The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  Rees had travelled only down the coast from Brisbane; for those arriving through the Heads from across the seas, they were seeing more than just the colour of the land change. After the Second World War, ocean liners filled with migrants and refugees cruised into the harbour. Believing the country had to populate or perish, Australia’s Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell signed an agreement with the International Refugee Organisation in 1947 to accept displaced persons from camps across Europe. Immigration deals had also been signed with individual countries. And so Australia’s post-war mass migration policy was enacted, and the ships began arriving from the war-shattered lands of Europe.

  While Arthur Calwell saw on those ships the security of the nation, many standing on the decks as they cruised into the harbour saw their future. In the comedic novel about post-war Australia, They’re a Weird Mob, by Nino Culotta (who was actually an author with the Anglo-Irish name of John O’Grady), the main character is an Italian journalist who emigrates in order to write about the experience. Nino observes, ‘I saw Sydney for the first time the very best way – from the deck of the ship. And at the very best time – early in the morning, with the sun behind us.’

  Yet often the sun only illuminated the mixed emotions of those on board. The photojournalist David Moore captured the faces of a group of passengers on a liner’s deck in his image, Migrants arriving in Sydney, taken in 1966. In that one shot, perhaps the most famous of his celebrated career, Moore managed to compress all the apprehension, excitement, hopes and doubt, the thoughts and worries emanating from the faces of those pressed against the rail. It is the portrait of not just the migrant experience; it is a powerful study of humanity facing change. As was later revealed, the photo was about more than the migrant experience; four of those in the photo were Sydneysiders returning home. Which somehow only reinforces the idea that, in Sydney, nearly all of us can trace our origins to somewhere else, and you can’t tell the difference between us.

  Some were initially made to feel different. When Teruko Blair sailed into Sydney Harbour in 1953, she was reaffirming life. On more than one occasion, she had all but tasted death. Teruko Morimoto survived the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War in 1945, then witnessed the extraordinary upheaval of her country, as the Occupation forces imposed new orders and ideas on life in Japan. Teruko was employed as a waitress at the British and Commonwealth Occupation Force’s base at Kure, where she met and fell in love with an Australian soldier, William Blair. The soldiers were under strict orders to not fraternise with the locals. Even if a soldier went against the rules and married a Japanese woman, she was effectively banned from entering Australia. With the sweetest, cherubic smile, Teruko told me how she found the thought of her sweetheart sailing back to Australia without her unbearable.

  ‘I thought I couldn’t survive,’ she said in a soft voice. ‘So I decide[d] to kill myself. If he is sent back, that is the day I end my life.’

  Teruko prepared a bottle of poison and wrote a letter to the Australian Government condemning it for being so heartless, and another to her parents, apologising. Then she waited for the day William Blair sailed away. But in 1952, Australia lifted the ban on servicemen bringing Japanese wives to Australia, and Bill dashed to tell Teruko the news. They would marry and sail to Australia as husband and wife.

  ‘I took that bottle of poison and threw it into the fire,’ Teruko told me. ‘And then I started to cry.’

  Teruko was one of about 650 Japanese war brides who came to Australia after the war. She was among the first non-Europeans permitted to enter the country when it was still under the restrictive White Australia policy. Teruko recalled her reaction as she stood on the ship’s deck coming into Sydney Harbour.

  ‘I felt I could be happy in Australia, that was my first impression,’ she said. ‘Some of the girls were worried, crying, but I felt I could be happy. I could see nice green trees, beautiful.

  ‘Such a beautiful sight, waiting for me.’

  I have been on the decks of cruise ships coming into the harbour, returning from holidays in the Pacific and Papua New Guinea. The only thing at stake for me was the prospect of slipping back into the rhythm of working life. Even so, there was a sense of returning home, which I felt more deeply than when looking out of a plane window at the vast blanket of suburbia rumpled around the harbour. That view diminishes the harbour. From the deck of the ship, everything begins on the water; the harbour takes its rightful place in leaving an indelible impression.

  My last cruise ship voyage was on Pacific Eden in late 2016. We sailed into the harbour as dawn was breaking. The Hornby Lighthouse on South Head was winking at us across the water. As the sun peeked over the horizon, it set alight the windows of the skyscrapers in the distant CBD. Pacific Eden was on a course closer to North Head. Its inner and outer headlands turned from liquid shadows to solid rock as we cruised towards the coastline, until the great bluff was beside us. The ship is 219 metres long and its width is just over 30 metres, big enough to create the sense of filling the space between the Heads as we glided in. But there was still more than a kilometre of water between us and South Head. Off our port side, a couple of fishing trawlers were heading out to sea, and a bunch of kayakers looked like mere marks on the water as they curled around South Head. As we turned south-west, cruising towards Bradleys Head, I looked astern. Perspective was gradually pulling North and South heads together until the gap closed. It appeared as though the sea was shut out and we were encased in the continent. By then, nearly everyone else’s eyes were looking forward, up the harbour, particularly those of Captain Chris Norman.

  Captain Norman had sailed into Sydney Harbour for the first time just a year earlier, but in the twelve months since, he had been in and out past the Heads about twenty times. A tall Englishman with a young, inquisitive face, Chris had first left the security of land as a teenager, working on fishing trawlers, revelling in ‘the challenge of taking an empty piece of equipment to sea and bringing it back with salary’. He had been on cruise ships since 1999, sailing all over the globe, except to Australia. As we sat in the captain’s suite on Pacific Eden while still out at sea, Chris had told me one of the reasons he accepted a secondment to P&O Cruises was to sail a ship into Sydney Harbour.

  When he had that opportunity in November 2015, he was captaining one of five P&O cruise ships entering the harbour at the same time, an event that filled the waterway and the shoreline. Sydneysiders had grown used to seeing cruise ships come and go on virtually a daily basis, but this was the first time five vessels from the one fleet were in the harbour simultaneously. Chris Norman was notching up another milestone in his own life by entering Sydney Harbour. But as he cruised past the Heads for the first time, Chris thought of history.

  ‘I thought of all those sailors who came from X, Y and Z in little wooden boats,’ he reflected. ‘And looking around, while on the land side there have been a lot of changes, on the sea side little has changed since they sailed in.

  ‘Coming into Sydney as a harbour, I’d venture to say, it must be one of the most famous runs in, it’s quite a spectacular run-in,’ he said. ‘Up until Sydney, the most spectacular place I’d come into was New York on a cold January morning as the sun came up, with a perfect view of the skyline, but coming into Sydney rivalled that. I’ve been into a lot of ports, but not many have something like the Opera House so close.’

  As we sailed through the Heads, I had an inkling how busy Chris Norman was on the bridge. About two hours earlier, he and his team would have communicated with the Port Authority of New South Wales’ Vessel Traffic Service, the body helping control ships’ movements in and out of the harbour, via email and VHF radio. As Pacific Eden neared the Heads, a pilot was brought out on a launch and transferred to the ship to help guide it in. From that point, any communication with shore is on the radio because ‘it’s in real time’.

  ‘Sydney is, all in all, not a super challenging harbour, but there are challenges
, with its usage and the wind,’ Chris had told me. ‘Wind is something you don’t like, because we are effectively one big sail. I don’t mind rain, fog doesn’t bother me, but wind . . . ’

  He would be pleased this was a still morning. And there were few other vessels on the water, unlike on the weekends, when all manner of recreational boats are scurrying across the harbour. Not that Chris minds, because he has plenty of watchful eyes on the deck, a Port Authority boat is out front ensuring no vessel gets too close, and, what’s more, he likes to see a city engaging with its harbour.

  ‘It is such a busy harbour,’ he mused, ‘whereas many [harbours] around the world are now empty hulks.’

  On the run from the Heads to Bradleys Head, Pacific Eden cruised at 10 to 12 knots, then from 6 to 8 knots as she headed to the terminal at White Bay, near Balmain, in the inner harbour. We passed under the Harbour Bridge, cruising at 6 knots. For the passengers on the top deck, it was an exhilarating and breath-holding experience as the ship slid under the steel belly of the bridge deck. The gap between the ship and the bridge seemed to narrow, until it appeared as though the funnel could have touched the steel. Chris had assured there was still up to 3.5 metres clearance. That is sufficient space, according to the Harbour Master’s Directions, which stipulates a minimum of 2 metres clearance under the structure, or a metre under the Bridge workers’ maintenance gantries. Still, looking up from the ship’s deck to the Bridge’s underbelly was an awesome sight, as so much of this hour-long run in from the Heads to the wharf was.

  For Captain Chris Norman, while the Bridge and the Opera House are exciting to see and provide great photo opportunities, they are not what resonate with him in Sydney Harbour. It is the sense that we are but passing through something much larger and older. He may be at the helm of a massive assemblage of steel as it pierces the harbour, with up to 1500 guests and a crew of 600 relying on him, but Chris Norman feels ephemeral in the face of what time and water have created.

  ‘Yes, the Opera House, yes, the Bridge, but take all that away, and the sea, channels, and the base fabric of the continent remain as they would have been long before we put our own mark onto things.’

  SINCE IT is early morning, which is when cruise ships slide in between the Heads, I look to my left. Nothing.

  Clear seas, perfect morning. Nothing can spoil this moment.

  Bump!

  That’s when I think of Jeff’s comment about big sharks. I stop paddling. That bump definitely felt and sounded like it was coming from under the hull. I breathe deeply, as if I might be able to inflate my lungs sufficiently to float away like a balloon, before I figure sitting here caught between two headlands and a whole lot of sea isn’t going to help. There’s no point turning back, since it’s as far either way, so I keep heading south. I place the blade tentatively into the water and drag it slowly. Nothing has bitten the paddle, so the next stroke is a little more confident as I ride over the relaxed arc of the swell. Then . . . Bump!

  There can be no doubt about it this time.

  It’s my water bottle. It has dislodged and is rolling around in the cavity behind the seat. I deflate my lungs and sit for a while as the rhythm of the swell lulls my heart rate.

  Peering into the aquamarine, I think of how the harbour’s gates are open for all things natural and manufactured to glide through. That rhapsodic 19th century correspondent, Dr Talmage, declared as he sailed into the harbour, ‘Room here for all the navies of the earth to ride in and secrete themselves so that they could not be found without much search’. Which is precisely what concerned the defence authorities. The headlands may have been progressively packed with batteries and observation posts to resist an attack from the sea, but as military technology advanced, it was the unseen lurking under the surface that increasingly caused worry. In 1925, a Committee of Imperial Defence report on the requirements for defending Australia stressed the importance of Sydney as a naval and commercial port, and it outlined ‘the major form of attack under consideration was by submarines laying mines or firing torpedoes, at shipping both in the harbour and in the approaches to the harbour’. That report prophesied what happened seventeen years later.

  On the eve of winter in 1942, three Japanese midget submarines brought into Sydney the fears that had stalked the city virtually since it was born in 1788. For the first time in its history, Sydney came under direct fire. The midget subs had been launched from mother submarines about 12 kilometres off the coast, sneaked between the Heads and created havoc. To find their way to the harbour entrance, one submarine crew used a chart that had been originally surveyed by Captain James Cook. The submarines slipped through the defences by audaciously following Manly ferries.

  It was not as though the attack was a complete surprise. Japan was at war with Australia, submarines had been lurking off the coast, harassing merchant shipping, and a few times since February 1942, the Japanese had sent a reconnaissance plane over Sydney without challenge. The last reconnaissance flight had been just a day before the submarines slipped into the harbour. Many years later, the pilot, Susumo Ito, recalled how in the pre-dawn he had flown up the harbour, sometimes as low as 30 metres, over the Harbour Bridge, around the Cockatoo Island dockyard and back out above the headlands along the North Shore.

  Even so, the attack was a shock. The harbour that was the heart of the city, and that was cradling dozens of naval ships on the night of 31 May, was the conduit for the enemy to bring destruction and death into Sydney.

  Two of the midget submarines did next to no physical damage. One, M27, became entangled in the anti-boom net laid across the harbour from Georges Head to Green Point on the southern shore. The two men inside blew up the submarine, and themselves. Another, M22, was chased around the harbour before it was finally destroyed by depth charges near Taylors Bay on the northern shore. These days, there is a plaque above the bay, acknowledging the fate of the submarine. You can sit there and contemplate a beautiful scene where two young men died entombed in a small metal tube. Relatives of those men have visited the site, paying tribute by pouring sake into the water and by simply standing on the harbour’s edge. As Kazuko Matsuo, the niece of one of the crewmen, told me in 2007 when she visited Taylors Bay for the first time, there were no words, just deep feelings.

  The third midget submarine, M24, managed to reach beyond Bradleys Head and fired two torpedoes towards USS Chicago, which was moored off Garden Island. They missed the US cruiser, but one torpedo slammed into the seawall near HMAS Kuttabul, which was berthed along the south-eastern edge of Garden Island. Kuttabul had been a ferry, carrying passengers across the harbour before the Bridge was built. When the war came, the vessel was made useful once more, as a floating barracks. On that Sunday night, Kuttabul was filled with sleeping servicemen. When the torpedo struck the wall, the force of the explosion shattered the ship and she sank. Twenty-one died on Kuttabul. While the nation was at war, and the city was meant to be on guard, few could believe the Japanese had attacked and killed people in the harbour. Not even survivors from Kuttabul could believe it. One later recounted how he laughed dismissively when told there were Japanese submarines in the harbour and had gone back to sleep. He woke up two days later in hospital.

  Hearing the explosions and gunfire and seeing the flares and searchlights as the Allied forces hunted the submarines, thousands of Sydneysiders were roused from their sleep and came down to the waterfront to watch. By the time the sun rose, the attack was effectively over. Most people were left in the dark as to what had just happened. Newspaper reports were initially heavily censored but the event inevitably became front-page news. A few days after the attack, Norman Makin, the Minister for the Navy, stood up in the House of Representatives and declared the Japanese attack had been unsuccessful and the harbour defence measures had worked, instantly detecting the midget submarines. The preliminary report of Rear Admiral Gerard Muirhead-Gould, the Naval Officer-in-Charge of Sydney Harbour’s defences, gives a different impression of how the defences handled
the attack. In his report, Muirhead-Gould liberally used the word ‘fail’ when appraising those under his charge. Yet in other quarters, Muirhead-Gould’s own actions were criticised, including the decision to allow passenger ferries to keep operating in the midst of an attack. His justification was that ‘the more boats that were moving about at high speed the better chances of keeping the submarines down until daylight’.

  The wreckage of two Japanese midget submarines was salvaged and taken to Clark Island, a loaf of land rising from the harbour just off the southern shore and close to where M24, which was the one sub that had not been found, had fired its torpedoes. On the island, the bodies of the two submariners in each of the craft were removed. A week later, they were cremated with full naval honours and returned to the Japanese. In the face of public criticism for showing too much respect to an enemy that had attacked the harbour, Muirhead-Gould went on radio, praising the ‘brave men’ for going to their deaths in ‘that steel coffin’, and he rhetorically asked, ‘How many of us are really prepared to make one-thousandth of the sacrifice that these men made?’ The wrecks of the submarines were examined then joined into one Frankenstein sub, which was taken on a fundraising tour before being placed on display at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

  The fear that the submarine attack was the precursor to a full-scale invasion was stoked just over a week later. On 8 June one of the mother submarines, I-24, surfaced off the coast and fired ten shells in the direction of Sydney Harbour Bridge. The shells fell short, landing in the Eastern Suburbs, damaging homes and shops, but no one was killed. Still, it terrified Sydneysiders. Some left the city, wanting to be away from the harbour. For the first time in a long time, Eastern Suburbs real estate could be had for a bargain. Yet there would be no more attacks from the sea.