The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  Barangaroo was also a fisherwoman. She and all the fishing women from the harbour groups have been honoured by Peta Strachan, the artistic director of the Jannawi Dance Clan. Peta conceived a performance piece called Net Fishing Dance, which she and her troupe performed on the Barangaroo headland on Australia Day in 2016. Like the harbour itself, the dance had a compelling energy. The women performers, wearing flowing dresses the colour of ochre, danced with a fishing net. The choreography gave the net fluency, creating the impression the performers were dancing with a wave.

  Peta has told me she conceived the dance to acknowledge and celebrate the skills and athleticism of the women, as they fished from their nawi, sometimes with their babies on their backs, and cooking what they caught, feeding their families.

  ‘Their skills were amazing,’ says Peta, who is a Dharug woman. ‘They were pretty impressive. Imagine doing all of that now.’

  Peta herself doesn’t fish. Instead, she developed her ideas for the dance from research, reading about Barangaroo and other harbour fisherwomen. The women would make their own fishing equipment, including lines from the fibre of trees and plants, and hooks from shells. Just as the harbour nourished the women and their families, those women, their stories, and their relationship with the harbour have fed the soul of Peta Strachan and led to her Net Fishing Dance. It also reiterated what Peta has always known and felt: the harbour is a special place.

  ‘It is the connection to all the different clans,’ she says.

  And through her dance, Peta helps all of us connect to each other, and to the harbour. While watching Net Fishing Dance being performed by the Jannawi performers on the Barangaroo headland, I thought that this was the realisation of what Paul Keating had said at the reserve’s opening: ‘This is going to be an absolutely magic area.’

  14

  DARLING HARBOUR TO GOAT ISLAND

  THE NOTION of Sydney Harbour as a major commercial port has been largely carried away on the king tides of history and progress. But from my kayak, I find traces of it in the water and in snippets along the shore around Darling Harbour. Which is where I’d least expected to find any sense of what this place used to be. This stretch of the harbour has undergone not just some serious cosmetic surgery through the years; it has had a character transplant.

  The shores of this long bay gouging into the south-west edges of the CBD were once a source of food for the original inhabitants. They collected cockles along the tidal flats. Before it was known as Darling Harbour, the British called this Cockle Bay. The name has been retained for one section of the waterway, which is still a source of food. It’s lined with restaurants and bars.

  Food was a motivation for the development of Cockle Bay in early colonial days. The first major wharf beyond Sydney Cove was built on the eastern shore in 1811. Produce was unloaded and taken up the hill to the marketplace. Through the 19th century, a ragged string of wharves and piers spread along the shores. They were the conduit between the water and the businesses that sprouted on the harbour’s edge. As well as accepting farm produce from up Parramatta and Lane Cove rivers, the wharves held timber unloaded for boatyards, coal for industries, including the Australian Gas Light Company’s works on the shore, and grains for flour mills. Multi-storey warehouses impressed themselves on the waterfront, and steam ships that had traced the coast and traversed the seas docked in Darling Harbour. This waterway became clogged with commerce. Lighters and cranes loaded and unloaded cargo, and the waterfront factories belched a Dickensian smoke into the sky.

  When the Sydney Harbour Trust redeveloped the wharves in the first years of the 20th century, it only intensified activity in and around Darling Harbour.

  ‘The ordinary observer of the new wharves of Darling Harbour . . . cannot fail to see what a metamorphosis the foreshores will present when a continuous system of similar structures, flanked by a wide thoroughfare, is completed, and what a convenience that will be for the maritime commerce of Sydney,’ declared a report in Sydney’s Evening News.

  While there had been reclamation work around this bay since the mid-1800s, Darling Harbour’s head was filled in during the 1920s, using spoil from the city’s underground railway construction project. That made room for more wharves and stores, and an extensive rail freight system.

  If Sydney Cove was the gateway to the city, Darling Harbour was the tradesmen’s entrance. As Circular Quay and its arms were increasingly beautified or at least made monumental, the hard graft of the maritime trade was pushed around the peninsula into Darling Harbour and the tendrils of water attached to it. Yet in the course of the 20th century, as the city grew and ships bulked up with containerised cargoes, pressure increased on the port. That was relieved by diverting ships to Port Botany. Darling Harbour began to stagnate, an industrial has-been of rusting rail lines, rotting wharves and warehouses filled with little more than cobwebs and dust.

  Where water is involved in Sydney, nothing stays neglected for long. Through the late 1970s and into the 1980s, the southern end of Darling Harbour was brought back to life to handle a form of commercial cargo that had been rarely seen in this part of the harbour: tourists. The New South Wales Government, along with private money, set about redeveloping more than 50 hectares of waterfront land, forming an administrative authority and drafting legislation for the construction of tourist, entertainment, cultural and commercial facilities. Some people hated it, believing the waterfront development was far removed from the soul of the harbour’s heritage; indeed, removed from any sort of soul. But the government viewed this as a Bicentennial gift to the nation, and it was opened to the public just ten days before Australia Day, 1988. As a tourist attraction, it is the gift that keeps on giving, bringing in millions of visitors annually. As a development, it continues to divide opinion.

  From the water, at least, Darling Harbour is pumping. The lifeblood, however, has changed. It is a working harbour, dedicated to recreation. I paddle past finger wharves populated with showboats, whale-watching boats, sightseeing boats, charter boats, water taxis, and ferries.

  Ahead of me, spanning the harbour like a portcullis, is the historic Pyrmont Bridge. A bridge has been here since the mid-1800s, carrying traffic across the water from the city to the west. The original wooden structure was replaced by this iron bridge in 1902. It had a swing-span mechanism to allow larger ships through to the head of Darling Harbour. The bridge now carries only pedestrians but it still opens, basically to allow through yachts and large cruisers. Which provides another tourist attraction, as crowds stand at the barriers of the split bridge, watching a mast glide past just in front of them.

  Standing sentinel on each side of the harbour are buildings with roofs that crest and roll like waves. The one on the city shore is an aquarium. Having somewhere to be within comfortable viewing distance of the mysteries of the deep right beside the harbour makes sense. That’s what the president of the local Linnaean Society thought back in 1879, when he declared in a speech, ‘there are few places in the world in which the requisite buildings could be placed with such advantage for the supply of all conceivable forms of marine life for exhibition to a large city population, such as in Sydney’.

  The building on the Pyrmont shore is the Australian National Maritime Museum. Inside are thousands of exhibits, tracing the country’s relationship with water. Outside is a flotilla of historic boats, from yachts to a boat used by South Vietnamese asylum seekers to reach Australia, from the replica of James Cook’s Endeavour to two decommissioned navy ships, the destroyer HMAS Vampire and the submarine HMAS Onslow. I have paddled to Onslow’s stern. It is like creeping up on a sea monster, its black flanks forbidding. I have also kayaked around the Endeavour replica, looking up through the geometry of its rigging, and peering at the windows along the lavishly decorated stern to the captain’s cabin, imagining Cook sitting in there, making marks on a chart, tracing a line towards the future and into history.

  The museum’s wharves are at their most beguiling when it is hosti
ng the Classic and Wooden Boat Festival. I have paddled in among the boats on display, placing my Kevlar and fibreglass craft almost within touching distance of some legends crafted from timber. Among the vessels are Halvorsen cruisers, preened and polished like nautical show dogs, and small yachts with gigantic reputations. I fawn over Kathleen Gillett, a double-ended, wooden cruising ketch, which was born on the banks of Parramatta River and sailed around the world by maritime artist Jack Earl. I see Anitra V, a timber yacht also built on Parramatta River at the Halvorsen family’s boatyard and raced by the brothers Trygve and Magnus Halvorsen in a string of Sydney to Hobart races. And there is an intriguing motor boat, Mount Pleasant. She has an intriguing aura, and an extraordinary history, as I learn from her owner, Simon Mitchell, who is standing at her stern.

  Simon has made his money in finance and now spends much of his time messing about on boats, particularly this century-old one.

  ‘You know what BOAT stands for?’ he asks, before answering. ‘Bust Out Another Thousand!’

  Simon should know. He has spent the past few years and a stack of money restoring Mount Pleasant on the state’s South Coast. Like a proud parent, he shows me photos of her restoration, from a worn-out shell to the royal-blue-hulled beauty she is today. While he was restoring Mount Pleasant, Simon tried to balance respecting her past and incorporating modern comforts.

  ‘One of the dilemmas was what to conserve, where to compromise, because we’re not a museum,’ he says, as he points behind. ‘Look! Period detail. USB chargers!’

  Simon is a generous soul, constantly inviting festival visitors on board his 12-metre boat for a look below deck and encouraging them to open the door with the fine glass panels to admire the fancy shower. He says he installed it principally to win his partner over to the idea of cruising.

  I must have been sufficiently impressed by the handiwork, because Simon invites me to cruise on Mount Pleasant the following day on a special tour. This is a homecoming and 100th birthday present for her. Simon had researched the life – or lives – of Mount Pleasant, and now he is going to take her back to some key places of her early years.

  We cruise the harbour not chronologically through the boat’s life, but geographically. First we circumnavigate Cockatoo Island, where, Simon explains, she used to ferry workers after the Second World War. We then putter a little south to Goat Island, where she had worked for the Maritime Services Board in the 1950s. She had been a ‘G’ boat, as the MSB’s Goat Island workboats were called.

  We carve the few hundred metres across the harbour towards the northern shore, heading for an old slipway incised into the shore near McMahons Point.

  ‘And this is where she was born,’ Simon says.

  Mount Pleasant was built in 1916 in the boatyard of William Holmes for a ferry operator on the New South Wales Central Coast. She could carry seventy passengers and was the star of the delightfully named Saratoga and Mount Pleasant Original Ferry Service. By the 1920s, she was back on Sydney Harbour, with her whistle, connected to the exhaust, turning heads whenever it hollered.

  The whistle still chimes, and it still turns heads. As we pass Alexander, Simon blows the whistle, as if one old ferry is talking to a younger thing. The other ferry’s passengers look up, surprised to hear the sound of the past, full of energy, bounding across the water to them.

  We chug east to Garden Island, skirting around the naval base. The skipper explains Mount Pleasant was put to work for the navy during the Second World War and was alongside HMAS Kuttabul the night of the Japanese midget submarine attack. When the Kuttabul was sunk, it’s believed Mount Pleasant helped carry the dead and others caught up in the attack to shore.

  We turn to head back out into the main channel, but Mount Pleasant takes her time. A dignified old lady is not about to be rushed.

  ‘Be a good girl,’ Simon coaxes, as he manoeuvres the boat.

  The skipper wants fish and chips from Doyles in Watsons Bay. As we cruise further east, Simon talks about the ferry’s life until he bought her. After her time in the Maritime Services Board, she was sold as a pleasure craft and was in Botany Bay. She was taken to the South Coast in the early 1990s. And there she stayed, slowly dying, until Simon came along, looking for a new challenge.

  ‘She’s a bit of a mongrel,’ he says of her new look, ‘with elements of the workboat, but her style is closer to when she was a ferry.’ I look around at the plush royal blue and white interior, and the gleaming wheel. She doesn’t look like an old workboat.

  ‘Honestly, I think it’s the best she’s ever been,’ Simon says.

  As we saunter along the harbour, Mount Pleasant receives plenty of admiring waves and hoots. We can see the Heads, and I ask him what it was like to bring her between those great bluffs, back home, for the first time in decades. Simon looks ahead and grins.

  ‘You know you’re an Australian when you’re coming into Sydney Harbour, especially coming into the harbour in a boat you’ve restored yourself, and on her centenary.’

  WITH ONE slab of forlorn and neglected waterfront land having been transformed into something eye-catching and money-spinning, the redevelopment fever spread a little further west along the harbour, around the Pyrmont peninsula.

  On the north-eastern side of the peninsula, the redevelopment has crept to the water’s edge, and then kept going. I kayak past finger wharves, built for commercial shipping in the post-World War Two years. Now those wharves prop up apartment blocks and offices that have the look of warehouses but are cocoons of luxury.

  Along the north-western stretch of Darling Harbour is James Craig, a fully restored tall ship. She was built in 1874 and for many years carried cargoes around the globe, until the age of steam reduced her to menial tasks, such as being a coal hulk. James Craig was eventually left abandoned on a beach in Tasmania, before she was rescued by volunteers from the Sydney Heritage Fleet, who spent years restoring her body and dignity. Now James Craig carries tourists around the harbour and often out through the Heads. Yet she, and other tall ships on the harbour such as Soren Larsen and Southern Swan, also carries the romance of sail.

  Once you have experienced that romance, you remain smitten. Soren Larsen doesn’t have the age of James Craig, having been built in Denmark in 1949, but she has a wonderful history. The square rigger was a star in the BBC television series The Onedin Line, and she was part of the First Fleet re-enactment voyage for Australia’s bicentenary, sailing from Portsmouth and arriving in Sydney Harbour on 26 January 1988. Twenty-seven years later, I was on Soren Larsen for an Australia Day tall ships race along the harbour. What a joy it was watching the crew members work with each other, and with the ship, their efforts bringing her to life; that, and the breeze. People often use sailing as a metaphor for relaxing, taking it easy, accepting wherever the wind blows. It all sounds so passive. But standing on Soren Larsen that day, it occurred to me that sailing was about working hard and making the most of the moment to get somewhere. As the saying goes, a pessimist whinges about the wind, the optimist expects it to change, while the realist adjusts the sails. So sailing is a lesson in reality.

  Yet the very vessel that teaches you to be a realist also seduces you to be a dreamer. The mere sight of a sailing ship is a dream. While kayaking, I’ve often seen James Craig out on the harbour. When her sails are filled with the winds, she looks as though she is off to the ball. But even as I paddle past James Craig docked in Darling Harbour, her sails furled, and her sleek black hull snuggling into the wharf, she is still a dream. Hers is a timeless beauty.

  Off the peninsula defining Darling Harbour’s western shoreline, there was once a small island. But as the point was industrialised, development extended to the island. Darling Island, as it was called, was the site of a slipway. The Australasian Steam Navigation Company built its maintenance yard here for its ships. By the 1870s, the march of industry had trampled any distinction between the peninsula and the island, as land was reclaimed.

  On the former island, the Royal
Edward Victualling Yard was built for the Royal Navy, to supply its ships as they cruised around the eastern edges of the British Empire. The complex was handed over to the Commonwealth after the Royal Australian Navy was born. A towering remnant of those times stands above the seawall on the western shore. It is an eight-storey building of brick and stone with gabled parapets. As I sit in the kayak and look up, the tower is more than a landmark; it exudes authority. The building commands you to notice it. Its face is tattooed with the letters of another age, another reign: ‘GR’, or ‘George Rex’, for King George V. The structure also wears what was a rarity when it was constructed. Each of its eight floors has external fire escape stairs, because in early 20th century Sydney, this was a tall building, and pumped water, if needed, could reach only so high. At the building’s feet on the quay is an old crane, reminding me I’m floating on the invisible prints of ships. For much of the past century, in wartime and peace, vessels were loaded and unloaded here. In the future, the building will accommodate only the loaded. It is being converted into apartments.

  I paddle out of the lonely quay and follow the peninsula’s shore, which is pinned with a promenade that looks like a wooden wharf, as though ships could still dock here. But it is built for recreation, not industry. A group is practising yoga on the deck, looking down at the water where there were tidal baths until the 1940s. I can’t imagine swimming in this part of the harbour now, let alone then.

  In the 19th century, Pyrmont was progressively dug up and carried across the water to make the CBD look more impressive. Pyrmont stone was used in the construction of major public buildings, including the General Post Office and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. All the while, the beauty of the peninsula, which early colonial picnickers called Pyrmont because it reminded them of a German spa resort, was disappearing into holes.