by Scott Bevan
The race was born straight after the Second World War. As the story goes, sailor and maritime artist Jack Earl mentioned he was sailing his yacht to Hobart around Christmas. A couple of others said they would sail down as well, before one of them suggested they make a race of it. When the race began on Boxing Day, 1945, there were nine starters. The man who apparently suggested the race, Royal Navy officer Captain John Illingworth, was the first to Hobart. He completed the 628-nautical-mile voyage in six days, fourteen hours and twenty-two minutes. In 2016, there were eighty-eight starters, and the line honours winner, Perpetual Loyal, finished the course in one day, thirteen hours, and thirty-one minutes.
Hobart may hold the promise of glory for a few, but the race’s start in Sydney always delivers something spectacular for everyone. More than a million people pack the shores and onto the water each 26 December to witness the fleet setting off. If you’re in a kayak, the experience can be both spectacular and scary. Never mind the cricket; my Boxing Day test has been to paddle on the fringes of the race’s start lines just to the north-east of Shark Island, without being capsized or run over. What looks like a ballet from the shoreline feels like a chaotic tango when you’re part of the water traffic. The water is whipped and whirled as hundreds of vessels jockey for position – and that is just the spectator boats. Historic ferries, sleek cruisers, speedboats, sail boats, gin palace pleasure domes, tall ships, and a few foolhardy kayakers, they’re all out on the water. The government department administering water traffic, Roads and Maritime Services, set an area where there is to be no anchoring or ‘passive craft’. I presume I’m one of those, but there is nothing passive about paddling near all those boats. We’re all kept at bay by the buoys marking the exclusion zone, or perhaps it should be the exclusive zone, given the money and courage required to enter a yacht in this race. Yet I’m still close enough to the competitors to hear the crack of the sails as they scoop up the wind, and to see on the decks the brew of human ambition and toil, as crews will Mother Nature to help take them first out of the harbour, and to not slam them into another yacht.
As the fleet pushes towards the Heads, the choreographed madness recedes into a patchwork of triangular pieces sewn into the sky. The gods of the yachts, the super maxis, seem to almost glide to the sea, while a few of the stragglers are still in the harbour, cross-stitching each other’s wakes. Finally, the last couple of sails head out of sight, turning right and heading south. I have sat in my kayak, watching those sails disappear, thinking about the crews, wondering what impels them to do it.
One of those I have watched sail out of the Heads is Wendy Tuck. On Boxing Day 2015, ‘Wendo’, as she’s known, was simultaneously at the start of one race and about halfway through a much bigger one. Wendo was the skipper of a 70-foot yacht, Da Nang-Viet Nam. She and her crew of seventeen amateur sailors/adventurers were competing in the Clipper round-the-world race, and the Sydney to Hobart was but one leg, a puddle jump, in their global voyage. Since leaving England in August, Da Nang-Viet Nam had already travelled thousands of nautical miles, and her crew had been through so much. But Sydney was the port Wendo had been really looking forward to. She is a Sydney girl, so sailing through the Heads was to be an emotional homecoming.
‘We came in at like one o’clock in the morning,’ Wendo recalled. Two friends had travelled in their boats to accompany her, then, once inside the Heads she noticed more lights, more boats, more friends, welcoming her.
‘Eight boats out there,’ she tells me. ‘It was really, really cool. I couldn’t see my friends’ faces, otherwise I would have been really crying!’
As a kid, Wendy Tuck fell in love with the water. She revelled in every opportunity to be on the harbour, as well as heading to the coast to surf. Yet it was only after she returned from years in Europe, backpacking in her 20s, and then working in a travel office, that Wendo realised she could shape her love into a living. In the new century, she changed careers, earning her tickets to be a professional skipper.
‘It seemed like a natural progression. I always struggled in offices. This [work on the harbour] is what I was meant to do.’
Wendo has been a sailing instructor, and she has been at the wheel of fast ferries and charter boats, guiding guests, including famous ones, such as Oprah Winfrey.
‘The harbour is just a special place,’ she says. ‘The more you’re on it, the more you see.’
Yet Wendo has always wanted to go further out. Before 2015, she had competed in the Sydney to Hobart race eight times. Then came the opportunity to be the first Australian female to skipper a yacht in the Clipper round-the-world race. Knowing that the fourth leg of the race involved competing in the Sydney to Hobart, she told her crew what lay ahead.
‘The whole way into Sydney, I was explaining to my crew you’ve never seen anything like this, the fanfare,’ she says.
‘Were they surprised by the start of the race, the fanfare?’ I ask.
‘Yes, but you’ve got to constantly look around everywhere, to watch out. Your crew want to perform well, but they’re distracted.’
Wendo had also made her intentions clear to the other Clipper skippers. Da Nang-Viet Nam was going to be first out of the harbour.
‘Boys, this is my home town, you’re following me for once,’ she told them. ‘I couldn’t believe it, leading them out of the Heads.’
‘I guess you don’t turn south [out the Heads] that often; it’s always a thrill. You don’t know what lies ahead.’
For Wendo, what lay ahead was victory. Her yacht was the first of the Clipper fleet across the line in Hobart. Then, while most crews celebrated reaching the finish and began planning for next year’s race, Da Nang-Viet Nam sailed on through enormous seas and wild storms, surviving a knockdown in the Pacific and thriving in the challenge of the long voyage. Almost a year after leaving England, Wendo returned the yacht and her crew to where they had begun.
Wendy Tuck is one of those extraordinary souls who appreciates the security of a harbour but has the courage to leave all that behind to embrace the life-threatening, life-affirming uncertainty of the sea.
‘I love that there is always something going on in the harbour, but I really love the ocean, just its many forms, the vastness of it all,’ Wendo muses.
While there are more oceans to sail, more challenges to stare in the face, Wendo’s dream lies much closer to home.
‘When people ask, “What would you do if you won Lotto?”, I answer that I’d buy a house on the water’s edge and a tinny, and each day, I’d go out on the harbour and clean rubbish,’ she says. ‘The cleaning guys do a great job, but I’d do my little piece. It would be like my morning walk.
‘Because I’ve made a living out of the harbour, I’d like to give back to the harbour.’
THE SONGLINES of the points and promontories around this part of the harbour have guided creative types for generations. Perhaps it is because Kings Cross, the city’s traditional centre of pleasure in all its incarnations, is just up the hill. So you can place yourself between the devil and the deep blue sea, or at least the harbour. Or perhaps it is because the Art Deco apartments packed along the western edges of Rushcutters Bay and over the headland into Elizabeth Bay offer the best of both worlds; a hint of the northern hemisphere architecturally, but with views that offer the best of Sydney.
For about a decade, David Bowie had an apartment in Elizabeth Bay. The musician lived there sporadically. He particularly loved the harbour outlook. Bowie sold the unit, which he later regretted, as he watched its value climb. During his last tour in Australia in 2004, Bowie mentioned he couldn’t believe how much his former property was worth. When a rich rock star is stunned by harbourside real estate prices, you know they must be stratospheric.
Paddling into Elizabeth Bay, I see the apartment block in which Bowie’s former neighbour and fellow singer Jeff Duff lives. As well as playing his own songs, Jeff has become well known for his shows paying tribute to Bowie.
Jeff had met Bowie i
n London in the late 1970s. When he returned to Australia in the late 1980s, Jeff was surprised to find the rock legend living in Elizabeth Bay and sipping coffee in the same café he frequented. Jeff says Bowie once referred to Elizabeth Bay as one of his favourite suburbs on the planet, a sentiment he shares with his musical hero.
For Jeff, Elizabeth Bay is not just his home but an inspiration. He loves to wander down to the jetty outside his home. The jetty is piled with kayaks, and a café has sprouted on its deck. While you can see to the other side of the harbour, Jeff enjoys looking into the water. Even when it is turbid from boats or stormwater, he finds clarity and ideas.
‘For my album, Fragile Spaceman, I wrote nearly every song while sitting on that jetty,’ he mentions. One of the songs is titled, ‘Dancing with the Jellyfish’. Jeff called his 2015 album Elizabeth Bay. For the cover, Jeff was photographed on the jetty, wearing a sailor’s suit, perhaps a reference to his neighbours at the navy’s Garden Island base. Not that they disturb him.
‘The ship horns become subliminal; you don’t notice them,’ he says. ‘I hear mostly harbour noises, but there are personal trainers [in the park] below my balcony!’
Just near Jeff’s little apartment is another connection to Australian music. Boomerang is a Spanish mission-style mansion on expansive grounds behind high walls. On the water’s edge there is a mini-Boomerang, a boathouse built in the same style as the mansion, with a long jetty reaching into the bay. Boomerang was built in the 1920s from rhythm and melody. It was the home of Frank Albert, whose family business had imported Boomerang mouth organs before moving into music publishing. The company grew into a powerhouse in media and music production, releasing records by iconic rock bands such as The Easybeats and AC/DC.
I land Pulbah Raider at the feet of Boomerang, on a strip of sand below its seawall. A couple of workers are building what looks like a wooden awning along the property’s harbour frontage. Apparently it’s a splashboard to stop the water curling over the seawall and landing on the lawn, because it kills the grass. It probably also prevents the likes of me peeking at one of Sydney Harbour’s best-known homes. Boomerang’s perimeter walls serve a purpose other than providing security. Jeff, a keen cricketer, practises his bowling against one of them. That he can play cricket in a little park against a wall that music built is just one reason Jeff Duff can’t imagine being anywhere but Elizabeth Bay.
‘To me, this place is like my Nirvana,’ he says. ‘Every time I come back into this area, I just feel at ease and at peace with the world, it’s so serene.
‘I’ve lived all around the world, but there’s nowhere like this.’
BOOMERANG IS almost modest compared with the property that is perched up the hill, surveying the harbour and all the land that once belonged to it. Elizabeth Bay House was considered the finest house in the colony, taking four years to build from 1835. This two-storey temple to fine living was the home of Alexander Macleay, the Colonial Secretary. The home was built on about 22 hectares of prime bayside land Macleay was granted when he and his family arrived in the colony in 1826. Even back then, when there was not the crush of people along the water’s edge, there was controversy that Macleay was given such a lucrative grant, on land that was rapidly increasing in value. The Sydney Gazette came to his defence, arguing ‘that Gentleman is converting a very small fragment of the most sterile part of the creation into an epitome of the far-famed Eden’.
Almost a decade before building his house, Macleay set about using the land to indulge his passion for gardening. When the Scotsman arrived in the colony, he brought with him plant specimens, including dozens of rose varieties. He also continued to import plants for his garden. He is credited with introducing the jacaranda to Australia, and it’s believed one of his daughters may have brought a curse to the landscape when she sailed into Sydney with cuttings of lantana. In all, about 4 hectares of Elizabeth Bay were crafted into a garden.
Macleay’s love of the natural world helped shape the house he built. The largest room in Elizabeth Bay House was a library, where he kept natural history specimens in wooden cabinets. He envisaged one day many of these exhibits would be housed in a museum, which would provide ‘an essential Service to Science as well as to this Colony’. Macleay’s oldest son and nephew inherited the love of natural sciences and history, adding marine specimens to the ever-growing collection. The sum of collecting over two generations ended up forming the core of a museum at the University of Sydney. It is still there, tucked away off the main quadrangle’s colonnades, and it is called the Macleay Museum.
Elizabeth Bay House and its grounds attracted many well-known visitors. The Scottish horticulturalist and the man behind Australia’s first nursery, Thomas Shepherd, wrote in 1836 how, ‘In walking among these lovely trees, you view on the one side an amphitheatre of lofty woods; and on the other you view a large expanse of water with ships, small vessels, and boats, passing up and down the harbour.’ The recently arrived artist Conrad Martens painted a watercolour in 1838 of the house shimmering through the foliage.
Macleay’s vision splendid didn’t last long for him. With the economic downturn in the early 1840s, the grounds shrunk, as allotments were sliced off for sale, and Macleay himself had to move out. But at least the house was saved. What was the private fiefdom of the Macleays is now a public museum, displaying how the fortunate few lived in colonial Sydney.
For a time, Elizabeth Bay House was cut up into flats and was a cauldron of creativity. The author C.J. Koch was a resident. He noted in his novel The Doubleman that many of the local apartment blocks had been built in the Jazz Age, ‘one of the last periods to allow whimsy and story-book fancy into the design of large buildings’. Not only were many of the apartments built in another time, the suburb had the style of another place. Elizabeth Bay, the narrator observed in The Doubleman, was as ‘inviting as a dream of pre-war Hollywood, from which it took its style’.
To the poet and journalist Kenneth Slessor, the suburb’s attraction lay much closer to home. Slessor was the bard of Elizabeth Bay. Having spent his younger years observing the harbour from a room in Kings Cross, Slessor had gravitated towards what besotted him. He lived in a flat close to the water’s edge in the bay. He could throw a line of thought out his window and reel in ideas and images.
Slessor was not a sailor, but he could imagine being one. And then, through his words, he invites all of us to imagine being one. He sails us back in time, to the days of Captain Cook and the other great masters and commanders, who, even to their crew, seemed like magicians under sheets of canvas:
Daemons in periwigs, doling magic out,
Who read fair alphabets in stars
Where humbler men found but a mess of sparks.
And Slessor often sails us to the edges, where time is running out and life is ebbing away, or has gone. That journey is perhaps most moving in ‘Five Bells’. The poem is an elegy for a friend who was drowned in Sydney Harbour, after falling overboard from a ferry. In ‘Five Bells’, Slessor asks:
Where have you gone? The tide is over you,
The turn of midnight water’s over you,
As Time is over you, and mystery,
And memory, the flood that does not flow.
Yet as the poem goes on, time and tide, mystery and memory, flow over all of us, as a ship’s bell chimes the hours and half-hours passing. It could be such a depressing read, leaving us asking of our own life, ‘Where have you gone?’, but for the beauty in the final stanza. The poet places himself by the window, looking out into the dark at ‘waves with diamond quills and combs of light’ and ‘Harbour-buoys/Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each’. And he tries to hear his friend’s voice but there are only the sounds of the harbour. And those five bells.
I imagine Kenneth Slessor sitting at his Elizabeth Bay window, listening, watching, fishing for ideas. Then, after a lot of preparation, he feeds us what he has caught. Of all the things that have been hooked in Sydney Harbour, none is more satisfy
ing than a Kenneth Slessor poem. And no matter how much of it you consume, you have no concerns of contaminants.
ON THE western side of Elizabeth Bay, I pass a harbour buoy that isn’t so much tossing fireballs wearily, in a Slessor sense, but is swaying languidly as the north-easterly takes its first few breaths for the afternoon. The buoy is a warning that I’m approaching ‘Naval Waters’ – as if the two warships moored ahead of me aren’t indication enough.
The ‘naval waters’ snap to attention against the eastern seawall of Garden Island. The ‘island’ reference is out of deference to history rather than reality; it is now tethered to the mainland and re-formed into one long peninsula. And from the water, there’s no sign of a garden. Instead, with its clock tower, office buildings, historic storehouses and barracks, and huge workshops, it looks like a self-contained harbour town. Which is what it is, really, being the navy’s main Sydney base, or Fleet Base East, as those in uniform call it.
In the early colonial years, the island looked unimpressive to some new arrivals, especially those who had been sent here as punishment. In the 19th century novel Ralph Rashleigh, purportedly written by convict James Tucker, the main character, who was also a prisoner, was nonplussed by what he saw as he sailed into the harbour: ‘But alas, the so-called Garden Island presented nothing to his view but a doubly sterile mass of rugged grey rocks rising from the bosom of one of the numerous bays, and crowned with the same unvarying livery of russet green.’ Perhaps being a convict dimmed his view, for a vegetable garden had been established on the island within a couple of weeks of the British arriving. As my friend and senior navy officer Pete Leavy explained, the garden was established on the island ‘presumably to minimise theft when most convicts couldn’t swim’.
