  Where soldiers’ bodies and souls were once treated, the muse is now nurtured. The Army buildings have become an artists’ precinct. Outside an artillery store, built around 1889, a French-Australian artist plays the piano accordion, while her sensual works of tango dancers mingle inside. In the former administration hut, a corrugated iron structure built during the Second World War, is part of the Julian Ashton Art School. History has presented a kind of symmetry by having the art school here. Ashton, one of Australia’s highest profile artists during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, painted and stayed in a camp nearby at Edwards Beach in Balmoral. The artists’ camp attracted other creative types. Performers and writers also stayed under the canvas, including the author of Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson, for one night. At the camp, Ashton immersed himself in harbour life; he slept in an old boat on the sand.

  Just across from the hut housing the Julian Ashton Art School is the studio of painter, sculptor and conservator Stephen Coburn. He is based in a large former workshop, built during the Second World War.

  ‘It used to be where they did up the PT Boats,’ Stephen explains.

  Moping outside the studio is a boat that looks as though it is in need of doing up. A sailing mate of Stephen gave him a 1920s wooden fishing boat. It’s beyond repair, Stephen says, so he’s looking at turning it into a work of art, a sculpture perhaps, and ‘make it look like a beached whale’.

  Stephen has been in this studio since 2005. When he first came here, the transition from military to art was still taking place, with army material stacked and scattered around the building. He recalls one evening walking outside and seeing soldiers, dressed in black and carrying serious weaponry, looking at him. Surprised, Stephen could only utter, ‘Are you on our side?’

  One of the soldiers replied, ‘Yeah, mate, don’t worry, we’re on your side.’

  As the son of a Second World War veteran and one of Australia’s great post-war abstractionists, John Coburn, Stephen has been in a lot of studios, but this is his favourite.

  ‘I’m very lucky to have a big messy art studio here in well-to-do Mosman,’ he says.

  ‘And if you get sick of working, you can go down to the beach.’

  MANY OF the fortifications on the headlands were designed to repel invaders who could have landed on the shore and climbed the slopes. From the water, those defences look unnecessary. Mother Nature had already provided the defences. By the time anyone had clambered up the sandstone cliffs and through the bush, they would have been exhausted.

  The intrepid still pick their way down to the waterline to fish. At the bottom of Georges Head are two fishermen. One standing precariously on the rocks tells me his name is Thomas. He’s travelled from Epping, a north-western suburb, to fish here for the first time. So far, he has caught one leatherjacket.

  He says it’s a bit dangerous, with the occasional wave rolling through, but the view is fantastic. As I talk to Thomas from my kayak, which bobs above a kelp garden swaying with the flow, his outline is cast against the distant North Head in a soft, diffused light. He’s right; it is a fantastic view.

  Along the shore, barely above the waterline are small concrete observation posts and bunkers sprouting from the rocks, or even set behind them. They date from the Second World War. I paddle into Obelisk Bay, and the source of its name is thrusting above the scrub near the shore. The white obelisk has served as a navigational aid for mariners seeking the right course along the harbour. Gripping the escarpment nearby are the remains of one of the harbour’s earliest defences. In 1801, a fortification was designed, in the words of the colony’s Governor Philip Gidley King, to ‘prevent any attack from without’. From the rock on the headland, convicts cut the platform and a curved parapet for a battery. The fortification sat about 15 metres above the harbour, with walls almost a metre thick. Everyone and everything had to be brought in by boat, and the six guns installed at the fort had to be hauled from Obelisk Bay. All the effort and expectation piled onto the battery quickly amounted to nothing but hewn rocks in the bush. The guns fell into disrepair within a few years, and the battery was abandoned. As I stand near the ruins, I look to where the guns pointed, to the Heads and out to sea. Below two men are fishing from the rocks, ignoring the harbour growing ever testier as it tosses broken waves at them.

  Leaving the ragged fringes of the harbour to the fishermen, I head back out onto the water. The sea is pushing a lumpier swell through North and South heads, straight into Middle Head. On a map, the tip of Middle Head looks as though it is trying to head north, to slot into the relative safety of Manly Cove, and escape the ceaseless attention of the sea. But it is a relationship that goes on. The sandstone face of the headland bears the scars and marks of that long, at times tempestuous, relationship. It is a face constantly changing as the water caresses and pounds it, shaves and picks at it. As I paddle around the headland, the waves crash into its feet, exploding in starbursts of spume. Yet the headland remains resolute, even if great chunks of it lie shattered at the water’s edge. It is an awesome sight looking up at Middle Head. And it is more comforting to gaze up at its solidity than out to sea, beyond the limits of the harbour, into the unknown and unknowable.

  But the sea still has its way with me. The waves rebuffed by Middle Head play with the kayak instead. Pulbah Raider
rises, then its prow kowtows like a vassal towards the opening between the Heads, as if honouring the might of the sea. But the sea blithely ignores any respect it is accorded. I watch a yacht that has sailed in through the Heads disappear into a trough, only for me to drop and lose sight of it once more.

  Somewhere beneath me on the harbour bed are two anchors, symbols of how quickly the harbour, when angry, can destroy a ship and the lives of those on board. The anchors are all that remains of Edward Lombe, a three-masted barque that was smashed onto the rocks at Middle Head in a gale in 1834. Twelve people were killed. While at least four other ships had been wrecked in the harbour since European settlement, this was the first time there had been loss of life. The tragedy horrified Sydneysiders. They saw passengers and crew desperately clinging to the shattered stern in the storm, they helped rescue survivors, and they grieved for the dead. Newspapers were filled with dramatic accounts of the event, artists sketched and painted the destruction of the ship, and the authorities responded by improving navigational aids in the harbour. That is the legacy of Edward Lombe; that, and the anchors.

  They may be in shallow water, about ten metres, but the iron anchors hold deep meaning and poignancy for maritime archaeologist Tim Smith, who has dived to them.

  ‘They are like a signature to the event,’ Tim says, explaining how the captain most likely dropped the anchors to try and stop his ship being pushed onto the rocks on that dreadful August night in 1834. Tim has sent me a photo of one of the anchors, and it looks both haunting and beautiful. For this symbol of destruction and death is festooned with life, including soft corals.

  ‘It shows just how vibrant the marine life is in Sydney Harbour,’ Tim says.

  With no desire to tempt the same fate as that of Edward Lombe, I paddle further away from the rocks, and from the exhilarating danger of the waves smashing into them, until I can look back and see the fortifications on top of Middle Head. Their days of power have passed. One concrete bunker at the northern end of the headland has been besmirched with graffiti.