The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  Even if the vegetables didn’t flourish on Garden Island, the navy did. While ships had anchored off Garden Island’s shores since the earliest days, and a couple of guns were implanted on its northern end in 1799 to guard the town, the naval presence dug in during the second half of the 19th century. The Royal Navy used the island as a depot for its ships, as part of its Australian Station. A few of the buildings that arose on the island to service Her Majesty’s vessels remain along the shore, their warm colours of brick and stone a contrast to the clinical grey of the ships berthed in front of them. In 1913, soon after the Royal Australian Navy came into being, the island was handed over to the Commonwealth to be its major naval base. During the Second World War, it ceased being an island. The barrier of water was filled with concrete and steel for a massive dry dock, nearly 350 metres long, to repair and refit ships. The Captain Cook Graving Dock, as it was named, was finished just before the war did.

  The conflict brought changes beyond the physical. The naval base here was named HMAS Kuttabul in 1943, in honour of the twenty-one killed on the barracks ship berthed off the island when it was sunk by a Japanese midget submarine’s torpedo the year before. The navy migrated beyond the disappearing island. With a land bridge now established, Kuttabul crept up the hill to consume a few historic mansions on Potts Point. Grand gardens that once swept down to the waterfront were reduced to a few walls and stone stairways. The naval past is sprinkled around the base, and it is preserved and on display in a heritage centre on the northern tip of Garden Island.

  Sitting forlornly off the north-eastern shore of Garden Island is the decommissioned HMAS Sydney IV. This was her home base for more than thirty years. And now it’s her retirement home, until her graveyard is determined. I feel for her, languishing in the section of water where Kuttabul was sunk, as she waits for the same fate, even if the means is less violent. I also feel for her, because she and I have a past. A brief but enjoyable one. For me, at least.

  Just a few years earlier, on 4 October 2013, Sydney was the pride of the fleet, as she led seven RAN ships into the harbour, as part of an International Fleet Review. The seven RAN ships were sailing in history’s wake.

  On 4 October 1913, the young RAN’s fleet of warships entered Sydney Harbour for the first time. The flagship then was HMAS Australia, but the first Sydney was in the line. Hundreds of thousands of Sydneysiders packed along the shores, and the Minister for Defence, Senator Edward Millen, was excited enough to declare, ‘Since Captain Cook’s arrival, no more memorable event has happened than the advent of the Australian fleet. As the former marked the birth of Australia, so the latter announces its coming of age.’ One hundred years on, the navy commemorated that ‘coming of age’ with the International Fleet Review, involving ships from seventeen nations. The re-enactment of the fleet entering the harbour for the first time was a highlight. I had the great fortune to be on HMAS Sydney as a reporter.

  A fleet of more than twenty warships, both RAN and foreign vessels, had sailed up from the navy’s base at Jervis Bay, bouncing through wind-churned waves under a platinum sky. Then, as the sun sneaked above the horizon on 4 October, Sydney led the RAN ships towards the Heads. I was standing on Sydney’s port side. I spent a good deal of time looking behind, staring at the ships strung across the sea to the north. It was a formidable sight. But as we slid between the Heads, I looked all around, trying to pull every direction and every sight into the one moment. For, in this moment, the ship was scratching its own signature, making history, on the harbour’s surface. Of course, the water would soon forget Sydney had ever been here. But I would never forget. I recall saying to myself, just out of sheer wonderment, ‘Well, I’m on Sydney entering Sydney.’

  A flotilla of pleasure craft darted around the ships like excited kids. As the ship rounded Bradleys Head, the air burst with a gun salute. Everyone on board was beaming, from the sailors lining the decks to the invited guests, including the then Premier Barry O’Farrell. I was so caught in the moment, I offered to take the Premier kayaking on the harbour some time. He never did take up that offer.

  Sydney was a platform for celebration the following night at the International Fleet Review Spectacular. In other words, a party with fireworks. Sydneysiders have long been brilliant at welcoming fleets by throwing a light-filled party. When the United States’ Great White Fleet arrived in 1908, illuminations were installed on Fort Denison, and, according to the Sydney Morning Herald’s report, the water was a fairyland. When the RAN fleet was first in the harbour in 1913, the ships were lit up at night, while the city celebrated. For the 2013 event, the spectacular organisers promised a show the likes of which had not been seen on the harbour before. That promise ensured huge crowds around the harbour’s edges. I was on Sydney, which was moored just east of the Harbour Bridge and off the Opera House. So it was perhaps the best position on the harbour to experience the spectacular. Above and around me were the choreographed vision, sound and fury of fireworks, light shows and projections onto the Opera House’s shells and the Harbour Bridge’s pylons, telling the story of the RAN and how it helped build a nation. Not that I was following the story; I was just immersed in the shock-and-awe party. Actually, I’m not sure if many would have been enriched with a greater knowledge of the RAN’s history because of the spectacular, but I reckon everyone would have left, saying, ‘That navy knows how to throw a great party’.

  So as I paddle past her at Garden Island, I not only feel for Sydney, I thank her for providing me with an extraordinary harbour experience in 2013.

  IF THE term ‘working harbour’ has drifted away from most promontories and coves in Sydney, it sticks on Garden Island. Its most prominent symbol of heavy work, the enormous hammerhead crane that was on the northern tip, has been dismantled, removing yet another piece of the harbour’s industrial heritage. But there is still incessant activity along the edges, and on the water. As I round the peninsula into Woolloomooloo Bay, the frigate HMAS Perth is being shunted and pulled by tugs into the main channel. Other warships are berthed along the wharves. When the ships leave for long deployments from here, loved ones, along with politicians and the media, crowd onto the wharves, and passers-by stop and stare through the fence. When a naval base is this close to the heart of the city, ‘bon voyage’ becomes a public statement. It is part of the vocabulary of Sydney life.

  The navy is busy not just on the surface around Garden Island; its divers could be somewhere below my kayak, for all I know.

  Able Seaman Paul de Gelder was under the water just around here on 11 February 2009.

  As a member of the RAN’s Clearance Diving Team 1, Paul’s workplace was where very few are allowed to go, beneath the warships. Which means Paul was familiar with an aspect of the harbour that is rarely seen. Not that we would want to, or even could, see through the plumes of silt.

  ‘It was horrible!’ Paul says. ‘We didn’t work in the beautiful parts of the harbour. The harbour floor under the warships is mud, and I don’t know how deep the mud is.’ When he was working under the decommissioned destroyer HMAS Vampire, on display at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Darling Harbour, he estimated the mud would have been at least up to his neck. For all the different characteristics of the harbour on the surface, Paul says, under the water, it is ‘mud, silt, and sand’.

  What he rarely saw through the gloom were sharks. He was wary of them, ‘but I still had a job to do’.

  On that February morning in 2009, Paul and his fellow divers were testing new equipment and involved in counter-terrorism training off Garden Island. Paul was on the surface when he felt a whack on his leg, but it didn’t hurt. He looked under the water to see the cold eyes of a bull shark, its mouth open and grabbing his leg. Once it occurred to Paul the near-impossible was happening to him, he began fighting for his life. Only he couldn’t use his right arm. He realised the shark had bitten into his hand as well. So he fought as much as he could with his left hand, trying to poke the shark in the eye and punch its
snout.

  The shark shook Paul and dragged him under. Paul kept fighting but he recalls thinking, ‘I’m not going to get out of this.’

  ‘Calm came over me, I had no regrets.’

  Suddenly the shark was gone. Paul was released. ‘It all happens in the blink of an eye,’ he says of the attack.

  Then came the rush to save Paul de Gelder. He had sustained dreadful injuries. Surgeons amputated his right hand and right leg. Paul spent about two months in hospital. After confronting how his body had been changed, Paul set about changing his life. But first he did as he had done before the attack. He entered the water.

  ‘After the attack, I spent a lot of time snorkelling,’ Paul says. ‘I had no PTSD, no flashbacks, none of that.’

  The experience gave him new perspective, including a desire to learn more about sharks, and about himself.

  ‘It made me appreciate sharks more, because I was forced into learning more about them,’ he says. ‘Before then, I thought they should all be killed. But then I learnt more about their place in the ecosystem.

  ‘It’s all about knowledge.’

  I ask Paul what knowledge he has acquired since, which, had he known, he would have applied in that moment of being attacked. Nothing, he replies. He would do nothing different.

  ‘There’s nothing I could do. You can’t imagine, you can’t understand what it’s like, to be stuck in the jaws of a 300-plus-kilogram animal. You are totally at its whim.’

  Paul has remained in the Naval Reserve as a diver. He has also been determined to share his knowledge and experience, writing a book, speaking at events, and making documentaries about sharks. On one filming expedition in Tahiti, he learnt to hand-feed the very species of shark that had bitten him.

  ‘If I can turn a terrible situation into something beautiful, that’s good,’ he explains.

  It had been almost half a century since the last fatal shark attack in Sydney Harbour, and Paul’s experience was the first time a navy diver had been mauled. The city reacted with horror. The attack brought to the surface the fears that lie barely under the water whenever any of us leaves behind the certainty of land and sinks into the beautiful, eerie domain that is the harbour. It has reminded us that when we are in the water, we are in another world, one that is both wondrous and home to dangerous creatures. Yet Paul counters that shark attacks have been very rare in Sydney Harbour.

  ‘Isn’t that an indication of how little interest we are to them?’ he says. ‘You’ve got to expect an attack, but we humans think we own everything.’

  WOOLLOOMOOLOO BAY is wide and deep enough to embrace warships, including the navy’s new massive amphibious assault vessels, HMAS Canberra and HMAS Adelaide, which are berthed, bow to stern, along Garden Island’s western shore. Yet the bay is narrow enough to provide me with one of those head-shaking harbour juxtapositions as I paddle along it. On the left are the grey metal cliffs that are the hulls of the amphibious assault ships, and beyond them, plotting the peninsula, is the rigidity and order of military life. On the right shore is the Andrew (Boy) Charlton Pool, with people sunbathing on its deck, a little platform of relaxation. So the inhabitants of these two worlds, the hedonists and the sailors, can wave at each other across the water.

  People have been bathing along the shore here for thousands of years. But defined baths, with the dubious enticement of ‘hot and cold seawater’, were built in the 1830s. There were separate areas for ‘gentlemen’ and ‘ladies’. The first competitive swimming races in the colony were apparently held in the gentlemen’s baths in 1846, so it seems fitting that the pool now on the site is named after the 1920s Olympic swimmer Andrew (Boy) Charlton. He used to plough up and down one of the earlier incarnations of the baths in the bay.

  With its cascade of vowels and consonants, the very name ‘Woolloomooloo’ sounds like water flowing. A number of Aboriginal words have been cited as the possible inspiration for the name of the bay and suburb behind it, but one meaning could be ‘place of plenty’. By the late 19th century, Woolloomooloo was a place of plenty, and its bay held more than water. It was the site of a major sewage outlet, as Sydney put the loo into Woolloomooloo. The fish markets were also on the shore for about thirty years.

  Local fish also helped in the shaping of yachts. In 1858, Dan Sheehy, a boatbuilder working on the harbour’s edge in Woolloomooloo built a yacht, Australia, based on his studies of a mackerel he had caught in the bay. Sheehy’s transposition of the lines of the dissected fish into the design of his boat must have worked, for Australia was a champion racer and influenced yacht designs around the world.

  The bay’s deep water attracted ships for mooring. But it needed facilities for berthing. So its edges were progressively girdled in wharves, and its head was dredged and buttressed with a semi-circular wharf. Then the bay’s head was effectively split in two by a long finger wharf. From the 19th century well into the next, the bay helped push Australian produce, particularly wool, out into the world on commercial ships. From here, an infant nation’s youth sailed away, to fight in distant conflicts. And they returned to here, those who survived. After the Second World War, the bay accepted many more arrivals escaping from conflict-scarred lands. The finger wharf became a major passenger terminal.

  These days, there are still large vessels berthed outside the wharf, but many of them are pleasure cruisers. For the wharf is no longer a place for people to depart from or arrive at; it is for those who have arrived. What was slowly rotting into the bay in the later years of the 20th century was reimagined into a polished enclave of the well-off. Along the wharf there are a boutique hotel, restaurants and luxury apartments. At the time of the wharf’s conversion, the journalist and author David Marr noted that developments such as this marked a new kind of real estate, subdividing the sea. Still, some seriously rich and famous people have put down their roots, along with great wads of cash, on top of the water. The Oscar-winning actor Russell Crowe has an apartment at the end of the wharf. In early 2017, it was reported that Crowe said ‘no’ to an offer of $25 million for his apartment, which includes a 35-metre marina berth. This place is not exactly a get-away-from-it-all abode for a movie star. Presumably Crowe has uninterrupted views of the hive that is the naval base and, if he were to look down, he could see a kayaker gawking up at his place.

  Wedged between two massive berthed cruisers, I realise I could probably paddle right under the wharf. I can even see the other side. But that seems like a short journey into deep trouble, and it’s gloomy under there. Instead, I paddle out of the bay, sticking close to the hedonists’ shoreline, until I’m back in the main harbour, heading for Fort Denison.

  WITH ITS sandstone walls and Martello tower, Fort Denison gives the impression that it owns the middle of the harbour, and it belongs here. Yet that isn’t how John Dunmore Lang, the impassioned Scottish-born clergyman, writer and politician, saw it. For he remembered what was there before a fort.

  ‘There was a remarkable rock or islet,’ he wrote in 1875. ‘A vast mass of grey weather-beaten rock, rising perpendicularly in a slender column to an elevation of seventy-five feet from the deep water.’

  When that rock was replaced by a mass of stones, John Dunmore Lang believed the work of God was destroyed by the folly of man.

  ‘I can never pass the island even yet without feeling indignant at the heartless deed which . . . can never be remedied,’ he thundered.

  The British had defaced the ‘remarkable rock’ with heartless deeds soon after they arrived. Convicts who had committed some minor misdemeanour were banished to ‘Rock Island’, as it was called, with nothing but bread and water, which, according to First Fleeter Jacob Nagle, was why it came to be known as Pinchgut. To give a gruesome warning to all sailing into the harbour, in 1796, the body of a murderer, Francis Morgan, was hanged from a gibbet until it was nothing but bones swinging in the breeze. According to the colony’s Deputy Judge-Advocate David Collins, the skeleton was far more terrifying to the Aboriginal people, who st
ayed away from the island they called Mat-te-wan-ye.

  It is not skeletons or ghosts that repel me from Fort Denison, but its sea-level armour of oysters on the rocks. That, and the wash of the passing ferries. I have nowhere to land. So Lieutenant Colonel George Barney’s creation has succeeded in warding off at least one vessel. For that is why the fort was built. It is the most conspicuous symbol in the harbour of a city’s fear that it was open to attack.

  On a map he drew within months of arriving in the colony at the end of 1835, Barney had identified Pinchgut as a place waiting to be fortified. But he, and everyone else, would have to wait for years. The fort would be built on not just rock but deception. To overcome budgetary constraints in the early stages of the project, Governor Gipps advised Barney to do some creative accounting to step around London, and, by the early 1840s, the Royal Engineer had launched into the work before funding had been approved. If Barney took a bulldozing approach to the bean-counters back in England, it was gentle compared with what he did to the island. He blew its head off, flattening the rock until it was close to the waterline.

  Work stalled when the focus of protecting Sydney shifted from the inner harbour to closer to the Heads. When a new Governor, Sir William Denison, arrived in 1855, he soon reversed that approach. With England embroiled in the Crimean War, concerns that a Russian fleet could sail into the harbour also helped resuscitate the project. Denison declared the anchorage in front of the town needed protecting, so Barney was back on the island. Perhaps in gratitude, as his fort took shape on the pancake rock, the engineer reckoned it deserved a better name than Pinchgut. And so ‘Fort Denison’ came to be. The project was finally completed in 1862, almost a quarter of a century after it began.

  The fort was built for action. Behind its 4-metre thick walls, the Martello tower housed three large guns, and below in the barracks were up to twenty-five Royal Artillerymen and their families. But the fort didn’t really see any action, and from 1881, its role changed, offering protection to shipping and a place to mark time and tides.