by Scott Bevan
William Dawes was more than an observer. He was a listener. He established a relationship with a young Gadigal woman, Patyegarang, and they taught each other their languages. Dawes scratched down what he learnt in his notebooks. What is apparent, in any language, is the intimacy the Englishman and the Gadigal woman shared. It is beautiful to read the local phrase for ‘You winked at me’, or how the action of warming your hand by a fire and then gently squeezing the fingers of another is summed up in one word, Putuwá. And while Dawes recorded how to say it, we are – as a nation – still learning how to enact this phrase: Gatu piryala, or ‘we two are talking to each other’.
On Dawes Point, the earthen redoubts were pounded and reinforced into something more substantial, as the defence complex was upgraded. It offered greater protection than the remnants of the incomplete Fort Phillip, further up the hill. When the fort was begun in the early 1800s, it was as much about offering protection from rebellious convicts as it was from enemies coming through the Heads. Yet within a couple of years, the project was abandoned, and it surrendered the hill to windmills. While Dawes Point was the command post for fortifications along the harbour, its guns never fired in anger. They were muzzled once and for all in the 1920s, when the area was cleared for the construction of Sydney Harbour Bridge.
The remnants of the fort, etched in the sandstone slabs and with a few mute guns pointing eastwards, now shelter under the great iron geometry of the Bridge’s southern approach. The Harbour View Hotel, which is crouching under the approach, is not where it has always been. The original pub had to be moved in 1925 for the Bridge. The silver lining was the hotel had a new, thirsty clientele – the workers. And the new location still had a harbour view.
Tracing Dawes Point in my kayak, I crane my neck and watch the sky turn into iron. No matter how many times I paddle under the Bridge, I’m in awe, as though I’m seeing it for the first time. The arch is majestic, but it is when you’re underneath that you feel the power of the Bridge, the sum of all those straining muscles, all that sweat, all the risk, it took to build it. Not that I can ever look up for too long, as I also feel the power, and the potential sinking sensation, of the harbour ricocheting off the sandstone seawall.
Many have paddled here before me. One of the colony’s earliest watermen, the legendary Billy Blue, rowed his passengers from the North Shore to Dawes Point. The watermen were among the original taxis of Sydney, transporting people across the harbour, or from ship to shore and back. The colonial surgeon and author Peter Cunningham noted that many of Sydney Harbour’s watermen had formerly plied their trade on the Thames. In the early years of the 20th century, a watermen’s shelter was built on Dawes Point, but it was already on its way to becoming a memorial. The trade was dying, its fate all but sealed by the Bridge shadowing the watermen’s shelter. Yet watermen – and women – still take passengers around the harbour. The waves of the passing ferries and water taxis bouncing off the seawall jostle me to not forget that.
I paddle into the bay that for many years had no name. It was simply the bay between Dawes Point and Millers Point. That it was close to Sydney town, particularly the earthy delights scattered in the lanes up the hill and over into The Rocks, yet it was a little removed, would have been a reason it was a popular mooring area with whaling ships in the middle of the 19th century. The ships’ cashed-up sailors may have been welcome but the stench of the cargo was not.
In this bay with no name, Captain Robert Towns, a trader and whaler who founded Townsville, built the first wharf around this area in 1845, and soon the bay had more and more private wharves spiking into it. In this part of the harbour, out of sight of the authorities, there was a lot of smuggling, including of crew members. Convicts could pose as seamen or stow away, but, as both the town and maritime trade grew, increasingly the problem for captains was their sailors deserting in Sydney, losing themselves in the sandstone warren beyond the wharves. Those crew members had to be replaced, by hook or by crook. There were quite a few crooks involved in procuring sailors. They were known as crimps, working out of, or milling about, sailors’ boarding houses and inns. The Sydney Morning Herald reported in 1906 of a parliamentary debate about how some boarding-house keepers and publicans in Sydney and Newcastle were involved in the trade. The sailors’ welfare group, the Mission to Seamen, wrote in response that more could and should be done to help mariners while they were on shore, and to stop ‘the plundering of sailors’. Usually the crimps’ method was persuasion with money, but occasionally there were reports of some poor sailor – and even landlubbers – waking up on a ship, having been knocked out with grog, or with a blow to the head, and carried to the harbour.
I walk, and climb, from the waterfront, along dog’s-leg lanes that are like dried-up creek beds and on streets flanked with tightly packed terraces to a pub that has been around since the days of sail and whalers. The Hero of Waterloo hotel is a wedge of history. The pub was built in 1842 by a Scot, George Paton, and it opened a year later. Paton was a master stonemason. He had convicts cleave out blocks of sandstone from the nearby Argyle Cut, a chasm being hacked out of the rock to ease passage from one side of the peninsula to the other. At the pub, the convict stonemasons’ efforts can be still seen etched into the blocks. Paton left his own mark around town; he was involved in the building of the Garrison Church just up the road in 1840, the Sydney Post Office, and the Australian Museum.
Inside the Hero of Waterloo, there is a distinct air of the colonial. The floors are wooden, the walls are sandstone, and great timber beams, like cross-trees on a sailing ship, buttress the ceiling. There is a fireplace that has blackened the blocks above it. I sit near a large sash window, sipping my beer (a James Squire, in deference to the convict brewer) and look at the Georgian and Victorian houses across the road. Yet it is the raw but warm lumps of stone and wood cocooning me that conjures up the past. I imagine this place filled with unleashed sailors going mad over grog and women. And all being well, they stumbled out of here, back to their own ship. Or they may have ended up on another ship. I had heard rumours of a tunnel from the pub to the then-unnamed bay. The story goes it was used for smuggling grog but also for ‘shanghaiing’ sailors. I ask the bartender if the story is true, and he points to a trapdoor in the floor, just near the bar. He tells me the tunnel was blocked off many years ago, so no one knows its exact route. I tell him I’m relieved, but he jokes I would’ve been safe, because I haven’t drunk enough. I order another beer.
For as long as there were those leading sailors into temptation, others tried to save them. Among the protectors were the clergymen and volunteers of the Mission to Seamen. In their memoirs, sailors write appreciatively of the Mission workers’ hospitality, and how they would take ships’ apprentices, or brassbounders, on picnics with local young women to the Blue Mountains. One old English-born captain, William H.S. Jones, recalled how meaningful a Mission picnic was for him, and other ‘lads so far from home’, during his first visit to Australia in 1906, especially ‘after our months of drudgery, monotony and anxieties afloat’.
The organisation is now the Mission to Seafarers, and it is still on the peninsula, huddled near the water at the bay that once had no name, still helping mariners. One of the Mission’s workers, Gary King, says the shipping industry has dramatically changed. For one thing, the commercial vessels now mostly dock not in Sydney Harbour but in the waterway rejected by Arthur Phillip as less suitable for ships, Botany Bay. And once in port, sailors are stripped of one luxury they used to have: time.
‘It’s a totally different world,’ Gary says. ‘The seafarers used to have longer R&R [rest and recreation], and we had accommodation for them. They might have been in port for days or weeks. Now sometimes they have only four hours. They’re in and out. So all they want is to have a quick look at the city, to be tourists for a few hours, buy souvenirs, and phone or email their families.’
So Gary and his colleagues drive a small bus to Port Botany, pick up ships’ crews, give them
a quick tour and bring them to the Mission headquarters. There, amid ships’ models, artefacts and mementos of a more gently paced but perilous time in seafaring, the crew members can contact home, before they are driven back to their ship and push out to sea once more.
While the seafarers would have a little more time ashore in Sydney if their ships docked in the harbour rather than Port Botany, Gary says that would not be practical. In 1788, Arthur Phillip may have considered the harbour big enough for a thousand ships to moor securely, but in the 21st century, the vessels are much larger, and Gary says it would be one congested waterway if they were all squeezing in and out of the port.
‘It’s all romantic when you see ships coming in, but you can’t contemplate that now,’ Gary muses. ‘It’s a different city to what it was, and the harbour was getting just too crowded.’
Still, with commercial shipping having largely headed south to Port Botany, I question how much Sydney has been diminished as a harbour town, now that it doesn’t have sailors from around the world wandering, and having a good time, along its waterfront. But Gary puts that notion in perspective.
‘Even if the ships were coming into here, that culture has gone, that kind of seafaring has gone,’ he counters. ‘The turnover is so quick.’
Gary says as the industry continues to change, and time is compressed ever tighter, the Mission’s role is more important than ever for seafarers.
‘We’re giving them a little break from the monotony of the ship,’ Gary concludes, his words echoing what Captain Jones had said in praising the Mission’s work more than a century earlier.
THE BAY between Dawes Point and Millers Point finally received its official name years after the Sydney Harbour Trust resumed the waterfront and much of the peninsula in 1901. It came to be known as Walsh Bay, named after the Trust’s first chief engineer and later commissioner, H.D. Walsh. Yet the change to the bay was more than in name. The clutter of private wharves in the bay was resumed by the port authority. The design of many of the old wharves provided high-density living for rats. After the plague outbreak, those old wharves were demolished. Walsh devised new wharves, as he did for other bays and inlets around the port, and a rat-proof sea wall was installed. Thousands of tonnes of silt had to be dredged and barged out to sea to accommodate larger ships. Just over a decade after the Trust took control of the port, Walsh Bay began to resemble a giant hand, with finger wharves stretching out into the bay. The wharves were bejewelled with handsome stores crowned with gabled roofs, and the past was pushed aside along the waterfront to make way for new buildings and a series of roads to transport cargo. From the early years of the 20th century, the world’s ships slipped in between those fingers. Yet as the years pushed on, the wharves became arthritic and increasingly neglected, as shipping embraced containers and unloaded their cargo elsewhere. Walsh Bay became a backwater on the doorstep of the city.
As the century drew to an end, the bay was rediscovered and revitalised. At Wharf Number 1, a hotel was built, luxury apartments sprouted on Wharf 6/7, as well as along the shoreline, offices and restaurants colonised the area, and at Wharf 4/5, members of the Sydney Theatre Company and Sydney Dance Company began treading the boards.
Along Pier 2/3, there is a stretch called Theatre Walk, and plaques wearing names such as Nevin and Cracknell, Livermore and Blanchett are spaced along the deck. It is also a thoroughfare of anglers. Having barely glanced at the gilded names at their feet, the fishing folk form a curious democracy at the end of the wharf, each finding their own space to cast a line and keep to themselves. That is, until a line tightens. Individuals suddenly become a team.
‘Quick, someone grab that net and bring it over,’ I hear someone yell. A net is brought over, just as a young man lands a fish, which looks as though it has swum through a rainbow and absorbed its colours.
‘It’s an amberjack,’ a middle-aged fellow explains. The young man receives high-fives and handshakes. A few take photos on their phones.
‘Don’t see many amberjack around here,’ mutters another man. He says that amberjack are more of a tropical fish. The middle-aged bloke grabs a measuring mat to check the legal size limits on an amberjack.
‘It’s legal!’ he declares. The amberjack measures in at about 45 centimetres.
Then, just as quickly as it had formed, the team drifts apart like bubbles and returns to the satisfied insularity of fishing – until the next big one is hooked and help is needed to land it.
ON THE peninsula, no section has been more dramatically transformed than the area now called Barangaroo. For decades, a massive block of concrete imposed its mass on the water along the peninsula’s western shore, providing somewhere for shipping containers to be stacked. The concrete apron was ripped up in the early years of the 21st century, and the waterfront is being redeveloped. In twenty-two hectares of waterfront land, there is a marked contrast in what ‘redevelopment’ means. To the south, towards Darling Harbour, a cluster of towers has risen. The developers have explained how the buildings’ designs were inspired by the shapes to be found on and by the harbour, from yachts’ sails to cockle shells. Yet from the water, it is hard for me not to see the buildings as being the shape of big piles of money.
To the north, however, there is an alternate future. The headland has been reshaped into something verging on the incredible in this city: a return to an approximation of how this foreshore once was, before there were wharves and ships, before there were towers and people living and working on top of each other. It has been turned into parkland, but not flat green expanses, like what you find at the head of most bays around the harbour; it is an undulating, rocky, straggly landscape. The 6-hectare reserve has been meticulously sculpted, including the placement of about 10,000 sandstone blocks and the planting of more than 75,000 native plants, to create the impression that it is very natural and attractively unkempt. It is the Sydney Harbour equivalent of a hipster.
Over the years, while paddling around the headland, I have been watching the area’s transformation. The unremitting wintry grey of the concrete was replaced by the formation of a hill that progressively turned green and shaggy with foliage. The shoreline was unshackled from the boring certainty of a straight line, instead squiggling along the water’s edge and sprinkled with large crumbs of sandstone. I have nuzzled into the small cove that has been scooped out along the reserve’s southern shores. While the cove itself is a recent creation, or recreation, its name is a reminder of the many generations of paddlers on Sydney Harbour. It is called Nawi Cove, named after the bark canoes of the original harbour people. Sitting in my own version of a nawi in the cove, I have looked up and around at the new-old terrain.
For a time, the emerging landscape was loomed over by the Sydney Harbour control tower. The building was erected in the early 1970s and was almost 90 metres high. It was nicknamed The Pill, because it controlled berths in the harbour. The tower had the shape of a World War Two German stick grenade, and its critics believed it had about the same effect on the surrounding area’s aesthetic appeal. The tower was no longer used for controlling vessel movements after 2011, so when the reserve was taking shape, it was decided to bring the tower down. Some, including the National Trust, fought to save the tower, arguing it symbolised Sydney’s shipping tradition, and that there was so little left of the harbour’s industrial heritage. The National Trust posed alternative uses, such as it being a viewing tower or part of a Museum of Sydney Harbour. However, in 2016, the tower’s concrete column was encased in scaffolding and dismantled.
From Nawi Cove, I can also see the crowded western face of Millers Point. I see Hickson Road, which was cut and pushed along the shoreline a hundred years earlier, and it passes a colonial sandstone warehouse converted to offices. I look up at the tiers of heritage, including the workers’ cottages built by the Sydney Harbour Trust to replace those it had knocked down as part of the peninsula’s redevelopment. Crowning the hill is the observatory. Yet I experience a greater sense of histor
y by stepping onto the sandstone shoreline and walking up to the headland at Barangaroo Reserve. From here, you can see all the way to the past. As former Prime Minister and champion of the headland reserve Paul Keating told the crowd at its official opening in 2015, this was where many Aboriginal people had lived. They could travel the short distances in their canoes to Ballast Point to the west, and over to Balls Head on the North Shore, and, in between, Goat Island. So Mr Keating saw this park as helping reconnect these key points of geography, and of history. He also thought the redevelopment would change how we looked at the harbour.
‘We always looked north through Circular Quay,’ Paul Keating said. ‘Now I think we’ll look west.’
The area’s very name is a link to the past. Barangaroo was a Cammeraygal woman with an indomitable presence, much to the consternation of the British arrivals. She was disdainful of many of their ways and commands, and she apparently ignored their appeals for her to wear clothes. Yet her husband, Bennelong, tried to straddle both cultures, which she didn’t like.
