by Scott Bevan
Back in 1848, while preparing yet another review of the harbour’s defences, Lieutenant Colonel Gordon had identified the headland as a very tempting site for a battery, and he compared Middle Head with Gibraltar. During the 1870s, temptation turned into action. On the northern side, Inner Middle Head fort was built, to cover Middle Harbour. On the southern end, the Outer Middle Head defences took shape to protect the entrance to Port Jackson. Gun pits and trenches were hacked out of the solid sandstone, and about twenty support and residential buildings were constructed in the scrub.
The defences were modified in the First World War and during the Second World War. Searchlights were installed at the Inner Middle Head fort, which was used as an observation station, while the guns remained trained between the Heads at the other installation, a few hundred metres away. After the war, the guns and searchlights were removed, but it remained a training ground for troops during the Vietnam conflict.
The machines and minds dedicated to warfare have left Middle Head, and it is now part of Sydney Harbour National Park. The remaining buildings have been occupied by the National Parks and Wildlife Service, and the views to the north, east and south that made this such an important strategic position are now a highlight for any visitor. Reminders of the military still hold some ground. Old stone tunnels and trenches cut through the bush like earthquake cracks, and teetering on the edge are the shells of gun emplacements and observation posts. Walking around the remains of the Outer Middle Head fort, I get a sense of what an immense facility this was. Five minutes’ walk through the bush and I come to what is left of the Inner Middle Head fort and some legacies of the Second World War. The view from an old concrete observation post is revelatory. From there, I’ve watched the sun rise. When a Manly-bound ferry cut across the harbour, the water looked molten. The vessel hardened into a silhouette and its windows were backlit and filled with ingots of gold. Way below, kayaks were cruising like sharks, and power boats were cutting in and out of the Heads.
Long after the guns have gone, the elevation and the outlook invest this place with enormous power. Yet to stand here looking over the harbour and out to sea, you feel humble. On that morning in the observation post, I felt particularly humble. For this headland also gave me perspective. From up here, I could see where I had already kayaked, where I was not going to paddle – out through the Heads – and, as I gazed to my left towards Middle Harbour, just how far I had to go.
8
MIDDLE HARBOUR
STRICTLY SPEAKING, I have not yet entered Middle Harbour. Going by the map, I will have paddled into Middle Harbour when I pass an imaginary line between Grotto Point on the northern shore and Middle Head. As far as I can tell, that boundary mark is still quite a few strokes ahead of me. But if I go by how I feel, having curled around the north-eastern tip of Middle Head, I’m already there.
Even the swell tells me I’m in a different part of the harbour. The water has relaxed and displays a gentler character. It helps rather than hinders me, as it nudges me towards Balmoral.
I can see Balmoral across the water, with its Art Deco Bathers’ Pavilion on the shore, and Awaba Street, rising even more steeply than the heart rates of those who jog up it. From the harbour, the gradient still looks cruel. The road that has become famous for an annual charity run known as the Balmoral Burn sears you even out here on the water.
I paddle past the navy base HMAS Penguin, which is holding onto the steep northern side of Middle Head. A navy workboat is moored in Hunters Bay in front of the base, and a few yellow buoys standing sentry warn all those in vessels to ‘Stop. Naval Waters’. Just beyond the prohibited area are dozens of moored pleasure boats casually bobbing about. From the water you can observe a lot more of HMAS Penguin than you see from the front gates, of course. The different architectural styles and eras form up in ranks down the slope to the water. Those serving on the base would vehemently argue otherwise, and with good reason, but from out in the bay, HMAS Penguin has the look of a recreation camp.
Then again, just about everything feels relaxed in this bay. Even the shore curves leisurely, feeding the illusion of Balmoral being a beachside village rather than an expensive harbourside suburb in a massive city. I paddle onto the beach beside a boatshed protruding on piers out into the bay. On the decking around the shed is a garden of umbrellas shading tables. For these days it’s more than a boatshed. It is the Balmoral Boatshed. It is no longer where boats just get fixed; it is where people get their coffee fix. The Boatshed has transmogrified into a Destination.
I sit on a bench near the end of the jetty, drinking a coffee, peering into the water, where thousands of tiny fish form a fibrillating cloud around the piers. As much as I’d like to sit here all day, I have to keep paddling. I pass the harbour baths, with a few swimmers gently stroking the surface, and the long stretches of sand that are Balmoral Beach and Edwards Beach, punctuated by a knoll called, predictably enough, Rocky Point. On this late morning there are only a few walkers and joggers on the beach. But on hot days, the combination of relatively calm water and superb views attracts big crowds. Special events also bring the people down the slopes to Balmoral. Shakespeare plays are staged on the beach in summer, and, on Australia Day 2016, there was a re-enactment of the arrival of the First Fleet. The flotilla consisted of rowboats with flimsy home-made sails. A number of the boats flew Union Jacks at their stern, but one curiously had the French flag, presumably in honour of La Pérouse. The presence of the tricolour and the arrival of the First Fleet at Balmoral were not the only questionable historical points of the re-enactment. The boats were greeted on the beach by a team of lifesavers.
He may not have landed here, but Arthur Phillip would have seen this section of Middle Harbour even before he led the First Fleet through the Heads. A few days earlier, Phillip and a small crew had rowed up from Botany Bay and into Port Jackson, seeking a better place to found a settlement. The party first tracked around the lower part of Middle Harbour before heading to Manly, then over the next couple of days towards Sydney Cove, where Phillip found what he was looking for.
Within months of the First Fleet arriving, Phillip and his men further explored Middle Harbour. Captain John Hunter tracked and surveyed the harbour to its tidal limit by boat (so I’m roughly following in Hunter’s long-faded wake), and Phillip led an overland expedition, determined to find arable land close to the shore. The terrain not only refused to offer potential for farming, it made the going tough for the expeditioners. As one of the party, naval surgeon John White, observed, ‘The country all around this place was rather high and rocky, and the soil arid, parched and inhospitable.’
First Fleet re-enactments and plays on the beach were hardly the first pieces of outdoor theatre in Balmoral. For more than a year from 1923, a large amphitheatre took shape at the northern end of Edwards Beach. The amphitheatre featured a stage with a white-columned structure, like part of a temple, framing the view across the harbour and between the Heads. Up to 3000 people could sit and stand on the tiered platforms, taking in the view and – if the builders’ plans had to come pass – a spiritual experience. The amphitheatre was built by a Theosophist group called the Order of the Star of the East to greet the expected arrival of one of its leaders. That so-called World Teacher from India did visit Balmoral, but only once. The order disbanded, and the amphitheatre was used for a time to stage more conventional theatre, before it was demolished and replaced by what the Order of Sydney Developers would consider a temple: a block of apartments.
The strip of sand gives way to a rocky outcrop at the northern end of Balmoral, where a couple is practising yoga, performing downward dogs and chair poses in their swimwear. Above them, staring out to sea, are the display windows of mansions along Wyargine Point. The rocks pushing out from the bluff into the water have been made sculptural by the years and the elements. Wherever you turn around here looks like a picture – or at least holds the potential of being made into one. And no one knows that better than the couple
who live a little further along the shoreline, Australia’s best-known painter and a brilliant visual interpreter of Sydney, Ken Done, and his wife Judy, who is a designer.
IN THE eyes of many people, Ken’s art is synonymous with the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. When I lived in Tokyo in the early 1990s, friends told me they were introduced to Sydney through Ken Done images, which were widely reproduced in magazines, including on the cover of one Japanese journal, Hanako, every month. They saw a Done, then they wanted to see the harbour city.
Like Sydney itself on special occasions, Ken’s paintings are ebullient and feel uninhibited. Most of us have forgotten what that feels like. His paintings are as refreshing as an ice block on a summer’s day. For a Ken Done image is not only a bold reflection of the city he lives in and loves, they are an extension of the man. To me, he’s a fantastic colourist and a good friend.
Yet the man who opens eyes with his art says of himself, ‘I have bream eyes’. He makes this declaration just after he has helped me carry the kayak out of the water and across rocks carpeted in frangipani and so beguilingly carved by the harbour that they look as though Rodin had been here. We head through a little wooden gate into the Dones’ front yard, which is actually their backyard, but when you live by the harbour, your perspective turns 180 degrees. Despite having a crook shoulder from a recent skiing accident, Ken is the most lithe 70-something-year-old bloke I know. With his tanned face and luxuriant moustache, his preferred wardrobe of board shorts or loose-fitting pants, and his generally relaxed air, Ken perennially looks as though he’s about to head to the water or has just returned from it. And it is often the case. It can’t always be so, because he’s also a prolific and disciplined painter.
We plonk the kayak down on the lawn under a gnarled old tree holding a swing from one of its branches, and we peer over the stone wall marking the boundary between Ken and Judy’s property and the harbour, looking at life in the water – ‘There’s one! See? A bream.’ That’s when he tells me he has the eyes of a fish. Ken goes on to explain that he often sees bream in the water, when the fishermen on the rocks don’t seem to. ‘But I never tell the fishermen. I’m happy to see them casting in the wrong place.’
In his art, Ken sometimes applies those bream eyes, painting underwater views, guiding you through gossamer light and veils of colour. He takes you into somewhere most people view only from the surface. He invites you to go deeper. The inspiration for those works comes from distant places, in Pacific undersea gardens or on the Great Barrier Reef, but it is also found on the other side of the stone fence. Ken and Judy often snorkel in the cove outside their home, and they swim along it for a hundred metres or so every morning. Having immersed himself in what he paints, Ken heads to his studio. He usually paints in a space high on the hill, overlooking Chinaman’s Beach. Named after those who tended the market gardens that once existed beyond the dunes, Chinaman’s Beach is, in my eyes, Done’s Beach. The beach is as ingrained in his art as its sand is under his toenails. The ribbon of beach, the swimmers and bathers who become dots and daubs of paint, the gentle surf swizzled and stroked in cool colours, the sails inhaling the wind and then exhaled onto canvas in triangular shapes of colour; Chinaman’s Beach may have helped make Ken Done’s name, but he has also made Chinaman’s Beach his own. Everyone seems to know Ken around here. Even navy divers in training out the front have surfaced and yelled out, ‘Nice paintings, Ken!’
Ken Done’s other studio on the property is the Cabin. The structure itself seems modest, as it grows like a bush orchid out of the rock face behind it. The Cabin has been here for many years. As a teenager living in nearby Cremorne, Ken would rock-hop past here, looking at the view and coveting the old shack at the bottom of the steep slope, being embraced and smothered by the Port Jackson figs flanking it. Little did he know that many years later, he and Judy would buy the Cabin, restore it, and the two-storey building would serve as more than a studio.
The Cabin has been one of the artist’s regular subjects, its bare beauty featuring in many of his paintings, whether it be the veranda on the second floor, the view framed by the kitchen door, or the louvre windows shifting the shapes and perspective on the world through the glass. The Cabin itself is a work of art. Before walking in, you are greeted by a frangipani clothesline, or, as Ken and Judy call it, the ‘cossie tree’. Swimming costumes are hung from the frangipani’s branches to dry, but the assemblage looks like a Ken and Judy work of art; colourful, colloquial and quintessentially Australian. The Cabin’s interior is casually dressed. Downstairs, there are terracotta tiles on the floor and a couple of day beds with fishing rods hanging above them. In the middle of the space, separating the kitchen from the living area, is a large lump of a rock. It is no design feature, Ken explains; the rock would have been the original shelter, long before the Cabin took shape around it.
‘Aboriginal people would have slept there for thousands of years, because it was north facing and offered shelter,’ he says.
Up a narrow flight of stairs, like something on a ship, and you’re in a living space that essentially puts you inside the eyes and soul of Ken Done. It certainly gives you the sense of standing in a Ken Done painting. He has created so many works looking out from this space. As Ken says, everything he needs is here: the French doors, the frangipani trees, the rocks, and the turquoise blue of the water, perhaps more paradisiacal in colour than any other part of the harbour I’ve seen. On coffee tables seemingly crafted from driftwood are books about idyllic seaside places around the world. But nothing in those books beats the Cabin. And this is to be my home for the night.
Waiting for the sun to set, Judy, Ken and I have a drink in a stone courtyard guarded by the natural rock face. Massive hibiscus flowers provide bursts of colour with the wash of Middle Harbour just behind. We talk a little about sharks. In all their time living here, more than three decades, the Dones have hardly seen any. Judy mentions she once swam with about a dozen baby sharks just off here. Wasn’t she worried Mum might be around? ‘No, she would have gone on ahead,’ says Judy in that unflappably calm voice of hers. Ken says he was once swimming in the shallows when he felt jaws bite him on the lower leg. He soon realised he had been attacked – by a small dog.
He may inhabit the busiest parts of the harbour with his paints, but Ken and Judy feel a greater connection to the more removed stretches. Judy grew up close to where we are sitting, in North Harbour.
‘It was pristine, and everybody had a boat,’ she remembers. Growing up in a quieter part of the harbour has shaped Judy’s view. The main harbour is almost another world: ‘it’s the city’. She finds the world a little further up from their home, past The Spit, ‘claustrophobic’. So she prefers looking the other way, towards the Heads and the opening to the sea. It is easy to imagine her outlook has also nurtured the way she is. Judy possesses a serene aura, like the harbour itself on the calmest days.
Night arrives and I head into the Cabin. Once the light has gone, I realise that while Ken’s studio up the hill allows him to see further, with its sweeping views, the Cabin is a more sensual space. Its proximity to the water makes it so. Sounds are compressed and amplified. I hear the distant clang of a yacht’s mast, the throaty moaning of the wind and the splashing of waves on the Rodin rocks. The air is laced with salt and the creamy aroma of night-scented jasmine. There are dribbles of lights on the water, from a street lamp near Chinaman’s Beach, and from homes on the opposite shore at Clontarf. A little further to the east along that shore is a block of darkness. The peninsula’s tip has been spared from development; it is part of Sydney Harbour National Park. I fall asleep to the calming sounds of the wind and water; silence is never a sleeping companion on Sydney Harbour.
I wake just before dawn. A paddle boarder glides by out the front. By the time I’m sitting on the stone fence, the water around Wyargine Point is the colour of copper. A couple of kayakers and a cruiser etch the surface. The copper turns to gold, as the sun rises above the headlands
. Ken and Judy come down from their home above to perform their morning ritual, a return walk along Chinaman’s Beach, then a swim. The stroll along the beach is only a few hundred metres, but it is a cleansing one, for the mind, and for the beach.
Ken walks ahead, a solitary figure in colourful boardies, leaving footprints in the sand. I walk with Judy. She sees a small fish flittering on the shoreline. ‘Oh, darling!’ she says and picks it up and puts it back in the surf. Ken has turned back to see what the issue is. The little fish doesn’t look like it’s going to make it. It has turned upside down and is at the mercy of the wave movement. ‘That’s nature,’ says Ken gently.
Walking along, Ken and Judy say the harbour is much cleaner. They regularly see dolphins, and a southern right whale was recently here for a few days. The number of moorings off the beach is also slowly reducing. It would be amazing to look out on a slice of Sydney Harbour and see no boats moored. We reach the end of the beach, which we share with only one other, a man jogging. Ken says he’s surprised how few use the beach of a morning. He shows me a ‘beautiful enclosed rock pool’, which he peers into like a little kid. I guess that’s the key to being an artist. They always peer like a little kid into things.
As we walk back, Ken and Judy begin the second part of their ritual, picking up rubbish dumped by the waves or beachgoers. By the end of the beach, we’ve picked up enough to fill a plastic bag, which was also collected. ‘That’s the amount we normally get each morning,’ Ken notes.
The swim is next. To reach the harbour entry point, we have to scramble across rocks and thin strips of lawn on neighbouring properties. Along the way, we stop at a dripping sandstone overhang, and Ken pulls back the foliage to reveal inscriptions in the rock. They are initials, a sketch of a pennant and stick figures in a boat, and the date, ‘30 December 1885’. Nearby is a more elaborate, and later, carving, the Australian coat of arms. Ken is delighted by these works, not only because he loves mark-making of any kind, but they are reminders in stone of those who have been here before him.
