The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  Adrian is in his mid-30s and is a chef. Every chance he gets, he heads out onto the water to fish. Not to catch fish to cook, as you’d expect, but to relax. No matter what he catches, he releases it.

  Adrian is keen, sort of, to show me where he fishes on the upper stretches of Middle Harbour. Unlike most fishermen, Adrian tells me, he doesn’t keep secrets. But he’d hate for these spots to be fished out. This area is so important for the future of local fish stocks, he asserts.

  ‘If we keep taking fish from up here, how can we expect there to be any fish up here – or down there,’ Adrian says, pointing in the direction of the main part of the harbour.

  As we begin paddling upstream, Adrian tells me he caught a bream 40 centimetres long, and he’ll show me where, before he quickly adds, ‘But you can’t write in your book exactly where I caught it.’ Now he sounds like a fisherman. Adrian has been coming up this part of Middle Harbour in a kayak since 2010. His craft is a plastic sit-on kayak, which he’s equipped with an electronic fish finder and holders for his fishing rod. Yet he’s been fishing around here since he was a kid. He and his father would follow bush tracks down to the water’s edge.

  A stream, Gordon Creek, pushes in from the left, joining the main arm, which continues to shrink as the bush squeezes tighter.

  ‘There’s no sound of Sydney up here,’ Adrian says. ‘I like no noise.’ I ask him did he hear the trumpeter before. Yes, Adrian replies. It annoyed him. ‘But I figured you arranged that to announce your arrival.’

  Beyond Gordon Creek somewhere (I hope that’s vague enough, Adrian), he casts his line in about 5 metres of water. This is where he caught that large bream. He points to the muddy shore and indicates the crabs scuttling about. Meantime, his artificial crab lure rests undisturbed in the clean olive-green water.

  ‘Oh, there’s a tap now,’ he says. ‘Sometimes the fish just takes the lure and runs.’ But not this time. After casting a few times and drifting, the line goes lank in the water, and he reels it in. He suggests we head upstream.

  The main arm splinters into Middle Harbour Creek and Carroll Creek. We follow Middle Harbour Creek, and a little way upstream, between a sandstone escarpment and a sandbank, Adrian casts his line again. He floats and waits. And waits. And casts again. But still nothing. I tell him I must be putting the fish off. But we can see them. He points out a school of whiting swimming by, and luderick. But none is hungry for a plastic crab, it would seem. He also points out clouds of baby fish darting through the water. The sight of fish, just eluding him, impels him to paddle further up the creek, deeper into the landscape. As the banks close in, constricting the water, compressing any sounds and restricting our perspective, the feeling of remoteness grows.

  ‘It’s the most secluded part of the harbour, straight out,’ Adrian says. ‘You go up Lane Cove River and you might get 100 metres of quiet, if that. Not like this; here the quiet goes on for kilometres.’

  The water becomes ever more shallow, the sandy bottom tickling the kayak’s hull. The water becomes more brackish. I taste it; it’s still salty but not as tangy as downstream. We’re approaching the harbour’s end.

  ‘You know, I’ve seen baby prawns around here. A cloud of white in the water,’ says Adrian.

  We paddle cautiously up the last part of the creek, as we hear the sound of running water picking its way through rocks. We round a bend and 100 metres further on, a low wall of rocks, a natural weir, marks the tidal limit, the end of the harbour – and the end of our paddling.

  Adrian explains the rocks are known as Governor Phillip’s steps. He’s also fished in the fresh water up there and has caught Australian bass. For now, he’s seeking fish in the salt water. He paddles back down the creek, keen to get in some solitary fishing.

  I leave the kayak and hop along the rocks to the natural weir. I taste the water rushing through. It is fresh. Well, as fresh as water running out of a great suburban clump is likely to taste. I imagine Arthur Phillip and his party also tasting the water in this creek on the night of 16 April 1788, when they camped around here during their trek for land to farm. In his journal, one of the exploration party members, John White, described how in this steep valley, they experienced ‘the most desert, wild, and solitary seclusion that the imagination can form any idea of’. Almost 230 years on, it still feels secluded here, beautifully so. It is hard to believe this spindly little course picking its way through the landscape broadens and deepens into the drowned river valley that is Middle Harbour.

  Paddling downstream, near the junction of the two creeks, I come across Adrian fishing. Still nothing. I leave him to it, so he – and I – can enjoy the solitariness. I’ve been paddling for only about ten minutes when I receive a text. It’s from Adrian. He’s sent a photo of himself holding a little bream. A couple of hours later, my phone beeps again. It’s a photo of Adrian with a bream that must be 30 centimetres long.

  The banks puff out, shedding any reminder that it was a creek. I pass under Roseville Bridge, with the helter skelter of traffic on its deck. Sometimes, when paddling out of the bush, I find there’s a reassurance in being greeted by the sounds of time-poor contemporary life. Yet here, I find it an annoyance. I feel like a character out of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, wanting to turn around and paddle up the creek, away from civilisation. But I figure my return would only curse Adrian’s fishing. I keep paddling back down the main arm, towards the turn into Bantry Bay.

  IF THE upper reaches of Middle Harbour Creek reminded me of Heart of Darkness, Bantry Bay is the antidote. For years, this gangly strip of harbour wriggling its way into Garigal National Park has been my escape from a heart of darkness, or a spleen of bile. It is where I have paddled to for years. For me, Bantry Bay is filled not with salt water but a magic potion that clears the head and refreshes the soul. Every time I paddle into it, I find it hard to reconcile that the bay is less than 10 kilometres from the CBD. This bay has allowed me to forget I am in a city. And it has reminded me to be grateful that I am in this city.

  For one of the most serenity-inducing places on Sydney Harbour, it has a volatile past. From the 1890s, the New South Wales Department of Explosives used the shores of the bay as a storage base. For more than half a century, barges packed with the dangerous cargo would be towed out of Bantry Bay and down the harbour. Small ships would also head up to the bay to load explosives, with the last vessel making that voyage in the early 1960s. The storage facility shut in 1970, as housing crept closer.

  The magazines remain along the western shore. They are stolid brick structures with thick iron doors and an unwelcoming presence. But just to make sure, one of the buildings wears a painted sign that is fading, but it still barks its message clearly: NO ADMITTANCE ON LAND. However, I have seen navy personnel bivouacking in the buildings, throwing open the iron doors at sunrise to let in the light and air, and the occasional fisherman standing on the prohibited shore, ignoring all rules and threats of fines in the hope of a tight line.

  Strung along the middle of the bay is a series of public moorings. On weekdays, especially in winter, the buoys bob unused, but on weekends and in summer the bay hosts an archipelago of more than a dozen yachts and cruisers. The poet John Donne may have declared that no man is an island, but when in a boat, a man can pretend he is on an island, floating free of everyone and everything. I find it intriguing when I paddle through the Bantry Bay archipelago that people on their islands pretend I’m not there, that no other boats are there, that nothing and no one is there, except them. That is, until the aroma of coffee wafts across the bay from what looks like a floating can of Vittoria. Then no man is an island; rather, they are all caffeine lovers.

  The gilded vision of the big coffee can gliding towards them is skippered by Garry White. Or, as he is better known among boaties in Middle Harbour, Garry the Coffee Boat Man. Each weekend, on public holidays, and throughout January when the harbour is heaving with pleasure craft, Garry putters across the water in his boat, waiting to be waved over by
a mariner in coffee distress. Which is frequent.

  I wait at the entrance to Bantry Bay, waiting for the flash of gold on the water. I hear the phlegmatic engine first, pushing along the coffee boat at a gentle pace. I give a wave, and over Garry chugs. I grip one of the boat’s fenders, and Garry greets me with a smile framed by a beard. Not a hipster barista beard, but one that is salted and nautical.

  I order a flat white. In his cabin/café, Garry swivels from the wheel around to his coffee machine. While he makes the coffee, Garry tells me the story of his business.

  His boat, a former US Army craft, didn’t always look this way. It was once painted blue. The golden livery of his boat and the coffee equipment he uses on board are courtesy of one of those boaties who beckoned to him. For more than two years Garry had been trying without success to speak with Vittoria about the coffee company working with him. After all, that was the brand he was serving. One morning in Sugarloaf Bay, Garry saw someone waving from a large cruiser. The gentleman on board the boat asked for a couple of espressos.

  ‘I didn’t know who he was, but I had my suspicions,’ recalls Garry.

  After the gentleman tasted the coffee, he told Garry he was the boss of Vittoria. Within two weeks, Garry’s boat was spray-painted, the cabin was fitted, and inside it was a new coffee machine and grinder.

  Just as his boat underwent change, so did Garry to become the Coffee Boat Man. For many years, he was an agricultural economist, and he worked in banking and stockbroking. Then, in 2000, he stepped off the career ladder and onto the water.

  ‘How many people in corporate life dream of the corner office with harbour views?’ he says, as he looks around.

  Garry loves the freedom of his floating café. With a boat, he says, he has ‘no worries about landlords’, although café owners usually don’t have to worry about physically going under. Garry has had to deal with his boat sinking, but he was quickly back on the water and in business.

  In reply to being asked how many cups of coffee he makes each day on the harbour, Garry says he doesn’t measure that way, but by how much coffee he goes through. On a very good day, he uses up to 3 kilograms. He estimates that can be up to 200 cups of coffee.

  For all the coffee he has served, for all the nautical miles he has covered, Garry White still gets a buzz far better than that provided by caffeine each time he enters Bantry Bay.

  ‘It’s just unreal. It has its own feeling. It’s a special place.’

  And with that, I drain my cup, let go of the fender, and watch Garry chug towards the archipelago to rescue those desperate souls drowning in their desire for a morning coffee.

  TO EXPERIENCE the magic of Bantry Bay, you have to go beyond the moored boats and the magazines, past the last vestiges of civilisation, over the shallow sandy bottom, and paddle into the mangroves. Then just sit there.

  After visiting the colony in 1885, English historian James Froude wrote rhapsodically about Sydney Harbour, noting, ‘There is little tide, and therefore no unsightly mud-banks are uncovered at low water.’ He must not have reached the northern end of Middle Harbour. Mud banks suck on the water, helping create a primordial atmosphere. If you paddle onto them, the banks are a bit clingy, but they are hardly ‘unsightly’. Yet it is the forest of mangroves rising out of the water that embraces your perspective. Their branches twist and bend like the arms of a Balinese dancer, especially when a breeze nudges the mangroves. The branches are reflected in the water, and the postulating, patterned muddy bottom, garlanded with fallen leaves, reaches up to hold the reflected branches, creating the most beautiful abstract pictures of nature. I have often sat amid those mangroves, just peering into the water.

  Since the shoreline is part of Garigal National Park, it is possible to look through the stands of mangroves and, from certain angles, see no evidence of human interference. Of course, if you really want to look for it, there is always the presence of the city and the detritus of ignorance lolling in the shallows, with bits of rubbish that have been washed down the creeks or thrown into the harbour. But when I’m among the mangroves, I want to pretend our rubbish can’t reach this bay.

  LEAVING BANTRY Bay is always hard, but that feeling is often softened by a white-bellied sea eagle perched in a tree on the eastern shore. The mere sight of the bird is the warmest farewell I can wish for.

  Sydney suddenly creeps up through the bush on the eastern slopes. From the water, the houses look as though they are co-existing with the trees for a bit, but the further south I paddle, the more the houses take over, occupying every crag and cranny.

  Just before I paddle around a point into Powder Hulk Bay, I pass a harbour pool, armoured with metal mesh to keep out the sharks that apparently cruise into Middle Harbour. I’ve been told many times that bull sharks head to Bantry Bay to feed and breed. Yet in the hundreds of times I’ve paddled to the bay, I’ve never seen a shark. Still, when it comes to sharks, people have long memories. The last fatal shark attack in Middle Harbour, or in any part of the harbour, was in 1963, when a well-known actor, Marcia Hathaway, was mauled in shallow water in Sugarloaf Bay.

  Her fiancé, who wrestled the shark in a bid to save Hathaway, later told the media how he straddled its thick body: ‘My legs were wide apart and its body touched both of them . . . The water was stained with blood and I never thought I would get her away from it.’ The 32-year-old died from her wounds.

  The tragic story of the actress is still often the reference point for well-meaning people when they are warning me to be careful on Middle Harbour. And it is why so many will only enter the harbour behind the netting and mesh, for they take their long memories swimming with them.

  Powder Hulk Bay remains branded by what it once was. Before the magazines were built at Bantry Bay, the explosives needed to blast and build a colony were stored in old sailing ships moored in the bay. Colonising the slopes around the bay are some big houses and intriguing architecture. One property, a wooden boathouse with a shingle roof and shooji-like doors, looks like a Japanese shrine, as though it has slipped out of a Hokusai print. For a few weeks in spring, the boathouse and its pavilion are dressed in the riotous purple blooms of jacarandas. I almost expect to see samurai sitting in the pavilion, composing haiku in praise of the jacarandas and the harbour. Then again, the words on a stone plaque set into the rock below a historic harbourside mansion, Cabeethon, a few doors – or jetties – further along says it more succinctly than even haiku can: ‘Fun by the Water’.

  As I paddle around Seaforth bluff back towards The Spit Bridge, mansions loom over me. The grand assemblages of concrete and glass lean out from the bluff, craning for a view. Downstream from the bridge is an inlet called, according to Ken Done’s mud map, Stingray Bay. ‘Well, that’s what I call it,’ he told me, ‘because you see a lot of stingrays in there.’

  Further on is the Clontarf shoreline. It has a languid beach that slowly slides into the harbour, allowing pet owners to walk their dogs in the shallows, a marina, and baths that wear an apron of old iron bars. In the baths, a crowd of children is watched over by their parents. The pine trees along the shore enhance the restful atmosphere. Yet this was not always seen as a gentle family place. The Bulletin wagged its finger at the young people disgorged by the steamer load at the privately owned Clontarf picnic grounds on Boxing Day, 1880. Wherever he looked, the reporter saw ‘satyrs and bacchantes’ drinking and dancing. He fulminated, ‘At Clontarf it was not an excursion – it was an orgy’. The picnic grounds owner saw the scene differently. He successfully sued the journal.

  Just a few years earlier, Clontarf gained infamy when it was the scene of an attempted assassination of a royal. Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s son, was on a goodwill tour of the Empire, when he attended a picnic on Clontarf’s shores in March, 1868. As the Duke of Edinburgh walked across the lawns, he was shot in the back by a man with a revolver. The would-be assassin, an Irishman named Henry James O’Farrell, was seized. The crowd, according to the newspapers, was yelling for the
assailant to be lynched, people fainted, and others were hysterical. The wounded Duke was carried to a steamer and brought back to Government House. He recovered quickly and sailed out of the Heads in early April, leaving behind a colony mortified by the event and deeply divided along sectarian fault lines. It was a dangerous time to be Irish and Catholic in Sydney. As for the Duke’s attacker, the crowd calling for O’Farrell to be strung up received delayed gratification. He was found guilty of attempted murder and hanged within weeks of the crime. To recognise the Duke’s recovery, people began a public subscription, raising money for the building of the Prince Alfred Hospital in Camperdown.

  From Clontarf, I follow Ken Done’s map of Middle Harbour. The map is also a guide to his and Judy’s past, for they would spend most Sundays at the secluded beaches on the Clontarf side, barbecuing lunch on an old piece of tin, playing cricket on the sand, and swimming out into the clear green water. I reach what Ken has marked as Buddha Beach, ‘because you can find a carved Buddha there, and just near it is a Christian symbol of a boat and a cross carved into the rock’.

  As I paddle towards Grotto Point, a survey vessel is drawing invisible grids on the surface. It is towing a device emitting a drumming sound. According to a crewman who kindly answers my shouted question, they are surveying for rocks on the bottom. The rock I’m heading for is plainly marked, with a small lighthouse on the tip of Grotto Point. Below the lighthouse, the water swirls from turquoise to creamy froth as it smashes into the rocks. The lighthouse is unmoved by the commotion at its feet. I look up as I paddle just out of reach of the turbulence. Beyond the lighthouse, I’m out of Middle Harbour.