The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  Ron was here in the 1960s, before he went to Vietnam. He lived in the barracks, and he marched in his crisply pressed uniform each morning on the parade ground. It may be decades since he had to march, but to this day, Ron walks around the parade ground, not across it, because ‘I regard it as a sacred spot’. Live-fire drills were held in the scrub, and the old tunnels were used for interrogation training. The strict discipline of the place meant Ron gave little thought to his surroundings most of the time.

  ‘Until you were out on your own, you couldn’t appreciate what was here,’ he recalls.

  Half a century on, Ron shares his appreciation. We leave the visitor centre and stroll to an open-air monument to the defence of Sydney. There are constructed tributes around the grounds, including walls of wood salvaged from old wharves. But the greatest monument to the defence of Sydney is the view of the harbour itself, laid out like an exquisite quilt before us, from the Heads all the way down to the CBD.

  From vantage points such as this one, Ron used to watch Australian and US Navy ships coming and going during the Vietnam War.

  ‘You could see the city skyline even in those days,’ he says, explaining that the trees would be bulldozed and kept at knee-height for clear sight lines. ‘So you knew you were in Sydney, but not in the metropolis.’

  At night, he could see the Macquarie Lighthouse over on South Head winking at the dark sea. But there was also something creepy about being on guard duty at night, because ‘this is the most haunted place in Sydney’. On the track near the Quarantine Station’s Third Cemetery, the soldiers reported hearing the clip-clop of a horse and the light of a candle swinging in the dark. They were convinced it was the ghost of a draught horse used to pull the cart carrying corpses to the cemetery.

  Ron prepares to take us into the darkness, where ghosts may still hover. Heavy rain is bombarding us, as we head down a camouflage-painted ramp to the skeleton of one gun emplacement. The dish of cancer-eaten concrete and rusting bolts looks naked without a gun. Nearby, there is one disembodied barrel on display, but it was brought here from Middle Head to give people a sense of just how big the guns were.

  We venture almost 10 metres underground, out of the rain and into the tunnels. I can still hear water flowing. Rivulets are running in small channels flanking the tunnels. We head into a shell store room, where the powder and shells were kept separately so that if there was an explosion, the hope was everything wouldn’t blow up. But Ron says, matter-of-factly, in that stentorian sergeant’s voice of his, it would have all blown. We continue to descend into the earth along a straight tunnel, which, in the artificial light, looks interminable. We’re accompanied by the incessant sound of running water. Up to eight thousand litres of water seep through the sandstone into the tunnels every day. Ron says the water has been filtered by the rock so is perfect to drink. It was used for domestic purposes in the fortress complex, and, he adds with a smile of satisfaction, it goes very well in whisky. Such was the quality, and reputation, of this water that it was scooped into containers and taken to Vietnam, so that soldiers could have a drop or two of North Head water in their whisky.

  ‘It’s just one of those traditions,’ he shrugs.

  At the end of the passage is an alcove that was a casualty station. As we look back up the tunnel until the yellow light sours and darkens, Ron tells a story about a young electrician who died while working down here. His ghost is said to wander the tunnels. Ron says once the keys were ripped from his hands and tossed. He’s convinced the ghost was playing tricks on him. As if to punctuate his story, Ron turns off the lights when we arrive in the cathedral-like space that was the engine room. The blackness is so complete, I can’t see my hand in front of my nose. But I can almost see a ghost.

  We pass a couple of blast doors and climb the steps back to the surface and into the rain. I ask Ron if he wishes this was still a military base, not a museum. He shakes his head.

  ‘Time moves on, nothing stays the same,’ he says. ‘What’s more, the facilities had had their day.’

  But what is timeless is the view. Ron stands with his hands on his hips, peers at the harbour, and, with an air of satisfaction – as though he has just sipped a whisky with a dash of North Head water in it – he murmurs, ‘It’s still the gem of Sydney’.

  NORTH HEAD is referred to as a tied island. When you look at a map, you can see that it is flimsily tethered to the rest of the world by that expensive strip of real estate known as Manly. Yet when you walk to the edges of the headland, it still feels very much like an island, as though it is teetering on the edge of limitlessness.

  The headland is stitched with old stone walls that were built under work schemes during the Great Depression. They divided public areas from those that had been scythed off for defence purposes, or for the Catholic Church. The walls cut through the scrub before they stop abruptly at the great cliffs along the eastern face that tumble to the sea. Any pretensions to order that the walls were meant to impose are stripped by the cliffs and the extraordinary sight of the sea, unconstrained and uncontrollable.

  I walk a little further south through the wind-bashed and stunted bushland, until I reach Fairfax Lookout, right above where the harbour surrenders to the sea. Two kilometres or so across the water is South Head, looking like a knot of strength and resistance against the sea’s ceaseless surge. I watch a group in dragon boats round South Head and paddle at the footing of the great wall of the Australian continent. Whale-watching cruises are heading out to sea. The voices of the tour guides bounce across the water and have splintered into syllables by the time they ricochet off the cliff and reach me. Those pieces of words are quickly washed away by the shushing of the sea. I look over the edge, and below the world is foamy, brittle and breathtakingly beautiful. I look up just in time to see a white-bellied sea eagle drift past at my eye level before it swoops.

  I look once more at the band of water binding the headlands, pulling them close. And yet somehow that stretch of water makes the southern shore seem like another country, an ocean apart. Perhaps it only seems that way when you’re about to paddle it.

  10

  BETWEEN THE HEADS

  BUMP!

  That’s all it takes to get me jumping out of my skin, if not out of the kayak. After all, that would not be a wise move, as I’m halfway across the harbour’s entrance, paddling towards South Head, about a kilometre ahead. Below me, the water plunges about 30 metres to the floor, and, off to my left, it grows into the sea, chasing the earth’s curve to South America.

  One bump, and I’m looking nervously at the water all around me, while my thoughts scurry back to shore. I remember Jeff, who I met back in North Harbour, looking at me quizzically when I told him where I planned to paddle.

  ‘Why would you want to go across there in a little kayak?’ he asked, before helpfully adding that sharks the size of small buses cruised in and out of the harbour’s entrance. ‘I wouldn’t do it.’ I shrugged and laughed. I’m not laughing now.

  And it had all been going so beautifully. I had set off at dawn, passing Quarantine Beach, its sand cool blue as it waited to be gilded by the sun. I thought of the Little Penguins waddling down the beach, beating the light to the water. I nudged around the western edge of Quarantine Head, riding the gentle rise and fall of the swell. The great weathered face of North Head revealed more and more of itself. Initially, backlit by the rising sun, the inner and outer headlands were silhouettes, as if they had been lifted from a Chinese ink painting. What the land lacked in colour, the sea more than compensated for. It was as if I were kayaking on burnished metal. But then the colours of the world found their balance, as the sun climbed. While I could see one of the long stone walls cutting down North Head like a scar, and I knew the remains of hundreds of souls lay in the earth up there in the Quarantine Station’s Third Cemetery, from out here, the landmark looked unpeopled and remote. It looked as wondrously unconquerable and as wilfully inscrutable as the sea it was rebuffing.

 
In the harbour’s entrance, no other vessel was about. In the distance, pushing along the harbour and preparing to turn left towards Manly, was a ferry. Sometimes in storms, the passengers are taken on a thrill, or terror, ride on the passage across the Heads, as the sea brutally punches and throws the ferries about. In one savage blow in 1972, the ferries were contending with waves about 12 metres high. Yet on this morning, the sea was in a placid mood. I could hear it gurgling as Pulbah Raider rubbed across its surface. The only other sound was the faintest thrum of the ferry’s engines, creating their own bass notes to bounce across the water.

  As benign as the sea appeared, I would not be seduced into paddling any further to the east. The last time I had headed out there in a small vessel, I was breaking a promise I had made to myself. That was back in 2003, to farewell the sailor and adventurer David Lewis on his final voyage.

  I had known of David since I was a kid, when I had read his accounts of sailing to Antarctica. David had been the first person to sail solo to Antarctica in his sloop Ice Bird in 1972 and 1973. By then, David had already notched up many adventures in his life, sailing all over the globe, particularly around his beloved Pacific Ocean, learning traditional methods of navigation from elders on the islands. Yet he wanted to go further, to the bottom of the world and way beyond the accepted limits of human endurance. So David had sailed through Sydney Heads and into history. More than once, he was almost history, as the yacht was capsized in monstrous seas and screaming gales. David reached Antarctica, his little boat limping into the US base of Palmer. Having read about his escapades, I wanted to be like David Lewis and find adventure. I never really did. But then adventure found me. In 2001, I was told David was moored a few bays around from our Lake Macquarie home, restoring his 28-foot sailboat, Leander.

  I tracked David down and introduced myself. From the moment I shook his hand, I was in the grip of adventure. David Lewis understood the sea like the back of his hand. Literally. For on his left hand was a tattoo he had received in the Caroline Islands. The design was of dolphins, a shark bite, symbolising danger, and birds, representing guides to land. That tattoo was a constant reminder for David of not only where he had been, but also what he was. For the design meant ‘initiated navigator’. In one sense, David had allowed the winds and his imagination to carry him through life, but he always knew where he was headed.

  When I met him, the then 84-year-old was preparing Leander to sail one last time up Australia’s east coast, through a string of islands, and back to his homeland, New Zealand. He invited me to sail with him and two other blokes on the first leg of the voyage, to the Gold Coast. I had never sailed offshore before, and here I was being invited to join the crew for a legend of the seas. I would be as good as an adventurer! I couldn’t have wished for more. But as we learn, you should be careful what you wish for.

  No sooner had we sailed out of Lake Macquarie than a bunch of dark clouds gathered in the south, just waiting to beat us up. The storm was ferocious, with 6-metre waves pummelling little Leander, along with any romantic notions I had of a pleasant sail north. I couldn’t stop vomiting, partly from seasickness, mostly from fear. I recall lifting my head from the bucket only to see a mountainous wave looming over us, the wind screaming like a banshee, and there was David, with his hand on the tiller, squinting at the blades of rain cutting into his eyes, and all the while smiling. In my mind, that image will always be the portrait of an adventurer.

  ‘That was a terrible first night of sailing for you,’ David said to me the next day. ‘It was exhilarating sailing, but one can take only so much exhilaration.’

  The greatest joy for me on that six-day run along the coast was sitting with David, listening to him talk in that soft, almost timid, voice of his about some of his voyages and what he had learnt about himself. One key lesson he had absorbed was that, like the sea, there was no end to knowledge. He was determined to keep sailing over the horizon in order to keep learning until his final breath. I also learnt a lot on that voyage. What I learnt most of all is what it took to be an adventurer, and that I would never be one. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t look for adventure and keep stretching myself. After all, the world is not flat but curved; the line on the horizon is only an illusion, so there really is no limit.

  As David said to me, ‘I know some people think adventure doesn’t hold much practical value. But it has an intrinsic value, a spiritual value, a value in personal terms of toning a person up, keeping them fully alive and getting the cobwebs out. Otherwise you risk becoming lethargic.’

  However, after that interminably terrifying night in the storm, I vowed I would never go to sea in a small boat again. No one would ever drag me out there again. But David did.

  He died in late 2002, and, in early 2003, there was to be a ceremony off Sydney Heads to scatter his ashes on the sea. I accepted a place on a yacht that was heading out for the ceremony.

  I remember looking at the horizon, taking in the sea and the sky, and, as thanks for all he had taught me and was still teaching me, I smiled and said, ‘You bugger. You got me out here again.’

  Desperation, not adventure, impelled some to venture beyond the Heads. The First Fleet marine Watkin Tench was so hungry for news of home after a few years in the colony that he once rowed about 10 kilometres out to sea to meet an approaching ship. Convicts also took to boats, trying to escape. The first recorded attempt was in 1790 when five men set sail in a small, frail craft for Tahiti. They were never heard of again. The following year, there was a celebrated escape, when Mary and William Bryant, along with her daughter and their baby son, stole away with a crew of convicts on a perilous voyage out of the Heads and north to Timor. They had stolen Governor Phillip’s cutter for the 5000-kilometre voyage, which took sixty-nine days. In Timor, they were held by the Dutch authorities and handed over to the British. While they had survived the most extraordinary open-boat journey, Mary Bryant lost her husband and children on the voyage to England.

  With the daring of the Bryants, and possibly with even less equipment, a lone sailor named Fred Rebell set off on a similarly crazy/brave voyage more than a century later. He wanted to emigrate to the United States of America, but when he was denied a visa, Rebell decided to go anyway, in an 18-foot sailing boat. He sailed out of the Heads in December 1931 relying on a homemade sextant, an old navigation manual, some hand-drawn maps, a couple of watches for chronometers, six months’ supply of dried food, and a whole lot of faith. When his watches gave up, Rebell relied on prayers and dreams to find his way to America. They must have been powerful dreams and prayers, because he reached California in January 1933. Rebell was the first person to sail alone across the Pacific from west to east, a feat that still has mariners, especially those who sail in 18-footers on the harbour, talking about him in wide-eyed wonderment.

  Yet, through the years, many have felt a sense of escape by coming through the Heads. Journals and diaries, memoirs and reminiscences crackle with the excitement of the first time they set eyes upon Sydney Harbour.

  Among the more sober entries are those by the first Europeans to thread between the Heads. Officers on the ships of the First Fleet were aware that with their words they were drawing a path into the harbour for others to follow. Second Lieutenant Philip Gidley King duly noted ‘the entrance is soon discoverd lying between two steep bluff heads, there is no danger in entering the harbour’. Still, others couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by the moment, especially after an eight-month voyage from the other side of the globe. Arthur Bowes Smyth, a surgeon aboard the female convict transport Lady Penrhyn noted that the descriptions of his fellow mariners painted a picture of a paradise discovered. Then in his diary he too attempted to paint a word picture of the harbour, although he conceded, ‘To describe the beautiful & novel appearance of the different Coves and islands as we sail’d up is a task I shall not undertake as I am conscious I cannot do justice to the subject.’

  Long after the first European arrivals had noted their impression
s, others would excitedly record their thoughts about their introduction to the harbour.

  ‘The entrance to Port Jackson is grand in the extreme,’ enthused the writer and illustrator Louisa Anne Meredith, recalling her arrival from England in 1839. Meredith was so enchanted by the harbour and the shoreline that when she saw a rainbow, it seemed ‘like a smile of welcome to my new country’.

  Four decades on, a visiting American preacher and writer by the name of Dr Talmage rhapsodically recorded his entry into Sydney Harbour. Perhaps he was writing a sermon. ‘Safely we rode in between the two great brown pillars of Hawkesbury sand-stone,’ he wrote, ‘and then began the revelation of a harbour such as nowhere else in the wide world is to be found. The whole scene is an Odyssey, a “Divina Comedia” [sic], an Old Testament and a New Testament of loveliness. You cannot for a moment relax your energy of watching without missing something which you cannot see again.’

  Aside from the original inhabitants, Australia has been largely shaped and populated by those coming through the Heads, seeking a new life. In the process, they have brought constant renewal and regeneration. We are a country of migrants, with waves of new arrivals having come in from the sea, shaping the land, as surely as the great rollers from across the Pacific that come to rest on Sydney’s sandstone shoreline.

  In turn, the harbour immediately set about shaping the arrivals. When the artist Lloyd Rees passed through the Heads, glimpsing North Head and the Manly shoreline through a porthole from SS Canberra in 1916, it was love at first sight. The porthole framed the perfect picture.

  ‘Opal-blue water, a band of golden sand, another of olive-green trees; above them a skyline of coral pink shimmering against the limpid air . . . In that first long look Sydney cast her spell and it has remained with me ever since, in spite of her brashness and disorder, the crimes she has committed against herself, and, above all, the opportunities she has allowed to pass – opportunities that could have made her more worthy of her setting.’