by Scott Bevan
In the space between the mystery rock carvers and Ken Done, other artists and writers have created some evocative pictures of the harbour around Chinaman’s Beach. In her beautiful memoir about growing up by Middle Harbour, A Kingdom by the Sea, Nancy Phelan recalled how families lived in homes of canvas and sand, dug into the dunes near Chinaman’s Beach. Nancy would pick her way down the steep, bushy slopes to remote harbour beaches then escape the clutches of the land and adult rules by swimming out into ‘The Open’. She also did something I’m not game enough to do, paddling at night. Young Nancy would steer her canoe towards the Heads, ‘where the sleeping ocean gently breathed’. She could just make out shapes in the dark, but mostly she listened and imagined, including visualising being dragged under by a bombora, ‘fear heightening the night’s enchantment’.
Half a century before Ken moved into the area, James R. Jackson lived and painted above Chinaman’s Beach. Jackson was renowned for his harbour paintings, and from the start of the 20th century to the early 1970s, he chronicled on canvas and board the changing waterfront. He was often simply referred to as a painter of Sydney Harbour.
Jackson was apparently quite territorial about the harbour as a subject. He would mark his painting spots, with his trademark being two palette knife swabs of harbour blue on the side of a rock. If he saw another artist’s paint marks on a rock, Jackson would get annoyed. James R. Jackson has long gone, relinquishing ‘his’ territory to Ken Done. Not that Ken views it that way.
As he gazes through the branches of the cossie tree, across the frangipani-coated rocks to the water, Ken muses, ‘If you sat here and try to make it the same as that, it’s not going to work, because it’s so beautiful. You can only use the experience of being here to take you to other things.
‘We never take it for granted. I understand how privileged and lucky we are to be here.’
NOT POSSESSING bream eyes as Ken Done does, yet wanting an insight into what he sees, I pull on a diving mask and snorkel and plunge under the surface outside their home.
The morning light fractures as it hits the surface before sinking and flapping on the sandy bottom. I feel as though I’m floating over sand dunes. I imagine this is what it would be like to have a bird’s, or fish’s, eye view of the planet Tatooine from Star Wars. Clouds of algae suspended in the water stick to my mask. Judy told me the algae were the legacy of ships coming in from distant waters. I swim out of the Star Wars set into deeper water. I float over soft corals and observe the fish gliding around kelp-covered rocky clumps. The plant life sways gently, as if it is conducting a lullaby. I can hear the high-pitched whine of a distant motor churning through the water, so I break the surface and look around – which occurs to me later is probably not the wisest response to hearing a boat engine. I put my head back under and watch a school of garfish pass like a floating cache of swords. My eyes are grabbed by a plant that is a stunning mauve. It strikes me that I’ve seen that colour before, in a Ken Done painting. For a moment, I feel as though I almost have bream eyes. If only I had an artist’s skill.
PADDLING AWAY from the Cabin, I have a mud map drawn by Ken in my lap, and in my memory his descriptions of the little beaches strung like pearls along the shore between his place and The Spit. I’m on a self-guided kayaking tour of Ken Done’s Middle Harbour.
‘Just beyond Chinaman’s Beach, you’ll see a little house with a boatshed underneath.’ Sure enough, I pass an older two-storey house, gleaming white, soaking up the light reflected off the water. ‘It’s one of the few houses around here right at the water,’ Ken had explained. Before reaching the ‘boathouse’, as he had called it, I’m to look for a larger rock with a small beach below it. Ken has called that beach ‘Tony’s Rock’. The name had been daubed on the rock, but ‘Tony’ has faded through the years – except in Ken’s mind: ‘I can only assume Tony was a fisherman.’
The next ‘secret beach’ is a couple of hundred metres further along. Ken calls it the ‘Sea Frame’, because embedded in the sand is a rectangular concrete frame encrusted with sea life, including barnacles. Within the frame is an ever-changing subject.
‘You can never be sure what you’ll find in the frame, but it will always be beautiful,’ Ken had enthused. ‘Sometimes it’s seaweed and a few fish, sometimes crabs; whatever, it’s always wonderful. It’s a picture being made by nature.’
I land on the sand and find the sea frame on Sea Frame. It is marooned on the sand in a low tide, but within the frame, there are still pools of water, which have arranged the sand into a beautiful abstract picture. Glancing up, the view out towards sea is beguiling as well. As Ken had told me, from Sea Frame, ‘you can see South America’.
I paddle further, leaving behind nature’s art gallery, and follow the strip of sand until it bumps into a long flat rock. This is ‘Japanese Tree’. Ken thought the tree that defiantly clung to the rock looked like a bonsai. The tree is now nothing but a dead trunk, but at least it is honoured in Ken’s name for the beach.
‘Then a little bit further on is a great big round rock, and half the rock has been eaten away. I call this “Big Brain Rock”, because it really does look like a big brain,’ Ken had explained. Big Brain Rock hovers over one small beach. I think Ken has been generous calling it a beach. It is a few grains of sand between a few rocks. It looks like a Zen garden at Ryoanji temple in Kyoto. So in my mind, I amend Ken’s tour; neighbouring ‘Japanese Tree’ is ‘Kyoto Temple’.
Writer Nancy Phelan had her own name for these slips of beaches that she would sneak down to as a girl. She called them ‘Treasure Island’ beaches. Nancy had a finely honed skill in seeing somewhere exotic in her local environment she knew so well. She referred to two concrete buildings squatting beside the harbour – one near The Spit, the other directly across the harbour at Clontarf – as Egyptian temples. Paddling past the age-mottled lump of concrete below Parriwi Head, I admire Nancy’s powers of imagination. For it was built for a more down-to-earth purpose; as a valve house for the sewerage system carrying the waste to the outfall pipe at North Head. It has served its purpose, but when it is the first main building you see as you approach The Spit from the water, the concrete lump looks not so much like a temple but a severe monument to how bureaucracy can approve the ugliest looking structures so close to such a beautiful waterway.
In the stretch between the ‘temple’ and The Spit Bridge, the water and shoreline are clogged with boats and services dedicated to them. With yachts and cruisers berthed to the left of me and dozens more tethered to moorings to the right, I feel as though I’m paddling through the eye of a needle.
Kayaking in the boat-flanked channel, I think of Ernest Flint. During the Second World War, Ern was a member of a unit called the US Army Small Ships Section. Ern and his First World War veteran father had signed up to be crew on vessels flying under the American flag, taking supplies to Allied soldiers fighting to Australia’s north, then cruising back down the coast with a cargo of the wounded, the broken and the dead. The ‘small ships’ were actually a motley collection of requisitioned and seized vessels, ranging from old fishing trawlers and ferries to tugs and sailing ships. The US Army Small Ships Section was nicknamed the Ragtag Fleet. With so many vessels requisitioned for the war effort or confiscated, so the Japanese could not use them in the event of an attack, Ern recalled the harbour’s edges looked stripped during the war. Which is why, more than sixty years later, when I was cruising with him on the harbour, Ern found it hard to reconcile how many boats there were.
Almost out of sight among the recreation armada, and housed in what was once part of the yacht club, is the Marine Rescue Middle Harbour headquarters. Every year, the unit’s volunteers help tow and guide dozens of boats out of sticky, embarrassing or dangerous situations.
According to the Deputy Unit Commander, Lyndie Powell, the service comes to the aid of boaties throughout Middle Harbour, around to the Harbour Bridge, and out to sea for up to thirty nautical miles. The jobs range from using the unit’
s launch to tow vessels that have broken down to medical emergencies, through to rescuing occupants off sinking or burning boats.
Lyndie, whose father was a Sydney to Hobart race-winning sailor, grew up on boats, and she sees her involvement as ‘giving back to the community’. She says most of the eighty or so volunteers at the Middle Harbour unit come from a boating background. Since she sees Sydney boat users at their most vulnerable, Lyndie is generous in her assessment of their behaviour.
‘In general, boaties are pretty good,’ she says. ‘Every now and then, you’ll get a young yahoo.
‘But boaties know they can call us when they need us.’
THE PLEASURE-on-the-water industry that is embedded along this shore, and on the western side of the point leading to The Spit, is hardly a new arrival. From the late 1800s, there were boatsheds, refreshment rooms and moorings. Yet crossing the water here was not always a pleasure, but a necessity, and frequently a pain. It still can be painful.
In naming the place where Middle Harbour separated the southern shore from the north, the early European settlers concentrated not on the water but the tongue of sand licking it. They called it The Spit. A correspondent in 1908 noted the ‘streak of sand . . . stretches like a natural bridge nearly across the channel’. But it was no bridge. From the mid-1800s, a hand-operated punt transported people and goods across the couple of hundred metres of water. No sooner was the punt in service than those who used it were calling for a bridge to be built. Like the punt itself, the bridge was slow in coming. The first Spit bridge, a timber structure, opened in 1924. It also had an opening span, to allow through boating. As more people travelled by car to and from the Northern Beaches, a new bridge was built in 1958. However, it also remained close to the water, with a clearance of little more than 6 metres. So, as a concession to those using the harbour, the bridge has an opening span. The traffic on the deck above has continued to grow; about 70,000 motorists and another 60,000 bus commuters trundle across each day. Even so, up to six times during weekdays and more on the weekend, the bridge’s opening span is raised, like an enormous hand indicating ‘Stop!’ For a few minutes, one of the main routes to the Northern Beaches is cut, and the increasingly frenetic life of a Sydney driver is pushed into ‘park’. Those in their vehicles can do little but watch the tops of yachts’ masts and very large cruisers glide gracefully through the opening. It is a strange experience to paddle under the bridge when its span is open. The towering block of tilted bridge is an imposing sight. Then the span is lowered, you hear the monstrous grumble of a thousand engines being ignited, and commuter life returns to what passes for normal.
On the western side of The Spit is Pearl Bay, and on its shores is the training shed of the Mosman Rowing Club. Pearl Bay is only a kilometre or so from the main body of Middle Harbour, which is elongated and runs roughly north to south for about 4 kilometres. So it is terrific for rowing. Early in the morning, I have often seen rowers parting the tendrils of mist, as their shells make incisions on the surface. Unlike on Parramatta River, the rowers on Middle Harbour don’t have to compete with many other boats. Indeed, on some weekdays, it is only them and me on the water. All you can hear is the sound of blades cutting the surface and the coxswain urging more effort, before the harbour quickly mops up any human-made sounds, wipes over the oar-stirred flurry, and restores the serenity that seems wondrous in a city.
Pearl Bay also cradles a rarity on Sydney Harbour: permanent houseboats. There are believed to be only four permanently and officially moored on the harbour, with leases required from the NSW Government’s Roads and Maritime Services. Three of those houseboats are in Pearl Bay; the other is squatting in a bay on the opposite shore, on the other side of The Spit Bridge. With the three houseboats in Pearl Bay, one looks like a renovator’s delight, its neighbour is much larger and fancier, as though some fine home has slid down the slope from Mosman and ended up in the water, and the third is a two-storey Cape Cod design.
Their presence in the bay is charming, even whimsical. They give shape to what many people dream about; living on the water. As an article in the late 1800s posed, ‘Wonder has often been expressed by travellers that the houseboat idea has not been adopted in our city of many bays.’ These days, the answer to that is simple: regulations. While the government may not be issuing any more leases for permanent houseboats in the harbour, in the past they have served as homes in straitened times, such as during the Great Depression. In the early 20th century, a newspaper reported there was even a boarding houseboat on the harbour, moored at McMahons Point and offering ‘all the comforts of a refined house, with the delightful experience thrown in of sleeping on the water, and a further thrill is offered by the fact that variety of scene is splendidly achieved by simply moving the house to a fairer and more charming spot’. In the late 1800s, a group of investors, known as the Sydney Harbour Residential Club Company, was trying to raise the money to buy and fit out a vessel, complete with a harbour pool and concert hall, for about 350 ‘gentlemen only’ to live on board. Like so many ideas involving water and money in this city, the plan doesn’t seem to have taken hold.
In Pearl Bay, I paddle in close to the Cape Cod houseboat. A tradesman is working on the floating cottage. I ask who lives on a houseboat these days, and he mentions that a family had been raised on board.
The air of relaxation floats out of Pearl Bay and along the shoreline of Beauty Point. However, before it was called Beauty Point, someone had responded not to the intoxicating mix of water, sandstone and trees but to the gradient of the slope, by naming it Billy Goat Hill. In the end, beauty won out. A little further on is an eye-catching natural sandstone sculpture, whittled and pocked, rising from the tip of the headland. A reverential soul named it Pulpit Point. The remotely religious theme continues in the next cove, with Quakers Hat Bay.
In 2016, on the cusp of his 95th birthday, I went canoeing in Middle Harbour with a mate, one of Australia’s artistic elder statesmen and Archibald Prize winner Guy Warren. In both his art and life, Guy seeks adventure, which is why, despite my suggesting we hire a boat, we were paddling. Guy is constantly curious and sharply observant. I figure it has not only made him the artist he is, but it has given him the fuel to live such a long and vital life. I remember as we approached Quaker’s Hat Bay, his gaze turned away from the cove, with its mansion-stubbled shore, and he looked up Middle Harbour, taking in the few kilometres of water pushing through the undulating, wriggling landscape of a drowned valley. The headlands still held a lot of bush, and the further you looked, the housing pinned to the steeply sloped peninsulas thinned and disappeared into the trees.
‘Incredible,’ murmured Guy in his voice that is simultaneously authoritative and gentle. ‘That’s how the main harbour would have looked before we all arrived.’
Squiggling off Middle Harbour is Willoughby Bay. The head of the bay is bushy and green, but in the late 1800s, the mudflats were covered with a sewage treatment works. By 1930 the plant was closed, and, since then, where there was waste, there has been the fragrantly named Primrose Park. As we paddled around the bay, Guy recalled playing there in cricket matches between Sydney artists and their Melbourne counterparts. Typically, he said, the Melburnians took the game far more seriously.
Willoughby Bay’s northern side is defined by Folly Point. It is delightfully scruffy, with casuarinas and gums. When my sons were small, we would wander on the point’s scarified and fissured sandstone ledges at low tide and count the periwinkles. Whenever we did that, I would think of the photographer David Moore, who described how growing up near Sydney Harbour provided ‘a world of delight, adventure and privilege’.
One brave and entrepreneurial man took adventure to new heights above this part of the harbour. In 1877, a Melbourne circus performer, Henri L’Estrange, announced he would walk on a tight-rope across Willoughby Bay, reportedly up to 100 metres above the water. L’Estrange proved himself to be a master of juggling the media and public hype. By the time the rope had
been stretched across the bay on a warm Saturday afternoon in April, an estimated 8000 spectators were clustered in the bay on boats, including on specially chartered steamers, and thousands more were perched on every vantage point in the ravine. Apart from a few who had managed to sneak through the bush, all had paid to watch L’Estrange perform his stunt. With a balancing pole in his hands and a red turban on his head, L’Estrange stepped onto the rope ‘with a confidence that was discernible by the spectators below’. Indeed, his every step was being scrutinised and counted to the extent that the Sydney Morning Herald journalist could report that L’Estrange ‘walked fearlessly at the rate of eighty steps to a minute’. He put on quite a show, and for his efforts, Henri L’Estrange was called the Australian Blondin, a reference to the Frenchman who had walked on a tight-rope across Niagara Falls. He also walked away with an estimated £25,000 in takings, a huge amount at the time.
Rounding Folly Point into Long Bay, the land presses in, with homes and the Cammeray Marina along the left shore, and bushland and the Northbridge Golf Club on the right. Long Bay was once longer, as it reached further into the valley. But the bay’s head was progressively filled in and turned into playing fields. Stretching high over the fields, looking like a castle in the sky, is a concrete and sandstone bridge with Tudor-style towers at each end.
When construction of the bridge began in 1889, it was to traverse the bay cradled in a valley, and to bring the ambitions of a real estate developer closer to fruition. The North Sydney Investment and Tramway Company built the suspension bridge to foster land sales at what was called Northbridge. Sandstone blocks were barged along Long Bay and hoisted to construct the castellated towers for housing the suspension cables. When the bridge opened in 1892, many people came to gawk at what was considered a masterpiece of engineering but few crossed to buy land. The company went under, and the builder tried to recoup some of the bridge costs by charging a toll. The government took charge of the bridge in 1912, tram tracks were laid, and the real estate marketing assured this was ‘The Bridge to Health and Wealth at Northbridge’. At last, the land buyers came.
