by Phil Jarratt
‘Come on, Snow,’ chortled his older, braver mate. ‘The silly old bugger’s only thrown you off, he’s not going to send you back to the bush.’ Hearing this, the conductor glared down at the lads. ‘By jingo, you won’t be so clever when Sergeant Halstead catches up with you,’ he muttered.
‘What, the abominable toe man gonna put his boot up me bum? Might get stuck!’ The bigger boy with the mouth winked through the window at Isabel as he began to shuffle off along the street.
Finally the tram arrived at the terminus next to the ferry wharf, and Isabel alighted and hurried down the Corso towards the School of Arts in Victoria Hall for the first of her two engagements in the village this day. Both were rehearsals for Manly’s Venetian Carnival, the event of the year held over a week each January. First, she must run through the choral program to be presented by the combined churches’ youth choir and be allocated her part. Isabel didn’t like singing terribly much and the hymns and standards chosen by Mr Brown, the choirmaster, were dull and old-fashioned, but anything to keep Father off her back.
The second engagement was more to her liking. All the youth members of the district’s swimming, lifesaving and surf clubs (including Freshwater) were to present a pageant of aquatic activity, featuring a march-past, demonstrations of life-saving techniques, synchronised swimming and aquaplaning, culminating in a series of beach sprints and pillow fights for the boys. Demonstrating life-saving techniques particularly appealed to Isabel since it was only last summer, when she was still learning to surf shoot, that she had nearly drowned. Father was first in shock, then purple with anger when he read in the Sydney Morning Herald:
The Dee Why Lifesaving and Surf Club held its first annual carnival on Saturday at Dee Why Beach. There was an attendance of about 3000 … Only two competitors—Miss Leatham [sic] and Miss Abrahams—started in the ladies surf race. The latter, however, gave up before the shore was reached, and had to be rescued.
Isabel had been shaken, particularly by seeing Bessie Abrahams labouring through the churn clearly in some bother, but Bessie had waved away her offer of assistance and she had persevered and won, and that had felt good. When he discovered the danger Isabel had been exposed to, her father had banned her from competing in the surf for six months, or until she had gained a certificate of proficiency in swimming, but it was the end of the season anyway, and this summer she was stronger in every department.
Isabel and Claude West frolic on Freshwater Beach, 1914. Photo from the Letham Collection, Warringah Library Local Studies.
As soon as choir practice was over, Isabel retraced her steps to the wharf, crossing East Esplanade onto the reserve. At the Broken Column Memorial, Claude was waiting for her, cutting rather a dashing figure in his ‘unshrinkable’ woollen Canadian swimsuit and unlaced tennis shoes, a ‘Turk’s’ striped towel thrown casually over his shoulder.
Claude was having difficulty containing his excitement. ‘Claude, what is it?’
‘He’s at Boomerang! I saw him! Duke Ka … the Duke arrived this morning. I don’t think anyone is supposed to know. Mr McIntyre was acting very strangely.’
Isabel felt a warm glow of anticipation fill her. The world’s greatest swimmer and surf shooter in her own backyard! Surely that meant they would soon meet. The reserve was crowded with people now and the officials were marshalling them into club groups. ‘Not a word of this, Issie,’ Claude cautioned. ‘I’ll see you after the rehearsals.’ He touched her lightly on the arm and they moved off to rally under their club flags, he to North Steyne, she to Freshwater.
The Venetian Carnival, established in 1912 as a night-time addition to Manly’s existing rowing and sailing regatta, had, over three years, grown into a massive production, drawing as many as 50,000 visitors, eager to experience ‘marvellous Manly’ in full celebratory mode. At Venetian time Manly had variously been compared with the French seaside resorts of Boulogne and Trouville and New York’s Coney Island, although, a Sydney Morning Herald writer noted, it ‘had a greater charm’ and was ‘without the roughness’. The newspapers described a ‘marine city in its Venetian blaze of light’, with the reflection of the Chinese lanterns in the water creating ‘a fairy picture’ as bands played, choirs sang and ‘sailor-suited girls in blue’ disported themselves on the shore alongside ‘hundreds of sailor-men in white, ashore and afloat’.
While these images may have seemed somewhat removed from the machismo of Manly’s emerging surf and bathing culture in the early 1900s, they accurately reflected the village’s planned development over the preceding half century, as initially conceived by Henry Gilbert Smith, an English entrepreneur who bought or leased large parcels of land in 1853 and proceeded to create an antipodean version of the English resort of Brighton. His application for subdivision referred to a ‘marine retreat’ that would become a ‘favourite resort of the colonists … ensuring health and amusement to residents and visitors’. Smith named his main street between cove and beach The Corso, after the famed Via del Corso in Rome, the city’s main thoroughfare that unites the Piazza Venezia in the south with the Piazza del Popolo in the north. Manly’s Corso, he assured the citizenry, would be somewhat shorter but no less grand. He named the ocean beach walkways South and North Steyne, like the promenades at Brighton. He created an English garden with ornamental seats and tea rooms at Fairy Bower, and along the beachfront he ripped up the indigenous cabbage tree palms and wildflowers and planted Norfolk pines to create a more European look.
This confusion of influences was the result of the strong view of the English ruling class that they had invented the concept of the seaside resort and introduced it to Europe, therefore they could copy at will. There was an element of truth in this, in that the English had long promoted the drinking of seawater as a remedy for gout, gonorrhoea and jaundice, and had set up coastal spas for this purpose, initially at places like Lyme Regis and later along the French Atlantic coast. When not drinking the stuff, spa visitors would bathe in it, although only briefly and privately, within a ‘bathing machine’, which was a small dressing room on wheels, pulled by horse to the water’s edge.
When the Prince of Wales gave the royal seal of approval to Brighton by building a royal pavilion there in 1783, he was 70 years ahead of Napoleon III, who gentrified the French fishing village of Biarritz by building a summer palace for Empress Eugenie in 1854, just as Smith was starting to create Marvellous Manly.
Manly was not, however, the first Australian seaside resort. Melbourne’s Sandridge (later Port Melbourne) and St Kilda became popular for sea bathing in the 1840s, while the Sir Joseph Banks Hotel on Sydney’s Botany Bay, with its waterfront zoological gardens and sumptuous sitting rooms, offered variations on the seaside experience, such as elephant rides from the lobby to the water’s edge. But nothing could compare with H.G. Smith’s grand vision for Manly. He built it, and to ensure they would come, he created a ferry service from Circular Quay that deposited new arrivals right at the door of his ‘Italianate’ Pier Hotel. The village flourished, with shops and restaurants along The Corso and lodging houses on every corner.
By the turn of the century Sydney’s south-side resorts realised they would have to develop new attractions in order to remain competitive. The Sir Joseph Banks had already undergone a massive makeover, with the construction of a new and more luxurious wing and the addition of athletic fields, bowling greens and cricket pitches adjacent to its vast gardens, while Bondi had built an aquarium and a cliff-top ‘switchback’ thrill ride. But in 1902, tiny Tamarama trumped them all with the creation of Wonderland City, with not just a switchback but a scenic railway, underground rivers, slippery dips and sideshows. On summer holidays, tens of thousands flocked to the beach park on the new steam trams that plied the hilly streets of the eastern suburbs.
Manly answered back in 1903 with the Manly Water Chute and Toboggan Slide on South Steyne. Originally known as Steyne Court, and modelled on the amusement precinct at
London’s Earls Court, the ocean-side park featured refreshment rooms, a wine kiosk, the Bijou Theatre and a shooting gallery, in addition to the scarily high chute and toboggan platforms that sent people hurtling into a man-made ‘lake’ where they were ‘enveloped in a perfect sea of foam’. All of this on less than a hectare of land! But the Water Chute (no-one but its developers ever called it Steyne Court) was an immediate success, with more than 30,000 people enjoying the thrill rides over the three-week holiday season following its opening in December. At sixpence a ticket, the enterprise was looking financially healthy until the park operator’s brother, a well-known footballer named Walter Baird, was crushed to death by a boat descending from the chute. The gloss soon wore off the seaside attraction, despite the popularity of the nightly appearances of ‘Professor’ Artie Adrian whose routine involved riding a cycle down the chute at high speed and crashing into the pool without injury. Steyne Court closed down in 1906.
Not everyone was completely sold on Manly’s charms. Travel writer H. Hemmer wrote:
Picturesque as Manly is, it possesses not the rich and blooming beauty of the Riviera. It possesses not the sweet loveliness of the Mediterranean coast, not the grandeur of the endless panorama of its shores, backed by snowclad mountains, not its balmy atmosphere, not its superb vegetation, not the warm azure colour of sea and sky … But Manly has its own weird beauty and uncouth loveliness. Surely no capital has such a place accidentally attached to it which can be reached comfortably with such a charming spectacle in transit. It is not the most beautiful sea-shore, but a sea-shore full of beauty, and thereby, and by its nearness to the greatest harbour in the southern seas, it is advance of many a famous beach. It needs booming. It needs arranging.
In 1910 a group of Manly entrepreneurs proposed to ‘arrange’ the village by building a 300-metre ocean pier where giant steamships could moor while passengers were entertained by bands in a pavilion at its head. Although the submission claimed that it would be ‘equal to those which grace the sea fronts of some of Britain’s finest and most popular watering places’, it was rejected out of hand for its enormity, in perhaps the first demonstration of environmental awareness that the civic fathers had yet shown. There would be many more attempts to turn Manly into a seaside circus and some (like the Manly Fun Pier) would succeed, but even in those early years there was a growing understanding that Manly’s more enduring attractions were its natural ones, and its appeal was increasingly linked to its rugged bush trails, its waterways, beach and surf.
Claude offered Isabel his hand as they crossed the busy Esplanade. It was the hand of friendship and perfectly acceptable, but here in the village one had to consider one’s reputation, as both Isabel’s father and mother would say. Isabel slyly glanced over both shoulders, saw no-one she knew and continued happily along her way.
They waited for two different trams, since Claude’s family home was a few stops up the Sydney Road, but as they sat in the warmth of a gloriously sunny afternoon, the last of the bad weather now gone, he was seized by sudden inspiration. ‘Let’s take the tunnel through to Freshie, sneak around the back of Boomerang and see if we can spot the Duke.’
The teenagers alighted from the Brookvale tram at the North Manly depot, flashing their ‘penny brown’ tickets at the inspector, and doubled back along the edge of the lagoon, quite on the nose at low tide, to cross the wooden footbridge and climb the hill above the Queenscliff rock swimming pool to the entrance to Mr Lewers’s tunnel. The tunnel was dank and damp and Claude had to duck as he entered, although once inside there was enough clearance for him to stand upright. Isabel had peered into the tunnel from the other end a couple of times but had never accepted the dare to run through it screaming her lungs out, as some of her gamer friends had. Now she said nothing to Claude but walked briskly in the dark, her eyes fixed on the patch of sunlight some 80 feet along.
Beloved of fishermen who trudged through it at night with their lanterns and shunned by picnickers who feared its precarious mineshaft appearance, the tunnel that now bore his name had been funded by businessman Robert D. Lewers in 1908, shortly after he had opened the Freshwater Kiosk. The idea was to shorten the journey over Queenscliff Hill for his weekend patrons, but once the electric tram service had been introduced and then extended along Pittwater Road, it became more or less redundant, although the local fishermen certainly appreciated the three months of single-handed toil put in by quarryman Bevan, and occasionally expressed this by dropping by his shack on the northern headland of Freshwater with a fat bream or a whiting or two.
Well before reaching Undercliff, Isabel and Claude cut across a sandy track up through the tea tree and sarsaparilla vines until they were directly behind the water tanks and tin-roofed thunder-box of Boomerang. Claude selected a spot where they were hidden from view in the scrub and pulled Isabel down onto the sand. ‘Perfect, Issie. If he’s still here he’ll have to use the dunny sooner or later.’
They waited in silence for a long while, but eventually, in the flat courtyard behind the main building, Mr McIntyre and another man Claude recognised as Charles D. Paterson, president of North Steyne Surf Club, were fussing about with saw horses as another two men came around the side of the house carrying a sculpted length of heavy timber, which they lay across the horses. All four men walked slowly around the timber examining it, then Mr McIntyre counted some notes out of his wallet and the delivery men disappeared. McIntyre took a cigarette from his silver case and lit it while Paterson ran his fingers along the wood.
Then Isabel noticed a tall, large, dark man standing on the landing at the top of the back stairs. He wore braces over a collarless shirt and his trousers were half tucked into his boots, but these observations were secondary. From the moment she saw him she was transfixed by his huge lion’s head and his dark wavy hair swept back off his forehead. Although she could not make out all his features, she could see his high cheek bones and the fine line of his nose. It was him!
Duke Kahanamoku slowly descended the stairs, picked up an end of the board with one hand and ran a finger along its edge. Soon he was joined by a smaller man, similarly dressed, and they both examined the wood for an agonisingly long time before Duke declared: ‘Gentlemen, this will do just fine. They’ve done very well, just needs a little finetuning.’
Duke’s voice carried up the hill, but Claude and Isabel had difficulty picking up the rest of the conversation. In response to something from Mr Paterson, Duke said, ‘No time like the present,’ flicked down his braces and removed his shirt. The big Hawaiian was handed what looked like a carpenter’s leather tool bag and fastened it around his waist. Holding one end of the timber up to eye level, he used a thick pencil to draw a soft curve around it, then repeated the process from the other end.
There was a bigger group of men around him now, watching his every move. Duke said something inaudible, and one of the Kanaka boys scurried off and returned with a wood plane and a selection of coarse sandpaper. Duke circled the timber again, holding it up at both ends before starting.
‘He’s making a surfboard,’ Claude whispered, sotto voce.
Isabel pursed her lips. ‘I can see that. Now shoosh!’
The outline of the board now cut back, the Hawaiian refined its edges with coarse sandpaper. Slowly, methodically, he moved from side to side, checking on its symmetry. A pass of the planer here, a rub there; it was a slow process, but Claude was fascinated to watch, even at this distance. Isabel less so, a sentiment she appeared to share with Mr McIntyre, who was looking at his watch and fussing.
‘Duke …’
‘Paoa, please.’
‘Paoa, we have automobiles arriving to pick up our party at five thirty, and we must not miss the magnificent harbour sunset from the terrace of the Pier Hotel,’ McIntyre pleaded.
Duke looked up and down the board again before responding. ‘You know, it won’t take that long, reckon I could have her finished by sundown.’ He
looked over to Mr McIntyre and saw the forlorn expression on the small, over-dressed, overwrought fellow. It was Mr Alexander Hume Ford all over again, trying so hard, perhaps too hard, but meaning well, so far as you could tell. Duke smiled. ‘Well, then, I’ll finish this in the morning. We’d better get cleaned up, I guess.’
‘You’re going to see Marvellous Manly tonight, sir,’ McIntyre chirped as he followed the Hawaiians inside. ‘That I can guarantee.’
By this point Isabel and Claude were long gone, already hurrying home along the flat sand track in the golden light of late afternoon.
Chapter 12
Kahanamoku Did Not Show
Francis Evans stared at the open newspaper as he sipped his tea in the dining room of the Oxford Hotel. It seemed a big fuss over such a small article, just a few lines of type on page twelve, buried under an avalanche of sailing and cycling: ‘Surf display by Kahanamoku … The New South Wales Swimming Association has arranged for a display by Duke Paoa Kahanamoku at Freshwater on Wednesday morning, at 11 o’clock. The famous swimmer will give an exhibition of breaker shooting and board shooting.’
He flicked through the rest of the paper, his eyes coming to rest on a rather large advertisement on the editorial page, offering a 100-pound reward for anyone providing information that might lead to the conviction of those spreading the malicious rumour that Schweppes Limited, makers of sodas and mineral waters, was a German company. Ah, the war in Europe. How easy it was to forget, despite the warships in the harbour and the khaki uniforms in the streets, that this was a country at war.