by Scott Bevan
Ben guides me through the island’s past. We walk up the hill to a beautiful Federation home perched on the high point. Popping out of the roof is a stubby tower with windows on all sides. This was the Harbourmaster’s home and office in the early 20th century. No one lives here now, and inside the house is fading and peeling into disrepair. But as a real estate agent might say, never mind the interior, look out the windows. From the second storey, we climb very steep stairs – virtually a ladder – into the little tower. For the Harbourmaster, this would have been an empowering view, with its aspects to the west, along the North Shore and to the east. The chimneys outside the windows are studded with small stones and shells, so the harbour is embedded in the home. The house may be empty and the Harbourmaster no longer needs a small tower on a roof to monitor ships, but out the front, there are still large navigational markers and lights to guide vessels.
Beside the Harbourmaster’s house is a row of historic cottages. Ben and his family live in one. They’re the only people living on the island. They have been here for thirteen years. He and his partner take their boys across to Balmain by boat to attend school, and they have to plan their housekeeping; they can’t just run down to the shops. At one point in the 1930s, when it was the base for so many harbour activities, about 120 people lived on Goat Island. Ben shows me where there used to be a tennis court and a hall where dances were held.
‘There was quite a community here.’
We stand on the high ground, looking west over the convict-era buildings and powder magazine and the shipyard, which I had seen from the water. It is a grand view across history. We follow a sandstone wall down the hill and head through an arched entrance. On one side are the convict-cut walls, on the other a 1960s amenities block, only a metre or so between them, but architecturally worlds apart. In the stone walls, visitors to the island made their mark through the years. Ben shows me etched messages, including one left by a soldier in 1914.
Beyond the wall is a cluster of sandstone buildings, including a large gunpowder magazine. Ben opens the magazine’s thick doors to reveal the vaulted ceiling. It has the beauty and stillness of a cathedral yet was crafted from convicts’ suffering. A century later, during the Maritime Services Board’s time, it was used for stores. Now it is eerily empty.
Across a courtyard is a former cooperage. A stone on the building indicates, in a lavish font, it was built in 1836. Between the magazine and cooperage is a strange-looking wooden box on wheels, with a barred door. It is a replica of the boxes that convicts slept in, while they were based on the island to construct the buildings. Inside the box are a couple of platforms and a dunny. Twenty men used to sleep in here, Ben says. Stooping in the confined space, I feel claustrophobic.
We look over into the shipyard, just as the cruiser glides down the slipway into the water. Through the 20th century, vessels frequently splashed into the water here. This island was like a port within the harbour. The port authority’s tugs and dredges were stationed here, as were fire-fighting vessels. On the three slipways, vessels were built and maintained by up to 500 workers, including thirty-five shipwrights. Then, in the 1970s, the Maritime Services Board began winding back its operations on the island, and, by the early 1990s, it had all but left.
The National Parks and Wildlife Service has been administering the island since 1994. But Ben constantly sees the reminders of who and what was here before. On the southern shore, he points out two stone lines running through the shallows, the remains of an early slipway. A little further around, he shows me a hollowed-out section in a boulder. This was Bony Anderson’s ‘chair’. Charles ‘Bony’ Anderson was a convict but also a former sailor who had sustained a brain injury during his service in the Royal Navy. He was considered hard to manage and was chained to this rock on the island. Depending on the story, he lived in this cavity for anywhere between several weeks to a couple of years. Looking at that cold, hard stone and imagining a damaged soul being chained to it, any time seems too long. Bony was sent to Norfolk Island where, Ben says, he had the good fortune to ‘get a kind commandant’, and eventually he was a free man.
From Bony’s chair, we can look across the water to the Barangaroo development. The significance of that name washes back to the island. Barangaroo and her husband Bennelong apparently liked to visit Mel-Mel during the colony’s early days. Bennelong claimed deep connection to the island through his father. Ben has watched the emergence of the Barangaroo development over the past few years.
‘When I came here, it was still being used for containers, and you could watch the container ships come in,’ murmurs Ben.
The eastern shore is sprinkled with great shards of concrete. Ben says they are the remains of wharves that skirted the island. He points to the forest of old pylons, where Maritime Services Board boats used to moor. The only vessels that come close to shore now are pleasure boats.
We cross a footbridge above the ‘moat’ to the island’s eastern tip, and the partly restored 19th century water police station. There have been water police on Sydney Harbour since Governor Phillip’s day, when he appointed watchmen to row along the shores. They became known as the Rowboat Guard. These days, the water police are based in Balmain East. While this location on Goat Island would offer an unhindered view east, the officers would feel the chilling effects of the harbour and the winds.
Ben has to leave in the launch to pick up his boys from school. I ask him what he loves about living on Goat Island. He smiles and says, ‘We’re surrounded by the city, but we’re not part of it’.
‘It’s a lot noisier than you’d think; you can hear the trains on the Bridge, party boats on the water, and the tugboats, when they pass. They get the windows shaking.
‘You can hear the fog horns early in the morning, and you get up and see the harbour is fog-bound. That’s a couple of mornings a year. The boys can’t get to school on those mornings.’
Having seen the historic water police headquarters, I check out the pretend water police headquarters. The popular television series Water Rats was filmed here from 1996 to 2001. The former Port Emergency Services building was the main base in the show.
The building is now a faded and forgotten star. Police logos remain on salt-smudged glass doors, and stairs lead to an empty first floor, with a sign giving the hollow warning, ‘NO ENTRY. POLICE ONLY’. In the yard nearby is a rusted anchor attached to nothing. The dilapidated building seems like a potent symbol of the ephemeral nature of television. One minute, everyone is watching you; the next, you’re washed up and weather-beaten. Yet I turn around, and I see Water Rats’ biggest star is as ravishing and as undimmed as ever. That view.
15
FROM MORT BAY BACK TO HENRY
AROUND EVERY bay in Sydney Harbour there is a water view. But it is the bay scraping out the northern edge of the Balmain peninsula that was accorded the honour, or lumbered with the bleeding obvious, of the name Waterview.
Paddling into the bay, it is evident many have taken up residence here for the water view. But they occupy sites where the work that used to be done was water-based. The motivation to make money was water-driven. In the 19th century, the bay was packed with ships, and its shores were made higgledy-piggledy by a rambunctious brew of maritime businesses, from boatyards to docks.
The maritime industry still hugs the shore in places.
The Sydney Ferries’ workshop is straight ahead. A few ferries are docked in front of the workshop. Yet as I paddle towards the complex, I’m caught in a pincer movement of the wakes of Scarborough and Golden Grove, as one ferry heads into the bay and the other pushes out to work. With the water momentarily hissing and seething, it sounds like I’m paddling through a nest of snakes.
Further east around the shore is a commercial marina, and a barge carrying a large wooden pole chugs purposefully across the water. So, for a moment, it looks like a working harbour. And then I turn and see the Waterview Wharf Workshops, a clump of buildings painted in breezy colours of apricot, o
range, green and blue. The buildings have been here for a long time, but they haven’t always been dressed to look like a rainbow landing in the bay. They were once the workshops of the Adelaide Steamship Company. The shipping company had bought the site, which had been a timber yard, in 1900 to use as a depot to maintain and repair its fleet. Along the pathway zig-zagging down the steep hill to the workshops, casual workers would gather each morning. They would stand at a zig or a zag, according to their trade, hoping it would provide a straight path to employment by the water.
For more than sixty years, ships berthed out the front of the workshops. When the maritime workers moved out, artists moved in. My friend Guy Warren had a studio in the workshops for a few years from the late 1970s.
‘Fifty dollars a week, and it was huge!’ he enthuses.
Guy worked on the ground floor, with wide-planked decking and the lap of the water beneath his feet, while he was cocooned in the workshop’s corrugated iron skin. In his rented space, Guy would stand amid a grove of ancient hardwood beams and columns as he explored the Australian landscape with his paints and imagination.
‘A lot of watercolours came from there,’ Guy remembers.
He still has sketchbooks filled with visual notes, especially of changing weather and shapes on the water, from ships to swimmers. For ideas, Guy only had to open the large double doors that looked straight onto the water. The view was still overwhelmingly industrial sometimes.
‘I’d look out and suddenly everything was black. It was a huge black tanker gliding past or turning around in the bay,’ he recalls.
‘At high tide, I had been known to swim out there, but I think I stopped when I found a dead dog floating in the water.’
The harbour increasingly flowed into his work. Lines of soft colour, light-infused, wash across the paper in his Balmain series. More than make marks on the paper, Guy began ripping and perforating the surface. He had observed small workboats chugging past, ruffling the water, with the froth and foam sopping up the sunlight. So to replicate how the water could be punctured or torn, he did the same to the paper he was creating on.
‘I stayed overnight sometimes,’ Guy says. ‘I would open the doors, and there was the harbour sparkling in the morning sunshine, it was just unbelievable. We knew it wouldn’t last.’
It didn’t last. Guy had to move out. The workshops were redeveloped into offices.
‘In the end, in a way, I was almost happy to leave,’ Guy reflects. ‘It was almost too powerful, because I found that everything I was doing was related to the harbour.’
‘But . . .’ And he smiles and his eyes crinkle, giving the 90-something-year-old the look of a mischievous boy. ‘I never got another studio as good as that!’
AS COMPELLING as the water view is, the bay’s name was changed. It came to be known as Mort Bay. It is named after Thomas Sutcliffe Mort, who has left his stamp on the harbour’s character, and on the shores of this bay.
I paddle west along the bay, past the ferry maintenance depot and the former Colgate-Palmolive buildings on the shore. The air around the bay used to be scented by the manufacturing of body- and household-cleaning products in the factory. The sweet smells were enough to quell the grittier odours of industry. Guy Warren can sniff the air in his memory, saying ‘it wasn’t unpleasant!’ In the late 1990s, the buildings were converted into apartments.
Tucked into the bay’s western corner are remains of Thomas Mort’s maritime vision. As shipping boomed in the early 1850s, particularly with the gold rushes luring people from across the seas, Mort saw opportunity. He had seen a lot of potential business sailing and chugging out of the Heads, as there were not suitable maintenance facilities for many visiting ships. So it was here in the bay that Mort built the colony’s first large-scale dry dock, which was completed in 1855.
The dock helped build Mort’s wealth and influence in the colony, and his vision kept expanding. His company serviced not just vessels but built machines for the country’s development, from bridges to railway locomotives. In the early 1870s, Mort’s Dock and Engineering Company was formed, and the complex spread over ten hectares at the head of the bay, and into the harbour. Mort’s Dock was a major provider of jobs in Balmain, with up to 1000 workers. It continued to construct and repair ships well into the 20th century. During the Second World War, corvettes and frigates were built here. In the late 1950s, eighty years after Thomas Mort’s death, the company went into liquidation. For a time during the 1960s and 1970s, a container terminal was on the site. Now it is a park.
The reminders of Mort’s dock and the container days meld along the shore, with the rusted iron of the old caisson sharing the water with sandstone seawalls, concrete aprons, and bollards that remain defiantly red. The caisson that held back the harbour now feels the surge of time. The dock has been filled in, and where vessels once squatted, dogs and kids now run. In the lawn is a ghostly line in the shape of a ship.
For a few moments, I sit in Pulbah Raider near the caisson. What a stirring sight it must have been as a ship settled into the water here and cruised away. Now all that is in this part of the bay are fish flittering about. The noises of industry have reverberated into history. I hear nothing but the murmur of water as it nuzzles around the kayak, and the laughter of children in the park. To Thomas Mort, it would have been the sound of ruination.
The shoreline bends around to what is called Ballast Point. This was where the oil tankers that Guy Warren used to see from his studio were headed. On this headland, there were about thirty storage tanks at the Caltex terminal. The skeletons and footprints of those tanks have now been incorporated into a park that acknowledges what the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust has called the industrial ecology. When it came into being, the Trust said harbour-side industrial structures no longer needed for the port’s infrastructure could form the basis of inspiring public spaces. That call has been heeded on Ballast Point. It is marvellous to wander among the exposed bones of industry here.
The largest storage facility, called Tank 101, is remembered in a structure built from recycled curved sheet steel retrieved on the site. Tank 101 once contained crude oil; now it holds words. Punched into the steel are the first two lines from Les Murray’s poem, ‘The Death of Isaac Nathan, 1864’:
Stone statues of ancient waves/tongue like dingoes on shore
The poet has said the inspiration for those lines came from looking at the hollowed-out sandstone along the foreshores, and the way the light reflected by the harbour quivered in the hollow of the rocks. Men made things here, but nature made the headland they worked upon. Those layers of history to prehistory to the waterline can be viewed all around the headland, as the remains of concrete walls and caged constructions of stones and boulders press into the ancient sandstone.
From Ballast Point, I can look over into Snails Bay, with its eclectic and eccentric collection of harbour life tethered to concrete dolphins strung along its mouth. That eccentricity is best experienced from the water.
I paddle past the diverse fleet of tugs, barges, and lighters, and a disembodied pontoon from the Cremorne Point ferry terminal. It makes the bay look like a waiting room for the discarded and forgotten. It is a marked change from what used to float here: timber.
Logs would be unloaded from ships into the water, then tugs would nudge and push them into rafts, and they would be towed to timber yards around the harbour and up Parramatta River. Occasionally, the chains corralling the logs would break, and timber would drift around the bay like lost cattle until it could be rounded up. Timber would also be loaded directly onto barges that chugged in and out of the bay.
When I was in the Environmental Services boat with Ken Wark, we talked about the timber trade as we passed Snails Bay.
‘Imagine how much valuable timber must be on the harbour bottom,’ Ken remarked. He explained that timber also used to be floated in Rozelle Bay, where this workboat was kept. When the bay was being cleared for new marinas, the sonar revealed large lumps on the
bottom. Divers were sent down, and it was discovered those lumps were massive logs. Ken said about thirty logs were retrieved and were auctioned off for very high prices.
The floating logs represented a healthy business to Nicholson Bros, which kept its fleet and base in Snails Bay. The company had grown from operating a launch carrying picnickers up Lane Cove River to the biggest private ferry service in the port, especially on the harbour’s western side. After the Second World War, Nicholson Bros had tugs, which helped move the imported timber to where it needed to go around the harbour. The company’s fleet featured dozens of craft with the prefix ‘Pro-’ in their name, from Providore to Proclaim.
Snails Bay is named in honour of the pace that the Gentleman Kayakers’ Club sets on the harbour. That’s not true. Otherwise, it would be called Leopards Bay. However, many an adventure has begun and ended in Snails Bay, as Gentleman Kayakers Bruce Beresford and George Ellis live in nearby suburbs.
‘Growing up in the western parts of Sydney, I knew nothing about the harbour,’ Bruce mentions during one of our adventures. ‘We had the occasional trip to the beach, but the harbour was somewhere I knew nothing about. So the idea of living near it is a revelation.’
The heads of most bays around the harbour, with their parks and reserves on reclaimed land, are symbols of the natural environment lost. But for rugby league followers, the head of Snails Bay is hallowed ground. It holds Birchgrove Oval. Two of the first rugby league matches were played here on 20 April 1908. So it is regarded as a birthplace of the sport. The oval was the home ground of the Balmain Tigers from that foundation year until 1932. On weekends, the sounds of crowds lining the oval, cheering on sports teams, still filter down to the water.
