The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  The curve of the bay is interrupted by the wharf, which is like a finger pointing and warning, ‘Here comes another load’. People do actually leave Watsons Bay. I’ve sat in my kayak on a weekday morning, watching commuters amble, not rush, along the jetty to get to the ferry. Their pace seems to fit the feel of the place, and their relaxed attitude is reflected in a sign at the end of the jetty: ‘No Waves’. The wharf leads straight to a couple of local institutions by the water, Doyle’s seafood restaurant and Watsons Bay Hotel. There’s been a pub on this site for about a century and a half.

  The restaurant has perhaps the most unpretentious vessel moored in the bay, a rowboat. The sight of the little boat, with ‘Doyles’ painted in blue on its hull, bobbing on the mooring, holds reminders of the fishing village, and its residents, who – at least in Stead’s novel – ‘were absolutely fearless, despite the frequency of squalls and sharks, paddling all over the harbour in unseaworthy tubs’.

  On the other side of the wharf, I paddle past the swimming baths. I take particular interest in the baths’ protective net. It looks intact. If only Robert Hughes were still here, to plunge in and inspect it. When the acclaimed writer and critic was a boy, he learnt to swim in the Watsons Bay baths. Hughes recalled in his memoir, Things I Didn’t Know, how parents favoured this pool because it was shielded by shark-proof netting. However, young Robert knew better. He had done as he did later in his life as a critic; he put on a mask, dived beneath the surface and saw what others couldn’t. There were large holes in the netting. Not that he ever encountered a shark in Sydney Harbour. But he saw plenty of dead ones, caught by game fishermen, hanging on the wharf at Watsons Bay. The Sydney Game Fishing Club still has a home on the wharf, and there are often large cruisers wearing spiky crowns of fishing rods berthed out front.

  Just beyond the baths is a two-storey building with the words ‘Pilot Station’ on its wall. These days, it is a boating safety education centre, but for many years until 2008, this was the base for those who helped guide ships into the harbour. Yet Watsons Bay has been linked to the safe passage of ships for much longer than the existence of this building. Once through the Heads, this was where ships often first dropped anchor, to have their documents inspected or while waiting for a berth further along the harbour. Soon after ships began arriving, pilots were stationed in the bay, rowing out in open boats to meet vessels. The bay is named after one of the earliest pilots. Robert Watson, who served on HMS Sirius in the First Fleet, had been granted land on the peninsula. In 1811, Governor Lachlan Macquarie appointed him senior pilot and then harbourmaster. Watson moved on from those positions, but he remained in maritime safety. When the original Macquarie Lighthouse was completed just up the hill in 1818, he was appointed its first superintendent.

  For many years, the pilot service out of Watsons Bay was a haphazard affair and largely unregulated, as crews scrambled out to sea to be first to an arriving ship. With the formation of the Marine Board in 1871, more order was introduced, bringing regularity to pilots’ wages and the fees they charged, largely removing the conditions for a frenzied dash for cash on the waves.

  While Watsons Bay was remote from Sydney, it was cosmopolitan. The rest of the world not only anchored in its bay but worked on its shores. Among those crewing the pilot boats were Maori and Portuguese mariners. A Russian explorer and biologist, Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, lived and worked in Watsons Bay. Miklouho-Maclay was accustomed to genuinely remote locations. He had lived and studied cultures in New Guinea. After arriving in Sydney, he believed there was a need for a laboratory to study marine life in the harbour, so he spearheaded the establishment of a biological field station at Watsons Bay. He had the backing of influential figures and organisations in the colony, who were beguiled by the good-looking, bearded Russian. The laboratory didn’t last long, and Miklouho-Maclay returned to Russia. But his name remains by the water, further along the harbour at Birchgrove, at the Miklouho-Maclay Park.

  The fringe of the harbour city continued to attract those with inquiring minds. John Olsen was already grabbing eyes and interest with his paintings by the time he moved to Watsons Bay in 1963.

  As a young man, he had viewed the harbour through the windows of places he lived and painted in. In 1956, he sailed out of the harbour, bound for Europe. John learnt, painted and absorbed new ideas in the Old World, particularly in Spain, before returning in 1960. He vividly remembers the ship carrying him back home through the Heads.

  ‘It was a Saturday evening,’ John says. ‘We were coming in, there was music playing, there was such jollity, and I thought, “How different this is to what I’ve experienced in Spain”, which was still recovering from a civil war. And here’s Sydney Harbour, and it was all bouncing and vibrant. It was just an incredible image.’

  For Olsen, the sensation was one of utter seduction, even consummation. To him, there is something sexual about the land opening and a ship penetrating the harbour. As he cheekily tells me, ‘Well, you’ve got to be imaginative too!’ Little wonder that one of his paintings is a phantasmagorical burst of colour and sinuous lines titled Entrance to the Seaport of Desire.

  Yet it wasn’t just the harbour’s arms and legs that were wrapped around John. He wanted to know every part of it. With paint, he explored its ragged margins and dived under its surface. After a few years, it wasn’t enough for John Olsen to be immersed in the harbour only through his art. He and his family moved into a fisherman’s cottage at Watsons Bay.

  The harbour quickly insinuated itself into his daily routine. He would swim in the morning with his children at Camp Cove, yarn with the fishermen as they returned to the bay after a night out on the harbour or at sea, and he would buy some of their catch. John himself would head out in a rowboat to fish, or to dive over and collect mussels and oysters off rocks. He could easily fill a sugar sack. Once, he recalls through infectious giggles, the eminence grise of Australian letters, Patrick White, accompanied him. Not that the writer had any intention of joining John in the water; he would stay in the boat, characteristically observing. But those plans were turned upside down when John returned to the surface with a full sack, handed it up to Patrick, who lost his balance and fell into the water. Patrick wasn’t amused, John chuckles.

  Each day, when he left the harbour physically, John would dive straight back in creatively. In his studio, the harbour and its profusion of life would splash and squiggle, dart and dance, across his canvases.

  ‘Watsons Bay just served as a wonderful viewing place of the harbour, the activities of ships coming in, of ferries, the different kinds of lights on the harbour – sunshine, as well as night time,’ he explains.

  ‘I lived physically in the harbour, and I enjoyed that sense of poetry, that kind of simple village life.’

  John constantly saw, heard and felt poetry in the harbourscape and transferred it to his art. He thought Watsons Bay and its resident characters were a Sydney equivalent of the Welsh village in Dylan Thomas’ famous radio play-poem, Under Milk Wood. John has plunged into the cadences and images of Kenneth Slessor’s poetry time and again, particularly that beautiful elegy, ‘Five Bells’. And he has been inspired to shape his own words into a tribute to the harbour. For a series of etchings, Seaport of Desire, published in 2002, John wrote a poem at Watsons Bay and called it ‘The Harbour’. In his verse, he swims through images of ships sliding into the harbour, of tidal pools, spotted fish and ‘cranky crabs’, before musing in the final lines:

  In a turning world, am I the

  Bay that called itself

    John Olsen?

  or

  John Olsen that became

    the bay?

  It’s a good question. For in the poetry of his painting, John and the harbour have often become so intertwined, they are inseparable. He has lived away from its shores for many years, and yet that body of water that seduced him all those years ago keeps calling him back. Actually, there is no need for that siren song, for the harbour has never left him
, or his art. They’re good for each other, John and the harbour. They give each other colour, vitality and, above all, love. They’re meant for each other.

  John refers to the harbour as a ‘blue bitch goddess’. I ask him what he means by that.

  ‘She is irresistible, she’s beautiful, but she will betray you. She can betray you as quickly as she can draw you in.’

  Yet, as he acknowledges in a later conversation, it is we who usually betray the harbour, by being neglectful or even wilfully cruel.

  ‘Love is a fickle thing, and you’ve got to look after the blue bitch goddess, otherwise she can turn against you,’ John says.

  ‘But we often don’t look after her,’ I reply.

  John sighs and utters, ‘We’re careless, very careless.’

  FROM WATSONS Bay, I can see markers warning of peril in the water. Near the main shipping channels is a reef that has caused concern ever since the First Fleet sailed in. The 150-metre-long hazard is known as the Sow and Pigs Reef, which indicates some early colonist had a good imagination. At low tide, the rocks are exposed; at other times, they lurk just below the water. Despite the danger, it wasn’t until 1824 that a beacon was erected on the reef. An old ship, festooned with hanging lanterns, was moored near the rocks. Some had other ideas for rendering the reef benign, proposing to build a fort on the reef, so that the Heads could be guarded as well. In the 1830s, enthusiastic harbour reshaper George Barney recommended building a Martello tower on the rocks. He would have his way further along the harbour at Pinchgut. So the reef has defied generations of plans and proposals, steadfastly gripping the harbour floor and, occasionally, vessels.

  The worst shipping disaster on the harbour happened not on a reef or near a hazard but out of the blue on a beautiful afternoon in November 1927. The ferry Greycliffe was making its way from Circular Quay to Watsons Bay, flitting into wharves along the harbour’s southern shore, collecting a mix of workers and commuters, holiday-makers and school students. South of Bradleys Head, the ferry suddenly wheeled to the left. Bearing down on the ferry at 17 knots was the steamship Tahiti, about three times the size of Greycliffe. Some of the passengers on the ferry could see the inevitable looming, but there was nowhere to escape the collision. Tahiti carved into the wooden ferry’s port side. Many passengers were trapped in the quickly sinking ferry. Others were tossed into the water.

  ‘I was drawn down by suction and whirled in all directions by the current,’ a schoolboy, Leslie Brooke, told the media. ‘When I came up I grasped the largest piece of wood that I could find. There was wreckage everywhere, and it seems as though the boat must have been knocked to splinters, because few pieces of wood were large enough to support anybody. It was terrible to see the scrambling and commotion in the water, which was whirled as though it were boiling.’

  Forty died in the collision. Many were residents of Watsons Bay and nearby Vaucluse. Around Sydney there was disbelief at the loss of life; in those two harbourside communities, there was paralysing grief. So many had died in the water that was so much a part of their lives. Outside St Peter’s Church in Watsons Bay, the Greycliffe Memorial Gates were built in 1929. Time dismantled the timber gates, but stone memorial plaques survived the years.

  PADDLING INTO Parsley Bay, I pass a couple of fishermen on the rocks below a line of mansions. They hold limp lines and wear bored expressions. One says, with a rueful shake of the head, ‘No bites, no fish’.

  The bay is an elongated finger of water scratching deep into the land between two sandstone hills. The waterway used to be much longer; in the 1930s, a seawall was built and its head was filled in, creating a park. Not that I can paddle far into the bay anyway, because a shark net has been strung across its mouth. Just to ramp up the warning a little more, a sign with a shark icon has been placed on a wharf, trying to ensure that, in the Parsley Bay swimming area, there are no big fish, no bites.

  Yet it is not the water that immediately grabs the eye in this bay, but the bridge suspended above it. The pedestrian bridge was built in 1910, and it is still well used. I climb out of my kayak next to the shark sign and walk up onto the bridge, feeling its deck’s graceful sponginess. I look through the cables out to the harbour, watching a ferry slide by. The surrounding landscape is studded with large homes, but there are enough trees to create the impression the bay remains flanked by bush.

  In the yards of mansions around here, I see a couple of markers of history. On a property boundary between two homes on Parsley Bay’s western shore is a sandstone obelisk that served as a navigational mark dating back to the mid-1800s. Just around the point, rising from among a string of houses, is a magical looking white tower, wearing a Moorish crown. I half expect Rapunzel to be letting down her hair at the window, or perhaps to see Juliet. It is, indeed, light that through yonder window breaks. The cylindrical tower, which has been on this site for well over a century, is an operating lighthouse, known as the Vaucluse Bay Range Front Light. I can only look at the tower from the water, for it is on private land. In that respect, when they are locked away on private property, these landmarks of our maritime heritage seem to be Rapunzels of the harbour.

  I’m hardly the first to observe how the harbour and elements of its history are cloistered and cut off. Parsley and Vaucluse bays were among the beachheads for a determined battle in the early years of the 20th century for the harbour foreshores.

  ‘Why should, say, a dozen or so owners monopolise the only available beaches, to the exclusion of hundreds of thousands of citizens of the present and future generations?’ asked William Albert Notting, the prime mover pushing for the resumption of foreshore land.

  ‘We have only one Sydney harbour in New South Wales, and only one bay like Parsley Bay in Port Jackson, but it will soon be too late to save it, unless the Crown quickly wakes up from its lethargic sleep of indifference or delay . . . Will our citizens awake, or stand idly by and see these priceless gifts of nature locked away from their reach for ever?’

  In 1905, the Harbour Foreshores Vigilance Committee was formed ‘to keep a watchful eye on all matters of public concern with the harbour and other foreshores’. Notting was elected secretary. He had been agitating for the resumption of land along the harbour for years before that. Notting was motivated in part by what haunted him. On Boxing Day, 1892, a party of picnickers in a yacht Iolanthe was thrown into the harbour when the boat capsized. Earlier the group had been ordered off the foreshore near Camp Cove by the landowner, forcing the picnickers to head back onto the harbour as a storm was intensifying. Seven people, including two children, were drowned when Iolanthe capsized. Notting had once owned Iolanthe. He often referred to the tragedy when citing the need for safe shelter around the harbour and the risk of allowing individuals to own land right down to the high-water mark.

  The committee stirred up a swell of interest, attracting dozens of boating and fishing clubs to support them, as well as some newspapers.

  ‘It was bound to come,’ thundered a report in the Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser. ‘For a hundred years we have been throwing away our harbour foreshores recklessly with both hands, as it were, until to-day there is hardly a stretch of beach where a picnic party can land without being ordered off. For scores of years it has been pointed out that this foolish policy should be stopped, if not in the interest of the generation of the day, then in that of posterity. But the process went on. The Government was warned that the water frontages so recklessly alienated would have to be bought back someday at enormous cost, and now the inevitable has come.’

  The committee wanted undeveloped foreshore land to a depth of at least 200 feet, or 61 metres. Like a military leader, Notting would pin a map to the wall at public meetings, and he would point out all the tracts he believed should be in public hands. Notting argued the government had to act quickly, as he rattled off examples of how much the price of waterfront land had jumped in a matter of months.

  Notting and the committee grabbed a toehold in Parsley Bay. Land
was resumed in 1906 and dedicated for public recreation the following year. The committee was unimpressed with the amount secured, arguing it was insufficient. Notting warned the Government had to be more committed, predicting ‘unless we bestir ourselves posterity will wake up to the fact that our much boasted of and beautiful harbour is practically, as it were, a pond in a privately-owned or military-guarded paddock’.

  The campaign moved on from Parsley Bay to the next cove, securing land at the head of Vaucluse Bay. The government responded to the committee’s pressure by forming the Foreshores Resumption Scheme to buy back more land – the western shores of Vaucluse Bay, the tip of the headland to create Nielsen Park, the Hermitage Foreshore Reserve. More than a century on, those reserves remain, offering respite to an increasingly clogged city. Yet William Notting’s vision of returning vast stretches of the foreshores to the people was never realised, while his fears that more and more land would be sliced up, sold off and buried under homes have been. If he were out here on the water, Notting would be perhaps disappointed, but not surprised, by what he would see on the land. After all, he predicted ‘the whole of the southern shore and heights above from Point Piper to South Head will be densely populated in years to come’. Yet when I’m on the water, I see the bands of green on sections of the southern shoreline, and I view them as victory flags for William Notting. That tenacious man and ferocious campaigner saved more than some harbour foreshores. He helped Sydney retain some of its very soul.