by Scott Bevan
Fears lingered, as did questions, including, ‘What happened to the third midget submarine?’ In the confusion that ricocheted around the harbour on 31 May into the early hours of 1 June 1942, M24 slunk back out between the Heads and into deep water. But not nearly as deep as the mystery as to where it had gone. The mystery was finally solved in 2006, when divers found the wreckage off the coast of Sydney’s Northern Beaches in about 57 metres of water. The sea had finally given up its secret.
The years reshaped and softened that historic attack on Sydney into an event that could symbolise the journey of two nations; how enemies had reconciled and become firm friends. In 2007, a year after M24 was discovered, Japanese and Australian military and political leaders, along with members of the dead submariners’ families, were on board HMAS Melbourne for a memorial service above the wreck site. The Japanese families were presented with sand collected from the seabed on which M24 lay, and Rear Admiral Nigel Coates, Commander of the Australian Fleet, read ‘Ode to the Fallen (The Sailor’s Ode)’:
They have no grave but the cruel sea,
No flowers lay at their head,
A rusting hulk is their tombstone,
Afast on the ocean bed.
GRADUALLY THE sense that I could be so easily a plaything of the sea, tossed into the wide blue yonder, subsides as I paddle closer to South Head. Experiencing the harbour’s entrance from the water, I more than understand why early travel writers and diarists, grasping for a metaphor, compared the two headlands to arms. I feel as though those arms are embracing me, like a mother’s, reassuring me they won’t let me out of their grasp. They won’t allow the sea to take me.
Where I feel something warmly maternal, Dr Talmage, that late 19th century American preacher and Sydney admirer, saw something more omnipotent when he steamed through the Heads. ‘God works by no model, and this harbour was of divine origination,’ Dr Talmage sermonised. ‘He works with rocks and waters and skies as easily as architects work with pencil and rule and compass; and he intended this harbour not to be a repetition of anything that had ever been done, but to make it impossible for any human engineering or landscape gardening or hydraulics to imitate. It is a winding splendour, an unfolding glory, a transcendent illustration of what Omnipotence can do in the architecture of an ocean.’
Still, that didn’t stop at least one designer from imagining he could improve on nature at the Heads. Or perhaps, having vaulted the air and expectations once, he was feeling a little God-like. At the opening ceremony of the Harbour Bridge in 1932, John Bradfield, the man who had nursed it from an idea to an icon in steel, said the structure was ‘a stepping stone for greater engineering feats, a bridge across the Heads, maybe . . .’
Looking up, I’m grateful that above me is not a bridge’s deck but only sky, which is thickening into a rich blue. More ferries are ploughing across the Heads, to and from Manly, as the day advances.
From half a kilometre or so out, South Head looks like a great ship, with its bow facing resolutely east. The impression is even more pronounced as waves finish their long journey across the sea by disintegrating on the rocks packed along the bottom of the head’s sandstone hull. It looks as though South Head is pushing through the seas. But, of course, the headland is going nowhere. It absorbs the sea’s energy, compelling it to behave more placidly before it can proceed into the harbour. I can see Hornby Lighthouse on the tip of South Head, painted in candy stripes, and in the distance, poking over the sandstone cliff, is the Macquarie Lighthouse, a stolid white column of dependability. In one form of another, it has been warning mariners that land loomed since 1817. The convict architect Francis Greenway designed the first lighthouse and set the stamp for its replacement in 1880. What I’m looking at is essentially what Greenway envisaged 200 years earlier.
Soon after sailing between the Heads for the first time in January 1788, William Bradley retraced his journey into the harbour, helping survey the vast body of water. Bradley noted, ‘As you sail into the opening between the Outer Heads which is near two miles across, steep too on both sides, you will see on the south shore a point off which is a small reef made by the fallen rocks and breaks as far out as any danger can be . . .’ I’m mindful of Bradley’s advice as I approach the feet of South Head. I make sure to keep my distance, so that the waves don’t push me onto the rocks. Having already jumped at the bump of a water bottle, I don’t need to feel the bash of Kevlar and fibreglass on sandstone.
A fishing trawler steams in from the sea behind me, its phlegmatic engine hawking in the morning air. I imagine how tired the fishermen on board are, and what a sweet moment it must be each and every time they pass between the Heads, returning to shore. I too head for land. I could paddle a little to the left, and, just before reaching the heft of the sea, land on Lady Bay Beach, discreetly tucked into a cove near the tip of South Head. Instead, I paddle to the right, bound for the beach where British bodies reputedly first lay on the shores of Sydney Harbour.
11
SOUTH HEAD TO DARLING POINT
EVEN ON the shortest of voyages, making landfall is a welcome prospect. Especially when the land waiting to greet you is as beautiful as the harbour shores inside South Head. I paddle away from the sea’s influence, out of its swell, and into Camp Cove. Its fringe of sand looks as though it has been peeled off the sandstone headland and meticulously laid like an offering to the water, or to the line of mansions fronting it. On the beach is a sign indicating all vessels are prohibited from landing. But the compulsion of history tells me to ignore the sign and follow Arthur Phillip onto the sand.
The Royal Australian Historical Society and the local council marked this spot as the place where Phillip first stepped ashore in the harbour. On Laings Point, overlooking Camp Cove, the authorities built a small monument in 1927, with a plaque that reads: ‘On this beach/Camp Cove/Governor Phillip/first landed in/Port Jackson/Jan 21st 1788.’ Despite that plaque’s proclamation, there has been a lot of debate about whether this was where Phillip and his party first landed in the harbour on their open-boat journey from Botany Bay. Yet it seems this is where a British person first slept, if not stepped, along the harbour’s shoreline. One of Phillip’s boat crew, Jacob Nagle, had noted how, after surveying the lower parts of Middle Harbour and Manly, ‘we landed on a beach on the south side and there pitched our tents for the night’. As a result, of all the names they could have come up with for the cove, one that perhaps responded to the beauty of the place or the magnitude of the moment, the party instead settled on something perfunctory: ‘This place was call’d Camp Cove.’ If the first British arrivals underplayed the significance of the site with the name, later generations have soiled it. Right behind the monument, on the knoll with the stunning views, squats a public toilet block.
A small wave gently lifts the kayak and places it on the sand. The beach is gleaming in the early morning light, reminding me of the British writer Louisa Anne Meredith’s first impressions of the ‘pure white silvery sand’ in the coves as she sailed into the harbour in 1839. She wrote that the sand was used as ballast in ships and transported to England, where ‘it is much valued, I believe, by glass-makers’.
I have the beach to myself for a few moments, before an older couple arrive to exercise, he to walk along the sand, while she wades into the water and begins swimming slowly the few hundred metres along the cove. A four-wheel-drive crawls slowly along the beach towards me. I immediately think of that ‘all vessels prohibited’ sign. But it contains two council workers, who are here to clean the beach. I get talking to one of them, Dave. The beach looks clean to me, but Dave knows there will be rubbish, because there have been westerly winds. Winter, when the westerlies mostly blow, is the worst for Camp Cove, he says, because it carries the rubbish of the city onto the beach. In summer, when the crowds descend, it is mainly dropped litter he has to contend with.
Dave cleans eleven harbour beaches between here and Rose Bay. The most littered, he says, is Watsons Bay, which is just aroun
d the point to the south.
I ask Dave what’s the weirdest thing he’s picked up, and he replies diplomatically, ‘You name it, I’ve picked it up.’ And with that, he heads off, prodding at the sand, returning the beach to almost-perfection, ready for the crowds to trample and sully it once more.
WATCHING OVER the cove from its perfect position on South Head is the naval base, HMAS Watson. The base straddles some of the finest real estate in Australia, as it faces the harbour to the west, and the sea to the east. Approaching the entrance, HMAS Watson has the feel of a resort in a fantastic location, but once through the gates, it quickly asserts itself as a military base with a rich history. Near the entrance is an arrangement of shells from the navy’s first flagship, HMAS Australia, along with a rusted anchor from a 19th century sailing ship. The anchor is leaning against an old fortified wall. This site has held military installations since 1871, when artillery emplacements were built to protect the port.
The navy has been on South Head since the Second World War. The first radar used in Australia was installed on the headland during the war. These days, Watson is primarily a training base for maritime warfare. Sprinkled around the site are barracks, and on the crest of the hill is the wardroom, the mess for senior sailors, with views all the way down the harbour to the city and the Bridge. My friend Commodore Peter Leavy recalls the first time he entered that wardroom. It was 1984, and the Western Australian teenager had joined the navy only ten days prior.
‘As my group of midshipmen entered for lunch on that first day, we all stopped in unison as soon as we walked in the door, struck by the amazing vista before us,’ Pete recalls. ‘In subsequent years, I have seen countless other people do exactly the same thing on their first visit to the wardroom.’
Perhaps the most gracious building on the base is Cliff House, the Fleet Commander’s residence. When he was the navy’s Commodore Warfare, Pete stayed in Cliff House for a while, and his family invited ours to visit in December 2015.
The house was furnished with naval heritage and a few reminders of Pete’s career. The dining table was from HMAS Westralia. Pete had bought that table for Westralia in 1989. Running through the centre of Cliff House was a wide corridor. I stood at the back of the house and looked along it, as though through a telescope, to the harbour. The view widened when I stepped onto the house’s flagstone veranda facing south-west. I could see up the harbour to the city skyline, about 11 kilometres away. On the veranda was a cannon cast in 1871, the same year the artillery dug in on South Head. Its barrel was facing towards the sumptuous curve of Camp Cove, just below, perhaps ready to blast any prohibited vessels, such as kayaks, landing on the beach.
From Cliff House, fleet commanders through the years could have watched ships coming and going. This position always held great strategic value. For Pete, the veranda played another role while he was living here.
‘One thing I used to wonder about – in fact, I still do – while staring down the harbour was what it must have been like for the First Fleet as they sailed into what was, for them, an unknown harbour,’ he recounts later, from his next posting, at the Australian Embassy in Washington DC. ‘And, more importantly what the Cadigal (or Gadigal) people of the day thought.
‘I think an often undervalued part of Sydney Harbour is the link it provides to the history and traditions of the original inhabitants. Australian Aboriginal culture is the longest continuously surviving culture on the planet – something we should all be proud of and do our utmost to protect – and Sydney Harbour symbolises the links between the Cadigal people and the harmony they enjoyed with their natural environment.’
While the ships go wherever the sea does, cruising around the globe, Sydney Harbour is, in Pete’s eyes, ‘the spiritual home of the Royal Australian Navy’.
‘There is nothing quite like returning to Sydney after six or seven months away on deployment,’ Pete explained to me. ‘The sight of Centrepoint [Sydney] Tower, while still miles off the coast, serves as the first tangible evidence of Sydney. As you enter the harbour, you immediately pass HMAS Watson down the left side. But the best sight of all is rounding Bradleys Head to see the Bridge, Opera House and city itself all open up before you. Nobody ever tires of that sight unfolding.
‘I think Sydney Harbour holds something special for all naval officers, and that’s saying something from one who hails from Western Australia!’
Pete took us for a walk over to the eastern side of the base, where the continent tumbled off the edge. He had done some of his celestial navigation training standing here on the cliff top. You could look straight out to where the sky touched the sea.
Around where we stood, homesick members of the First Fleet once did the same thing, staring hopefully, expectantly out to sea. In early 1790, Governor Phillip ordered a flagstaff and huts be erected on South Head, so that watch-keepers stationed there could send a signal to Observatory Hill, above Sydney Cove, when a ship was approaching. On 3 June that year, the cry of ‘The flag’s up!’ bounced excitedly around the settlement. One of those who heard the clamour was the marine Watkin Tench. He looked outside his cottage, saw people celebrating and kissing their children, and he guessed what was happening. Tench ran to the top of the hill and, with the help of a telescope, he could see a flag fluttering on South Head. ‘My next door neighbour, a brother-officer, was with me; but we could not speak; we wrung each other by the hand, with eyes and hearts overflowing,’ Tench noted in his journal. The colony at the bottom of the globe had not been forgotten. The vessel was Lady Juliana, packed with a cargo of female convicts.
The convict artist Joseph Lycett used the perspective from South Head to depict the distant settlement of Sydney, and he sketched the view the other way, perhaps wistfully, towards the Heads and out to sea. Lycett tellingly placed in the foreground of his pictures those who were being pushed away by the colonists, portraying the Gadigal walking through their land or watching ships sailing into their harbour. Once the colony took root, and homesickness was quelled by a growing sense of ‘home’, Sydneysiders would still come to the cliff’s top along South Head to look out and around. One of the colony’s most influential figures, William Charles Wentworth, observed how, ‘In boisterous weather the surges that break in mountains on the shore beneath you, form a sublime contrast to the still, placid waters of the harbour, which in this spot is only separated from the sea by a low sandy neck of land not more than half a mile in breadth; yet is so completely sheltered, that no tempests can ruffle its tranquil surface.’
A century on, Kenneth Slessor wrote an entire newspaper report about travelling to the best-known stretch of South Head, The Gap, and getting cheap thrills by standing there in a storm. As he told his readers, ‘For a five-penny tram-fare yesterday the Sydney citizen had heaven and earth performing beneath his insignificant feet.’ That’s the beauty of The Gap; it’s where nature is so compelling, it puts you in your place. The tragedy is that so many have come here feeling insignificant. The Gap has become renowned as a suicide spot.
The sea has also washed away many lives along the foot of South Head. On a foul night in August 1857, the clipper Dunbar was attempting to enter the harbour when it was driven onto the rocks. One hundred and twenty-one passengers and crew perished. It remains one of Australia’s worst maritime disasters. There was but one survivor, a crewman who clung to a ledge for more than a day before being rescued. The Dunbar disaster horrified and traumatised the harbour city. Corpses and wreckage were washed through the Heads and onto the foreshores. While there are other memorials to those lost from Dunbar, the most practical and enduring monument shines out from South Head. The Hornby Light was built in response to the disaster, to more clearly mark the harbour’s entrance. This disaster, along with the loss of twenty-one lives when the clipper Catherine Adamson foundered off North Head just two months later, highlighted the need for a lifeboat to be stationed close to the Heads. Through the later years of the 19th century and well into the 20th, a lifeboat service w
as based at Watsons Bay. In vile weather, men would row around the point and through the Heads into monstrous seas to helps crews and passengers on stricken ships. By 1946, the service was finally decommissioned, and the lifeboat that had been based at Watsons Bay since 1907, Alice Rawson, was retired. The sea had grown no less tempestuous, but improvements in ship designs and safety methods helped nudge the lifeboat service into history.
WATSONS BAY may be part of Sydney Harbour, but in its look and feel, the village on the shoreline is a community unto itself. The water that connects it to the rest of the world is what also disconnects it. That is a key attraction for those living in the collection of historic and contemporary homes – most of them tasteful, all very expensive – occupying the bay’s edge. To its residents, Watsons Bay is like living in a remote fishing village. Which is what it once was.
‘There is no place in the estuary . . . so suited for an old tale as this fish-smelling bay, first in the port,’ wrote Christina Stead in her beautiful novel of place, Seven Poor Men of Sydney. The village where her tale is set, Fisherman’s Bay, is Watsons Bay, where she lived for the best part of two decades. ‘Life is poor and unpretentious, life can be quiet. The sun rises just over the cliff, and sailing vessels roll in and out as they have done for a hundred years, and a quarter of a mile away unfurl their full sails to catch the Pacific winds.’
Some things have changed from fact to fiction, and from the past to the present. Life is no longer poor in the bay, and the decayed weatherboard cottages and fishermen’s shanties that Stead described have been either knocked down or renovated. But the spire of Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic church is still there, thrusting above the landscape, and boats are still moored in the bay, yet few are working vessels.
In Stead’s novel, set in the 1920s, the bay’s shoreline is a provider for those who search it: ‘The beach provided not only fuel, but also dead fish, swollen fruit, pumpkins, shoes and socks, broken straw-boaters – all varieties of food and clothing cast up from ships and sewers.’ The beach is no longer strewn with this sort of flotsam, but people still wander along the shore, fossicking for something far more elusive: peace and quiet. That can be even harder to find. Crowds of people escape to Watsons Bay, many arriving by ferry.
