The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  Along the bay’s western shore is a thin strip of land, with large homes teetering on either side of its spine. This protuberance from the suburb of Birchgrove is called Long Nose Point. Those on the point’s eastern side have colonised just about every skerrick of land, for they have box seat views to the Bridge. The maritime industry used to be concentrated along here, with small yards and boatsheds. Historian Graeme Andrews referred to the Sydney Harbour Trust’s 1922 handbook to indicate the sheer number of little businesses and workboats that once existed, particularly west of the Bridge. Among the vessels listed were 559 lighters and sixty-eight tugs, along with cranes and dredges – and thirty-six watermen’s boats, the prototype for the water taxi. Jammed in between the yards along this shoreline was the Snails Bay Sabot Sailing Club. It began in the early 1960s, and these little sailboats would scurry around Snails Bay and between the tugs and lighters each weekend for about a decade. As the repair yards and boatsheds began to disappear off the point, so did the sailing club. A crumbling reminder of those days used to hide between the houses on Long Nose Point, with an old boatyard on the water’s edge. But in recent years, I watched the yard being demolished, its industrial footprint wiped over and replaced with multi-million-dollar townhouses. The removal of any trace of the working harbour from Long Nose Point is almost complete. Almost.

  At the tip of the point is a sandstone seawall and ramp to the water. It is all that remains of the Morrison and Sinclair shipyard, which had taken up residence soon after the end of the First World War. The company built ferries and luxury cruisers, even a patrol ship for the colonial administration in New Guinea. The state bought the site in the early 1970s for $185,000. It is now a park and popular fishing spot. The point’s tip is always finely webbed with fishing lines, setting the subtlest of traps for an unsuspecting kayaker. Pushing into the harbour, the point is also frequently harassed by passing boating traffic, particularly with ferries stopping at its tip. Water smacks into the seawall then eddies and whirls angrily. It is as though the harbour is protesting at ‘Long Nose Point’ and is demanding a return to the Aboriginal name, Yurulbin. It would be more appropriate; Yurulbin means ‘swift running water’.

  Once I have paddled around Long Nose Point’s tip, I’m back in Parramatta River. The sandstone face and industrial remnants of Cockatoo Island are ahead of me, a kilometre or so upstream. I turn left and trace Long Nose Point, its shore and ridgeline pebbled with houses, historic and sparkling new. Some are designed to stand out; others try to blend into the harbour environment. One home looks like a scaled amphibian, armoured in tiles the colour of stormy water.

  One of those living along here is artist Ken Unsworth. He has lived in a semi-detached house in the Louisa Quays development since the early 1990s. The waterfront development is built on the site of old boatyards. Ken kind of wishes the maritime industries were still on the shore.

  ‘My house is okay,’ he jokes, ‘but all these other houses should still be boatbuilders’ yards!’

  Ken loves his place, viewing the water through the trees he has planted, but he worries, ‘Sydney Harbour is rapidly becoming an ornamental lake.’

  As I paddle south-west along Birchgrove’s shores I’m thinking about Ken’s lament for the harbour, when I see a couple of old wooden boatsheds. One of them is shedding its skin of shingles, but their appearance, and their defiance, is heartening. May they continue to defy the years and the developers.

  The shoreline grows steeper, yet there are buildings above and below the escarpment, and clinging onto it. Along here, there used to be a coal mine. The Sydney Harbour Colliery first broke through the earth in 1897 and kept digging for about twenty years, under the Balmain peninsula and beneath the harbour bed, chasing the dark vein. The two shafts were named the Birthday and the Jubilee, in honour of Queen Victoria. The colliery closed in 1915 but reopened in 1924. The Balmain Colliery, as it became known, tunnelled almost a kilometre underground, burrowing below the harbour towards Goat Island and the North Shore. The colliery was a tolerated neighbour in Birchgrove as it provided about 300 jobs, but for those in the shafts, it was hot, humid and dangerous work. Ten were killed in the life of the colliery. Coal ceased being mined in the early 1930s, and gas was extracted from the operation for another twenty years. The shafts were filled in, and part of the site was eventually transformed into a housing development.

  At the bottom of the escarpment, just near where the coal mine used to be, is Balmain Sailing Club. A steep set of stairs lead down to the clubhouse, so it is easier, and less demanding on the legs, to approach it from the water.

  The club provides a link back to 1849, when the first Balmain Regatta was staged, bringing watermen and sailors from around the harbour to test their skills and have some fun. The club continues to stage the Balmain Regatta on the last Sunday of October.

  One of the great custodians of the harbour’s maritime traditions, Ian Smith, regularly participates in the regatta in Britannia, his homage in wood to Balmain hero ‘Wee Georgie’ Robinson. In 2016 he entered Britannia in the Vintage Skiffs division, and he invited me to join the crew. We were towed from the Sydney Flying Squadron clubhouse at Careening Cove, under the Bridge and up the river to Balmain Sailing Club. Long before we reached the club’s jetty, we slalomed through a crowd on the water, and Ian recognised many of those in the boats.

  ‘There’s “Dog-boat Dave!”’ Ian said animatedly, pointing to David Glasson, who chugs around the harbour in a century-old boat, which in its former life was used to retrieve dogs’ corpses from the harbour. David is renowned for respecting and reviving old workboats, when others have given them up for dead. He has recently restored a wooden launch that had been used to transfer personnel to and from HMAS Parramatta. During the week, David works on the maintenance of bridges around the harbour. And very early each day, long before the sun is up, he is out on the water in his old boat. It’s how he gets around. ‘My boat is my car,’ David says. ‘I still can’t walk on water. I’m still trying to perfect that!’

  For the regatta, the sleek 1903 ‘gentleman’s’ schooner, Boomerang, was moored proudly in the cove, wearing a colourful shawl of flags. There was also a tiny dinghy darting about.

  ‘There’s our little sister, our baby sister!’ exclaimed one of our crew. Her name was The Balmain Bug, and she was built by Ian and launched in 1994. The 6-foot dinghy looked so cute, her cedar hull gleaming, but Ian said she was a volatile little thing to sail and easily turned over.

  Striking a pose among the boats were yellow female mannequins, with bikinis painted onto them and mounted on floats. They were the ‘goils’, as opposed to buoys, that would be marking the course we were to sail: past Cockatoo Island, down to Goat Island, then back up to Drummoyne Bay and across to the clubhouse.

  Soon after we had begun racing, Ian ordered for the ‘Tigers’ spinnaker to be unfurled. It seemed appropriate, since we were deep in Balmain Tigers territory and in ‘Wee’ Georgie’s heartland. The north-easterly had the Balmain Tigers’ logo puffing its chest out as we carved across the harbour. The Balmain Bug scurried in front of us, and a photographer snapped the scene, presumably catching two of Ian’s ‘Balmain’ creations in the one frame.

  We won our division. As we waited for the trophy presentation, we stood on the deck outside the clubhouse and watched kids jumping and diving into the harbour. I took that as a vote of confidence in the health of the water. Ian looked doubtful, before telling me how he once had to dive in here to retrieve a keel, and he could not see for the mud. He figured all that mud would have been contaminated with the legacy of the industries that had been along these shores.

  The final race was run. It was a rowing competition, the watermen’s race. As though symbolising the dwindling of that tradition, there were only two competitors in the watermen’s race.

  At the presentation ceremony on the deck, Ian accepted the division winner’s trophy, which was a carved lump of hardwood. It was called the ‘Commonwealth Bowsprit Troph
y’. But true to Ian’s boatbuilding knowledge, he pointed out the wood was not from a bowsprit but a tiller. No sooner had the ceremony ended than rain started sprinkling the harbour. Hardly a sailor sought shelter. They reached for their drinks and stood resolute, watching Cockatoo Island being wrapped in a skein of rain.

  JUST A few hundred metres further along the shore is a monument to one of Balmain’s favourite people, the Olympic swimming legend Dawn Fraser. Fittingly, the monument is a harbour pool. It is called the Dawn Fraser Baths.

  The pool predates Dawn. It is reputed to be the oldest operating pool in Australia, having been built in the 1880s. But it’s Dawn’s pool. Always was, long before it was named after her. Dawn was the youngest of eight children in a local family, and she would come to the baths to swim. Swimming helped her breathe. She had asthma. Harry Gallagher, her future coach, met the teenage Dawn here. Actually, he was confronted by her. She was bombing the kids he was trying to train in ‘her’ pool. Harry thought Dawn was just a local tough, until he saw her swim. Harry invited Dawn to the other side of the river, to train with his squad in Drummoyne. She was dismissive. But Dawn did go to the other side of the river, trained with Harry, and swam to glory. She won the gold medal for 100-metres freestyle at three consecutive Olympic Games.

  Dawn Fraser is still revered in Balmain. She remains the true north in many locals’ compass. While paddling around the harbour, I’ve met quite a few people who grew up in Balmain, and each of them found their way home in their story-telling with a reference to Dawn. They swam with her or her older brothers in the baths, they worked with her father at Cockatoo Island, they had a drink with her.

  I want my own moment associating with Dawn Fraser on the Balmain peninsula. Or at least with the Dawn Fraser Baths. On a late April afternoon, I decide to go for a swim. Approaching from the water, the Dawn Fraser Baths could not look more Australian. Its perimeter walls are made of corrugated iron. It could well be one huge outdoor dunny. At a time when the harbour’s water quality was dodgy, that was perhaps what swimmers felt they were in. But the harbour’s water on this day looks clear, so I’m confident the pool’s will be beautiful, if a little chilly.

  I head to the entrance, crowned in stolid concrete. But the roller doors are down. Then I see the sign: ‘Closed for Winter’. I reckon Dawn would be disappointed by that. How soft, closing the pool during the cold months. And it’s not even winter. Balmain boys don’t cry, according to former resident and ex-New South Wales Premier Neville Wran, but maybe they shiver and tremble.

  Denied the opportunity to swim, I climb to the neighbouring headland which holds Elkington Park and a long, wide view to the north and west. On the headland, which is called White Horse Point, there are signs warning people to keep away from the cliff. But I bet the sandstone ledge over the water has been used as a jumping platform by local kids for generations. At the foot of the headland is a small beach tucked into the cove. Gentleman Kayaker Bruce and I have landed on that beach for a mug of tea. Sipping on a drink, and shielded by the sandstone from the rest of Sydney, it is one of those magical places on the harbour. It offers a solitude that is harder to find the further you go along the shoreline. Unless you can pay for it.

  On the next headland, at Sommerville Point, there is a new housing development, which has boasted in its marketing that it is Sydney’s hidden exclusive sanctuary. I wonder how the neighbours feel about that. The new development is across the road from a cluster of public housing blocks that have been on the point for more than sixty years. The residents look out upon one of the few remaining commercial maritime operators along here. At the Balmain Marine Centre, a couple of yachts are on the slips, and the jetty is flanked with boats. As I paddle past, I cannot help thinking the public housing complex and the marine industry will be probably pushed off its valuable land in time to create more hidden exclusive sanctuaries.

  Residential developments have been popping up right along this stretch in recent years. The site of a former pharmaceutical and chemical factory that dated back to the 1860s was turned into medium-density housing. Neighbouring that reinvention, the Balmain Shores housing development is built on the site of the former power station complex. For more than six decades, coal was shipped to the station to be burnt and generate electricity for the surrounding homes and industries. The complex was a rubbish dump of sorts as well, because Balmain Power Station ‘A’ burnt garbage. The complex was decommissioned in the 1970s and was demolished in 1998. There is little evidence a massive Balmain power station was ever here, other than a few plaques and the shell of a 1930s pump house, which drew water from the river for use in the cooling process.

  Whenever I come to a bridge, I’m like the troll in Three Billy Goats Gruff. I love to sit under there. However, unlike the nasty troll in the fairytale, the only thing I want to devour is the atmosphere. I also love the sense that time is only nibbling at me, whereas I can hear it almost gnawing at those rushing across the bridge above me. And so I stop paddling and sit under the Iron Cove bridges, connecting Rozelle to Drummoyne. The older steel truss bridge was opened in 1955, and it maintains a fairly straight line across the cove. Right beside it, on its southern side, is the concrete bridge, opened in 2011, and it slightly curves around the older structure. So I can look up at the semi-circle framing the sky between the bridges. Around a pylon near the Rozelle shore is a nice fishing spot. At least, that’s according to the graffiti painted on the pylon. A cleaner from the local Leichhardt Council is reaching across with a paint brush on a long pole, erasing the graffiti. The ‘Nice fishing spot!’ declaration, however, is out of reach. I ask the cleaner if the graffiti is correct. No idea, she tells me. But it’s been there for about eight years. Still, it’s a nice spot for trolls and kayakers to sit for a while.

  I track the joggers and walkers on the path along the meandering shoreline. The water’s edge is kept in order by a seawall, before a weathered rocky outcrop reasserts the power and beauty of unshaped stone. Beyond the shore, on the rise, a few sandstone towers and turrets poke above the trees. They mark the site of the former Callan Park Mental Hospital. The Inspector of the Insane, Frederick Norton Manning, whom I had learnt about back at the former Gladesville Hospital, further up Parramatta River, worked with the Colonial Architect James Barnet to create a group of beautiful neo-classical buildings for patients. It was hoped a new facility would alleviate the problem of overcrowding in the colony’s asylums.

  The buildings were constructed in the 1880s from sandstone mainly quarried on the 40-hectare site. Just as he had done at Gladesville, Dr Manning shaped the institution according to his belief in the therapeutic benefits of calm surroundings, with gardens and views, and well-designed buildings. While it underwent changes through the years, eventually becoming known as Rozelle Hospital, the complex remained a centre for the treatment and study of mental illness for more than a century. Since the hospital closed in 2008, some of the historic buildings have been a nursery for creativity, with tenants including the Sydney College of the Arts and the New South Wales Writers’ Centre. After all, the philosophies that Dr Manning espoused about the connection between well-being and beautiful surroundings also have a place in feeding the muse.

  For rowers in search of calm waters, Iron Cove offers some hope, as it peels off the main harbour, yet it is a huge expanse of water. The run from the bridges to the south-western edges of the cove is more than a kilometre. As a result, there are a couple of large buildings, the Leichhardt Rowing Club and the UTS Rowing Club – on the eastern shore, and Drummoyne Rowing Club on the opposite side. Although there are obstacles and potential distractions. In the bay in front of Leichhardt Park, I see a slalom course for rowers, with a couple of dozen boats moored.

  I circle around the bottom part of the cove, which is fed by a couple of creeks that are now really canals, disgorging into the harbour the run-off from the suburbs to the south and south-west of here. Heading back up the western shore, I land at Rodd Point, which sticks into Iro
n Cove like swollen tonsils. I’m intrigued by an austere stone cross standing on raised ground. It gives the impression that someone wanted to be left alone in death. Traipsing up the hill to the cross, I find it was the resting place for the Rodd family.

  Brent Clement Rodd was a lawyer and extensive landowner around these shores for more than half a century through to his death in 1898. He may have left this world, but Rodd wasn’t about to leave his harbourside land. A family vault had been carved into the rock on the point, with the sandstone cross marking it. In 1903, Rodd’s body and those of other family members, along with the cross, were transferred to Rookwood Cemetery. But as a plaque indicates, the Rotary Club of Five Dock moved the cross, if not the bodies, back in 1975, ‘to complete the restoration of Rodd Point’.

  Arguably, the restoration is not quite complete. There’s still the ‘landmark’ at the tip of Rodd Point. As further proof this city has so many beautiful locations that authorities are left with few choices for ugly conveniences, there is a public toilet built into the knoll. The block has all the appeal of an air-raid shelter. And the roof of the toilets is a lookout. It is while standing here, looking all the way to the harbour’s northern shore, that I reflect on how many toilets with a view I’ve visited on this journey. I may have found my next book subject . . .

  From this point, Rodd could have gazed over at the small island that he coveted but could never own, despite a lot of effort to buy it from the government. While he didn’t acquire the title deeds, the island acquired his name. It is called Rodd Island. The paddle from Rodd Point to the island is only a few hundred metres, but the destination feels wonderfully remote. I trace the northern shore, which is leaning against a thick stone seawall, and admire the palm trees, picnic pavilions and main building, painted a burnished tangerine and russet, as though a bushfire were in full flame above the water.