The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  Yet as I can see from the water, in recent years the peninsula has been refilled with building materials. Medium-density housing has been packed along the ridges and at the base of the shaved sandstone faces. If the celebrated photographer Max Dupain were still here, I wonder what his eye would make of the change. He used to have a studio on the other side of Darling Harbour, and through his window, he would photograph the ships and wharves, the industries and jammed-in working class housing, catching with his cameras and light the texture and grit of those lives. If he could look across at the shinier, cleaner Pyrmont, with its proclamations and promises of wealth in the apartments and offices and the Star Casino, would Dupain see the makings of a compelling image, or a place that is now having its soul quarried?

  At the end of the peninsula, along Johnstons Bay, the Colonial Sugar Refining Company presided over a large area for more than a century. Raw materials from as far away as Fiji were unloaded at the wharves then distilled and refined into sugar, golden syrup, molasses and alcohol, as well as building materials. In the early 1990s, when CSR moved off the 11-hectare site, the developers moved in to create a new community. A few of the old industrial buildings were retained and recycled, but shadowing them are high-rise residential blocks. Moping around the walking areas near the waterfront are a few artefacts of the site’s industrial and shipping past, including two large iron balls. I don’t know what their purpose once was, but when I paddle past them, I cannot help but think they may be symbols of a castrated maritime industry around the harbour.

  Straight ahead is the David and Goliath, or the past and present, of bridges.

  Any modern bridge that sets out to be noticed, rather than merely be driven over, is up against it in Sydney. What has been built across the harbour before and Mother Nature ensure that. But Anzac Bridge projects a monumental presence. The then-Premier Bob Carr must have been confident of the bridge’s profile as he officially opened it in 1995, because he cut the ceremonial ribbon using the same pair of scissors as his political forebear Jack Lang did in 1932 for the opening of Sydney Harbour Bridge. Anzac Bridge has the architecture to substantiate the ceremony. It has twin 120-metre-high concrete towers, each fanning stay cables ever so delicately towards the deck. As I paddle towards the bridge, I marvel at those cables knitting the sky.

  Sitting below the Anzac Bridge like Banquo’s ghost is the structure it replaced, Glebe Island Bridge. The original bridge was built from wood in 1857. To allow ships to pass, the operator – and toll collector – would turn a winch, and a section would rise like a drawbridge. The wooden structure was replaced in 1901 with a steel bridge, which had a swing-span in the middle. What was impressive technology at the start of the century was a source of frustration for motorists near the end of it, before Anzac Bridge was opened. My friend and fellow Gentleman Kayaker George Ellis grimaces when we paddle this section of the harbour, because he remembers sitting in his car and waiting in a long queue of traffic, while the bridge swung open, cutting a main artery to the west.

  Time and lack of use have rendered the structure sclerotic. In an insult to any bridge, it is no longer fixed in the position that made it useful – crossing the bay. Instead, the swing span is left open to allow through the array of vessels that berth in the bays on the southern side. Some locals want the bridge rejuvenated as a pedestrian and bicycle crossing. Gliding past its time-worn sandstone pylons, then looking up at its replacement, I reckon the old bridge remains a beautiful gateway to Blackwattle and Rozelle bays.

  Having passed through the narrow throat of water into these two bays, I’ve been swallowed into a bizarrely diverse part of the harbour. It is working hard to offer something for everyone. A glass half-full view would say it looks eclectic; half empty, it’s a bit of a mess. Along these two bays that peel off in opposite directions like a feuding couple, there are elements of what the harbour once was, markers of how it has changed, and predictors of what it will increasingly be. There is a concrete plant but also extensive parklands and a waterfront walking track. There are tasteful apartments and townhouses yet derelict patches and ramshackle wharves that are an eyesore, unless you’re a planner or developer. There is a marina swaddling large pleasure cruisers, yet also mooching about on the shores, waiting to work, are barges, ferries and showboats. Sculls cut across the water from the Glebe Rowing Club, and paddling teams in dragon boats and outriggers huff and puff in unison towards Anzac Bridge. These two bays combined have the feel of a working harbour but in places look like a backwater, as though the same levels of development and beautification that have washed over other parts of the harbour haven’t yet been carried into here. All of which makes it an intriguing place to paddle.

  I turn left into Blackwattle Bay. I’m paddling in the wake of convict labourers, who rowed across the bay then waded into the swamps to cut wattle trees and reeds for building materials. As the area was cleared, factories and timber yards rose out of the mud. The bay that was named for its black wattle is now synonymous with fish.

  The Sydney Fish Market is on the bay’s south-eastern shores. It turns away from the hubbub of the city and ignores the scuttling and shuffling of traffic on the spider web of arterial roads and ramps above its head to create its own energy. The market is reminiscent of a shopping mall, as visitors cruise through the retail areas, looking for a feed. Just before Good Friday and in the lead-up to Christmas, the complex is filled with not just the scent of the sea but desperation, as hordes spiral into a buying frenzy, snapping up a couple of hundred tonnes of prawns and about 900,000 oysters. Each morning, beginning before dawn, the market holds a wholesale auction, selling what is bound for plates in restaurants and cafés. About fifty tonnes of seafood are traded each day. With seafood, Sydneysiders are insatiable. It seems to be part of our identity as harbour people, literally nourishing who we are. It has been that way for many thousands of years.

  For the original inhabitants living around its shores, the harbour helped sustain them. But no sooner had the British arrived than there was competition for fish. Jacob Nagle was part of Arthur Phillip’s crew exploring Sydney Harbour. Nagle noted how on the night before they headed back to Botany Bay to tell the others they had found a place to settle, he tossed out a line from his boat.

  ‘I ketched a large Black Brim,’ Nagle recorded, adding that Phillip had asked who caught the fish. ‘I inform’d him that I had. Recollect he Said that you are the first white man that ever caught a fish in Sidney Cove.’

  According to the First Fleeters, when they first threw out their nets and hauled in large catches, the Aboriginal people responded positively. Surgeon John White wrote how in one encounter the day after the fleet had arrived in Sydney Cove, the ‘natives’ helped drag the catch ashore and ‘were liberally rewarded with fish, which seemed to please them and give general satisfaction’.

  But satisfaction dimmed as fish stocks were reduced during winter, while the demand from the newcomers increased, and the original inhabitants’ precious fishing equipment and canoes were sometimes stolen. In a letter to his father on 12 July 1788, Newton Fowell wrote the Aboriginal people passed his ship, Sirius, daily but never came close. ‘We could often see them strike fish,’ he wrote. ‘I have often gone to them & given them things which they readily accept but will never part with anything, particular their fish which is their only Subsistance [sic] & I believe they have little enough for themselves.’

  As the colony developed, it was not just competition for food that put pressure on fish stocks in the harbour. The development around the shores, and treating the harbour as somewhere to dump a city’s waste, sullied the waters to the extent that governments had inquiries, and Sydneysiders asked what was happening to their jewel. ‘Our harbour has partaken largely of the character of a “dead sea”,’ declared a newspaper, after a die-off of oysters and mussels in 1891.

  Yet for decades, the harbour remained a sink trap and dumping ground for the city, and the results of that can be seen – or, more to the point
, can’t be seen – in the fish market. You can’t buy Sydney Harbour fish at Sydney Fish Market. The seafood comes from beyond the Heads. Commercial fishing in Sydney Harbour ended in 2006 due to concerns about contaminants, particularly dioxins, in the water. The State Government bought back commercial licences and warned recreational anglers where not to fish. That move meant the livelihoods of commercial fishermen were poisoned by the past actions of other industries.

  In Iron Cove, just a few bays to the west of the fish market, I come across a man named Frank. He is gently pulling up onto the shore a much-patched and repainted dinghy. With a beanie pulled towards his weathered face, and his lithe body covered in a thick-cabled jumper, jeans and gumboots, Frank looks like a fisherman. The way his face ignites as we get speaking about water, and the mysteries and bounties it contains, tells me Frank is a fisherman. And that’s before I hear Frank’s story.

  Frank was born into fishing. His father had been a fisherman in Sicily, before he emigrated in 1948. In new waters in a new land, he practised his old ways, fishing on the harbour. Four years later, the teenage Frank, his siblings and mother also arrived in Sydney, stepping off a ship at Walsh Bay.

  In 1954, Frank’s father launched a boat that had been built in Berrys Bay, over on the North Shore. It was a 25-foot craft constructed from kauri pine. A priest blessed the boat, and it was named San Giuseppe, to remember the family’s home back in Sicily. Frank joined his father on San Giuseppe, working the harbour, creating a life. They fished for bream, whiting and John Dory, and they trawled for prawns in the bays, including this one, Leichhardt Bay, where I’ve met Frank.

  ‘Leichhardt Bay prawns, they were beautiful – this big,’ Frank enthuses, opening his thumb and forefinger as wide as he can.

  The father and son headed out in the afternoon and fished late into the night, before delivering their catch in the early hours to the market. It was a hard way to make a living – ‘I was a fisherman during the summer, and a painter during the winter’ – but he loved the life. Then it ended.

  Frank shakes his head. He reckons shutting down commercial fishing in the harbour was a big mistake. It caused economic pain in so many quarters, from those who sold nets to those supplying fuel for the boats. But, he says emphatically, it also hurt the community. It changed people’s way of life, the social activities and culture, associated with fishing. Frank squints at the water, seeing what is no longer there, as he mutters there used to be up to forty fishing boats in this bay.

  I ask Frank what happened to San Giuseppe. He smiles and points to her, a blue and white vessel with her name lovingly hand-painted on her bow. He can no longer make a living from her, but she remains part of his life. Frank has just spent a few hours on her, replacing a plank and painting. His loved ones tell him he should sell the boat, but, he shrugs, ‘I can’t. I won’t.’ For Frank, San Giuseppe maintains a connection to his father, to his past, to what he did, and to who he was – and still is.

  ‘I like the water. I’m happy when I see the water,’ says Frank, as he gives his battered little dinghy one last heave onto the shore.

  You can still see trawlers travelling across the harbour. Their engines reliably grumble as they go out of the Heads and come back in again, wearing a halo of gulls flapping and screeching for a free feed. You can usually find a small fleet docked outside the fish market in Blackwattle Bay, in between their voyages out to sea.

  Early one morning, I paddle up to a man standing in a rocking tinny beside a trawler. He is painting the hull with a hand-held roller. It looks an enormous job, like painting the Harbour Bridge, and I tell him so. As he keeps working, he tells me he has sanded, undercoated and painted most of the hull in one night. I ask him if he’s the skipper.

  He stops rolling, turns cautiously, and looks at me quizzically.

  ‘Do you think a skipper would be doing this job?’

  WHILE THE cause of the damage to the fishing industry lies in the sediments under the water, just a few hundred metres from the market is a team dedicated to keeping the harbour’s surface and shorelines looking clean and free of rubbish.

  The Roads and Maritime Services’ environmental teams are based on the northern side of Rozelle Bay. They’re responsible for inspecting 200 locations around the harbour. Every day, the teams head out in barges, removing rubbish from the shores and anything on the water that could be a hazard to boating.

  I’m invited out with Troy Polidano, who is skipper today, and deckhand Jarrod Bernhardt on ES5, a catamaran barge with a bow ramp. The 12-metre barge can be loaded with almost 5 tonnes of garbage. We set off from the wharf and glide under Anzac Bridge.

  The team’s first job is to check the pump-out stations at White Bay and the King Street commercial wharves, where many of the tourist boats dock. Troy and Jarrod say the commercial sector is highly aware of avoiding pumping out waste in the harbour, but they know a few recreational boats still do it; they’ve seen the evidence on the water.

  We trundle around into Walsh Bay, where Jarrod scoops up a soccer ball. Usually they collect tennis balls.

  ‘I could keep twenty tennis balls every day,’ says Troy, as he manoeuvres the wheel and levers to steady the barge for his colleague. The teams also retrieve stacks of headwear, which they hang on a ‘hat tree’ back at the base.

  We edge into Sydney Cove, after Troy contacts the Port Authority’s Vessel Traffic Service for permission to enter what is a restricted area. As we bob at the base of a white mountain that is a berthed cruise ship, Troy explains a lot of plastic rubbish can be trapped in the cove and has to be removed, to keep paths clear for ferries, and it is not a good look in tourists’ photos.

  We turn west and head under the Bridge. ‘I think I’ve been under the Harbour Bridge more than I’ve been over it,’ says Troy, who joined the team in April 2015, after years working as an aircraft mechanic. Jarrod, who had been working in the commercial maritime industry, joined the service a few months later.

  Jarrod and Troy are on the ‘river run’ today. They are inspecting Parramatta River as far as the weir, a course of just over 20 kilometres, to ensure it is clear for the RiverCats.

  ‘Our primary function is to make sure there’s safe navigation in the harbour,’ Jarrod explains.

  ‘We try to get things before they’re a hazard, so if we see potential hazards on the shore, we grab them,’ Troy adds. As if on cue, he notices a palm frond splayed on the surface. The barge crawls up on the frond, and Jarrod fossicks it out. The worst time for debris on the harbour, they say, is after a king tide has flushed out all the rubbish along the shores.

  ‘After king tides, there are just lines of debris, and they’re really thick,’ mutters Jarrod. He says they can collect more than 3 cubic metres of rubbish from just one little cove.

  Sometimes, amid the thick refuse of the city, are things they would prefer not to have to deal with, such as animals’ corpses and ‘Sydney Harbour squids’ (used condoms).

  On the journey up and down the river, Troy nudges the barge onto the slips of beaches in small coves and lowers the ramp, so Jarrod can collect rubbish off the shore. Jarrod tells me the weirdest item he’s fished out of the harbour is a quad bike. He had to use a small crane on the barge to lift it out of Powder Keg Bay in Middle Harbour. For Troy, the most disconcerting item he’s retrieved is a complete artificial breast.

  I’m transferred to another Environmental Services vessel at ‘Naval Beach’, a secluded cove beside HMAS Waterhen, tucked in around Balls Head. As I bid Troy and Jarrod farewell, they are frowning at the line of plastic on the shore. They had cleaned here only yesterday.

  ‘It’s never ending, really,’ says Jarrod.

  The ‘never-ending’ clean-up voyage continues with Ken Wark and deckhand Louise Nelson on their skimming boat. It has a cage that drops through the deck to scoop rubbish. Ken and Louise are cleaning the ‘City Circle’, the stretch of heavily used water just east of the Harbour Bridge.

  Ken has been working on, or b
eside, the harbour for more than thirty years and has been on the Environmental Services barges since 1994. He reckons that, while there’s less rubbish on the water, a lot of problems continue to flow from the catchment areas.

  ‘This is the lowest point,’ Ken mutters. ‘So it all ends up in here.’

  ‘One thing I’ve seen less of are cigarette butts, they’re not in the concentrated levels of the late 1990s.’

  Near Bradleys Head, Louise spots a bottle of household cleaner in the water. It’s still full and can be put to use sprucing up the cabin.

  ‘You see,’ smiles Ken. ‘The harbour provides.’

  Louise explains how each officer seems to focus in on certain things when inspecting the harbour.

  ‘I’ve been on a straw tangent, and also styro, or polystyrene,’ she says. Louise also has a skill for spotting floating money – ‘I found a $50 note off Luna Park’ – although it’s becoming less common with the advent of ways to pay without cash. Ken’s forte, she says, is navigational hazards, such as logs.

  Sadly, both have spotted bodies in the water. In her eight years on the boats, Louise has found four. Ken has seen one in his time.

  Ken lowers the cage into the bay just beyond Milsons Point. The water bubbles furiously, as lines of rubbish are scooped from along the seawall. There’s not a lot today, but they know that will soon change. Rain is forecast.

  After the wet weather, Louise says, ‘you play the goalkeeper almost, and stop the debris coming down [the river] and washing on shore’.

  ‘We’re on top of it much quicker now,’ says Ken. ‘And so the harbour gets back to its state much quicker.’

  In a disposable society, what Ken and Louise, Jarrod and Troy, and the others do for the harbour is indispensable. It is, as Jarrod says, the never-ending job on Sydney Harbour.