by Scott Bevan
Within a couple of months, the settlement formed from another society’s cast-offs and criminals was actually taking root on the shores of Sydney Cove. You can see the rough indications of that in a map drawn in March 1788, by Lieutenant William Bradley, marking the placement of tents and buildings, the vegetable gardens, the mooring positions of the ships, and the depth of water in the cove. The marks on the map are made clearer by a watercolour Bradley painted. Sydney Cove, Port Jackson, 1788 depicts a band of cleared bush, making way for a few buildings around the shores. In the bay sits a moored ship, while another is being careened on the eastern shore. And in the middle of the image, fluttering on the harbour’s edge, is the Union Jack.
Louise Anemaat, from the State Library of New South Wales, showed me that watercolour in Bradley’s journal. Wearing gloves, Louise also extracted from the archives some sheaves wrapped in wonder and anticipation. They were letters of those first arrivals, including Phillip’s correspondence with the Marquis of Lansdowne, praising the harbour. In that one famous phrase from the letter, ‘Here a Thousand Sail of the Line may ride in the most perfect Security’, lies proof, Louise reckons, that the Governor always saw this place as much more than a dumping ground for Britain’s unwanted. There was a strong strategic and geopolitical reason for the settlement’s existence. This land and its resources, including the harbour, had to be protected from rival powers. Anyway, as she added, this experiment had cost so much money, sending almost 1500 souls to the other side of the globe, Sydney had to succeed.
Arthur Phillip may have believed in what Sydney could become, but plenty didn’t. Along with the dreamers on those first ships were the doubters. Major Robert Ross, the officer in charge of the marines, was one of the biggest. Ross often argued with Phillip, and he hated New South Wales. Where Phillip saw the buds of an exciting future in a new land, Ross viewed a place where nature was nearly worn out. What’s more, he thought this scheme of shipping people to what was a ‘vile country’ was a ludicrous folly. ‘I think it will be cheaper to feed the convicts on turtle and venison at the London Tavern than be at the expense of sending them here,’ Major Ross wrote to Secretary of State Nepean in July 1788.
The doubters sailed away; the dreamers prevailed. Their memories shape how Louise Anemaat sees Sydney Cove, especially its crowded and paved head, Circular Quay.
‘I find it really hard to walk around Circular Quay and not spend the whole time imagining the beach that was there,’ Louise says. ‘It was a sandy beach, and you can imagine back then dogs swimming out around the boats, the waves on the sand, the boats clinking away in Sydney Cove, and I imagine all of that because of the letters.’
Bobbing in Pulbah Raider on the agitated water just off Bennelong Point, I too can imagine the boats clinking. I can hear other sounds from the water as well, particularly the rumbling beat of ferries pushing in and out of the cove. And as a few of them pass, I see the memory of the First Fleet, in the names of the ferries – Supply, Sirius and Charlotte – and in the unhappy looks among their cargo, only they belong to commuters not convicts. I can’t paddle into the cove. It is out of bounds to all but authorised vessels. Yet long before there was a forbidding invisible line stretching between beacons on Bennelong and Dawes points, long before the names Supply or Sirius were seen in the cove, paddlers would have presided over these waters. Soon after the First Fleet arrived, in an effort to put a figure on those who were here before them, Watkin Tench noted how a survey was undertaken around the harbour, and sixty-seven canoes were counted. Although Tench himself conceded there were doubts about the accuracy of that figure.
Still, the canoes of the first Australians outlasted Sirius on Sydney Cove. The ship had survived so many close shaves and scrapes. She had not only journeyed all the way from Portsmouth to Sydney Cove with her convict cargo, but she had helped the young colony survive by sailing to Cape Town and back for supplies. Then in 1790, while on a voyage to the infant satellite settlement on Norfolk Island, Sirius came to grief on rocks in, of all places, Sydney Bay. The anchor and a gun from Sirius were recovered from the waters off Norfolk Island and brought back to Sydney. These artefacts of the First Fleet’s flagship are now only a stone’s throw from where Sirius first moored. Her anchor and gun are barely noticed memorials, marooned in the deep shadows of the park at Macquarie Place. In early colonial days, this place was near the waterfront, before the cove was beaten back several hundred metres by land reclamation works in the 1800s. More prominent in the park is an obelisk that Governor Macquarie had erected in 1818, ‘TO RECORD THAT ALL THE PUBLIC ROADS LEADING TO THE INTERIOR OF THE COLONY ARE MEASURED FROM IT’. Unlike his predecessors, Macquarie was not a navy man; he had risen through army ranks. So it is no surprise he wanted to build roads, to turn away from the sea and look inwards to open up the country. But salt water remained the lifeblood – and the lifeline – of the colony at the time. Overlooking Macquarie Place from a niche in the Victorian-era Lands Department building across the road is a statue of the colony’s first Governor. I can almost imagine a tear being shed from Phillip’s stone eyes at the sight of those all-but-forgotten relics of his flagship, or perhaps he stares in wonder at how much the cove he chose as the colony’s birthplace has shrunk and been reshaped since his time.
Phillip’s belief that the cove was capable of accommodating quays at which the largest ships could unload was slowly realised. Perhaps the tardiness to build quays was set by others’ belief that nature had already provided what was required. The harbour ‘possesses the best anchorage the whole way’, declared William Charles Wentworth. ‘It is said, and I believe with truth, to have a hundred coves, and is capable of containing all the shipping in the world.’ For many years in Sydney Cove, cargo was unloaded from moored ships onto lighters and brought ashore at a public facility on the western shore, the Hospital Wharf. There was also the Governor’s Wharf on the southern shore. A merchant, Robert Campbell, who was reshaping the northern stretch of the western shore with his storehouses, had built a wharf by 1802. It was the first private wharf in the colony. The practice of loading and unloading goods out on the water also reduced the opportunity for convicts to escape on ships, or to steal from them.
The first governors had also put in place measures to prevent the harbour being transformed from a form of imprisonment into a means of escape. They banned the building of boats. Yet Phillip had quickly realised boats were needed to transport supplies from the new farming area at Parramatta. So Rose Hill Packet, or ‘The Lump’, was built in a yard at the head of Sydney Cove in 1789. A naval shipyard was built on the cove’s western shores in the late 1790s under the orders of Governor Hunter. Gradually merchants and tradesmen crafted their own vessels. Official bans were no match for the imperatives of living by the water.
The small shipyards, including the government’s own facility, were pushed out of the cove by development along the shore. The water itself was becoming more clogged with shipping, but the cove was also silting up. The Tank Stream, the creek that Phillip had identified as a reason for settling here and that had sustained life in the early colony, was itself dying. The stream’s fate was sealed as soon as the settlers stepped ashore, and its death was foretold by one of those first arrivals, David Collins.
‘The spot chosen for this purpose [of clearing ground] was at the head of the cove,’ Collins wrote, ‘near the run of fresh water, which stole silently along through a very thick wood, the stillness of which had then, for the first time since the creation, been interrupted by the rude sound of the labourer’s axe, and the downfall of its ancient inhabitants . . .’
The clearing of land upstream and the sum of unreasonable demands heaped upon the waterway, and dumped into it, by residents and businesses along its course ruined it. The stream that entered the cove in its south-western corner became a stormwater drain. The creek was buried under a growing city and effectively killed. But not quite. As writer Delia Falconer points out in her wonderful love letter to Sydney, the Tank Strea
m is a ghost creek, haunting the foundations of buildings built over it.
Through the 19th century, the trading and maritime industries clustered ever more tightly around the cove’s edges. And the edges themselves were changed to meet the industries’ needs. A seawall kept creeping around the waterfront, reaching the Tank Stream. George Barney, the engineer reshaping and rearranging a number of landmarks on and around the harbour, had arranged for sandstone he was blasting off Pinchgut to be transported across the water for the Sydney Cove project. The marshy land behind the seawall was reclaimed. The Tank Stream’s muddy mouth was cleaned up and scraped out, and the wall and wharves extended along the cove’s western shore. By the early 1850s, Semi-Circular Quay was created.
In time, the quay lost the ‘semi’ from its name but gained ever greater importance. On the reclaimed land rose fine stone buildings dedicated to collecting and making money: Customs House, staring directly, expectantly, at the docked ships; along the eastern shore were bond stores perfumed with bush paddocks and lanolin, as they were packed with wool to be exported; on the western shore multi-storey warehouses waited to receive what the world brought through the Heads; and, just near Customs House, stood the waterfront edifice that was the Mort & Co storehouse. Thomas Mort was involved in many aspects of shipping. He repaired the ships in his dry dock at Balmain, he stored and sold what was brought in their hulls, and he filled those hulls with Australian produce, particularly wool. He is credited with developing refrigeration for the export of perishable goods. So in his business career, Mort rode both on the sheep’s back and the ship’s deck.
His Circular Quay building was not just filled with wealth; it was dressed to look rich, with grand colonnades and arches. The store had such an imposing presence on the waterfront that it seemed it would be there for all time. It wasn’t. On that site is the AMP building, which was the first to reach for the sky in the city in the early 1960s, after the 150-foot height limit was lifted. Perhaps Mort would not have minded his showpiece being toppled for an insurance giant, for he had been a founder of the Australian Mutual Provident Society. The memory of Mort still holds a small piece of real estate nearby. A statue of him, erected in 1883, five years after his death, stands in Macquarie Place. He is faced away from the harbour, and where his beautiful storehouse used to be.
By the 1870s, Circular Quay had been refashioned sufficiently for a newspaper columnist to declare that if Trafalgar Square were the finest site in Europe, then this was the best in Australia. But it wasn’t good enough. It needed ‘commercial palaces’, paved frontage and better landing stairs to replace the ‘slippery and dangerous wooden structure up which our visitors have to scramble when arriving from the ships lying in the harbour’.
‘Perhaps the next generation may suggest that at least a portion of our steam-ferry system is capable of improvement, especially as regards the pier arrangements,’ the columnist ‘Uralla’ huffed.
Uralla would have been pleased with the developments over the coming years. The ferries that had sidled in between the larger trade ships to pick up and drop off passengers gradually insinuated themselves deeper into the heart of the quay. Actually, they had already lodged themselves in the heart of a city. The ferries connected one shore of the harbour to the other, and millions of Sydneysiders to their routines. Sydney functioned, in no small part, because of the ferries. They were the city’s bridge before there was the Bridge. The ferry wharves at Circular Quay were upgraded and, in the 1890s, they were reordered, so that the sequence corresponded with the destinations. The Parramatta and Lane Cove rivers ferries were at the far western end, the Watsons Bay and southern shore craft berthed at the far eastern wharf. In that way, ferries didn’t cross each other dangerously in the quay. On Bennelong and Dawes points were docks for horse ferries.
The numbers using the ferries were enormous. By 1890, about five million passengers and 378,500 carts and buggies, along with 43,800 horse riders crossed the harbour annually. Within twenty years, those passenger numbers had more than doubled, stoking the argument for a harbour bridge. The visiting British author D.H. Lawrence observed through his main character in Kangaroo how the city’s inhabitants ‘seem to slip like fishes from one side of the harbour to the other’. More than eight decades after the Bridge opened, the ferries remain a defining element of harbour life, carrying commuters and tourists on about fifteen million journeys annually. The joy of the ferry journey has remained constant, but the view of the destination has dramatically changed.
Approaching Circular Quay on a ferry deck, there are the ‘commercial palaces’ the 19th century columnist Uralla had wanted. The buildings must offer wonderful harbour views for their inhabitants. But for those of us on the harbour, they forbid us to see far up the hill into the CBD, or to get a sense of the rills of a city running down to the water. It wasn’t like this a century earlier, when the towers were but stubs and the view was embracing.
‘From the harbour, city towers dominated the skyline – St Mary’s Cathedral, the Queen Victoria Building dome, the Town Hall, Post Office, and near the Quay, the Lands Office tower,’ recalled the artist and poetic observer Lloyd Rees. ‘At times the Quay could be very beautiful – especially in the evening peak hours of winter, when in the dusk the ferries would fan out from Sydney Cove like slow-moving clusters of golden rockets and spangle their lights across the velvet waters.’
Scything across the towers’ feet is the Cahill Expressway. When it opened in 1958, the roadway was considered a mark of progress in the city, making life easier for those in cars. A stunning harbour view even swishes across your side window as you drive east on the expressway. Yet from the water, the Cahill Expressway, with its rumbling underbelly of the City Circle railway line, is a perennial scar. It diminishes the sense of arrival that should course through us every time we disembark in what is, after all, the birthplace of Australia. That streak of concrete cuts the CBD off from the harbour, and it slices through our connection to the past. It is a miserable greeting to Circular Quay.
What remains around the quay, as it has ever since the beach and mudflats began being transformed into the entrance to a harbour town, is the bustle. The musty odours of livestock and mud have been replaced by the aromas of coffee and cooking from the cafés and restaurants. The clatter of buggies and carts has been long drowned out by the guttural noises of motor vehicles and trains. Where the ferries berth, and along the eastern shore, you would have once seen bowsprits, hanging like abundant branches over the wharves, and the sleek lines of clippers with legendary names such as Cutty Sark and Thermopylae, accepting cargoes of wool and the challenge of setting record sailing times to England. Their sails would eventually wrinkle and fall limp, becalmed by the age of steam.
And there are the people, transiting from home to work, from water to land, from one world to another, and back again. It is always a slightly disorienting, labyrinthine walk around the quay, being jostled by rushing commuters, parrying around tourist groups. Faces, in all their wonderful diversity, form and drift away as you move through the crowd. The quay has always been about the faces, as sailors from around the globe poured off their ships and sauntered and swayed on sea-legs up into Sydney town. Faces tattooed or weather-creased, skin of all pigments, hair from black to snow white, they all melded, sometimes clashed, around the quay. As an English old salt, Stan Hugill, wrote, ‘the Circular Quay Sailortown was infested with all sorts of bums and stiffs, as well as sailormen, ex-convicts, remittance men, gold-robbers, bushrangers on a town jaunt, deserters, Larrikins’. Yet not all were welcomed ashore. In 1849, thousands gathered in mizzling rain to protest the harbour being ‘polluted with the presence of that floating hell – a convict ship’. The protestors wanted no more transportation of convicts, and it called for a ship in the cove, Hashemy, to leave without offloading its human cargo. Water cleanses everything, even memory, for in that crowd there would have been some who chose to forget how they had arrived in Sydney Cove. Four decades later, another convi
ct ship, Success, was moored in the cove. Only it was a tourist attraction, filled not with wretched souls in rotting clothes but wax figures and convict artefacts. The ageing former bushranger Harry Power was apparently a living exhibit on the floating museum, although he denied having ever been transported as a convict.
But mostly Circular Quay was, and is, a place of welcome, and of farewell. From the quay, the young have embarked to serve and fight, even before Australia was a nation. In 1885, when New South Wales sent a contingent to support the Empire in the Sudan War, it was estimated that two in every three Sydneysiders gathered along the procession route and at the wharves to see off the soldiers.
When there was peace in the world but still restlessness in youthful hearts, the young would board liners in the cove, travelling great distances to find themselves. Around the quay, set into the promenade, is a string of plaques dedicated to writers with a connection to Australia, particularly the harbour, in one way or another. The Writers’ Walk begins with Dorothea Mackellar’s ‘I love a Sunburnt Country’, and it features a couple of plaques to visiting authors, including Joseph Conrad, who, as a seaman, stepped ashore here a number of times and in later years dipped into his memories of the harbour. Conrad’s plaque features a quote from his memoir, The Mirror of the Sea: ‘Sydney Harbour . . . one of the finest, most beautiful, vast, and safe bays the sun had ever shone upon.’ Yet the plaque that most poignantly shows how the harbour is both a place of transition and an anchor for the soul is that of Clive James. The plaque for the expatriate writer, poet and broadcaster is between wharves 3 and 4, offering a view over to the overseas passenger terminal on the western shore, which most days has a massive cruise ship presiding over it, engorging or offloading a couple of thousand passengers on brief holidays. Clive James set off from here on New Year’s Eve, 1961, bound for England and glory. He has never returned to live in Sydney, but, then again, as the inscription on his plaque shows, he has never left either. It is a quote from the final page of his Unreliable Memoirs: ‘In Sydney Harbour . . . the yachts will be racing on the crushed diamond water under a sky the texture of powdered sapphires. It would be churlish not to concede that the same abundance of natural blessings which gave us the energy to leave has every right to call us back.’ The harbour continues to call Clive James home. He wrote in his will that he wanted his ashes to be scattered off Dawes Point. He could end his voyage just near where it had begun.
