The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  Ross then points at a half-cabin launch at a nearby mooring. He helped his father build that boat, named Bouquet, in the late 1950s, and the family would head out on her.

  But where Ross collected the bulk of his knowledge about building vessels – great and small – can also be seen from his shed. He gestures downriver to a nest of buildings.

  ‘See that grey roof? That’s where I worked.’

  COCKATOO ISLAND commands a stentorian presence in the middle of the harbour. It sits a few hundred metres off the Woolwich shore. The island’s name is embedded in the vernacular and ‘Cockatoo’ sounds almost playful, but its appearance is far more serious. Whether it is the hard face of sandstone on the eastern side, the austere structures of brick and iron, or that this mass of severity is accentuated because it is surrounded by shimmering, light-polished water, the island looks like a prison. Which it was for many years.

  When you arrive by ferry, which regularly stops here, there is a sign attached to a reception building that spells out the dimensions of what is the largest island in Sydney Harbour: ‘Length 500m. Width 360m. Area 18 hectares’. But those arbitrary measurements give no clue to the depth and texture of human experience on Cockatoo Island.

  It was used as a meeting place for Aboriginal groups, who called it Wareamah. When British settlers turned up, they saw little value in what was a solid lump of sandstone thatched with red gums, in which sat and screeched the cockatoos that the new arrivals named the island after. What’s more, the island was apparently snake-infested. What was of little interest to settlers was attractive to Governor George Gipps. The island held the promise of solving two problems: fluctuations in food supply and prices, and housing convicts.

  In 1839, Gipps decided to use convict labour to excavate underground grain silos on the higher part of the island. His plan was to store wheat in the good seasons, which would soften price rises in poorer times. The silos hacked out of the rock were shaped like bottles, almost six metres deep, and they could hold up to 140 tonnes of grain. By the end of 1840, about 560 tonnes of wheat were stored in the silos, and the Governor was pleased.

  ‘Being hermetically sealed, grain of any kind may be preserved in them for years,’ Gipps wrote.

  The British Government was less impressed. It effectively told Gipps to shut the silos and let the market determine grain prices. Still, the colony had a new place to put convicts, which was needed with the closure of Norfolk Island as a penal settlement. The island within an island was well suited to being a prison.

  Cockatoo Island earned a reputation for being the dumping ground for some of the toughest and worst-behaved of convicts. The cruellest torment of being locked up here, I imagine as I walk through the prisoners’ barracks, was not the cold stone or cramped conditions but viewing the harbour’s beautiful northern shoreline through bars. Then again, to a convict, perhaps the opposite shore looked dispiritingly like yet another wall, another obstacle.

  Near the barracks was the military guardhouse, which was built in 1841. The ruins are on an exposed patch on the western end of the upper part of the island. It is open to the finest of views and all the moods of Mother Nature. The guardhouse neighboured twelve isolation cells next door, where prisoners would be lowered through a ceiling trap-door. This was a horrible place to do time. Sitting in the darkness, the inmate would have to fight off the rats when his meal was delivered. Even the Hunters Hill developer Jules Joubert, who had acted as a magistrate on the island, referred to the cells as a tomb.

  The obsession of many convicts was to escape. Stories of the waters teeming with sharks were not enough to dissuade some. Guards were posted along the shore, and others were in boats rowing around the island, particularly when the harbour was fog-veiled. A few convicts planned to escape by staying on top of the water, as a diary entry by a police sergeant in 1859, indicates: ‘mast, paddle and sail discovered . . . an attempted escape’. Others tried their luck in the water. Some didn’t get far or were drowned, and a few made it to the mainland shores before being caught. The writer Louis Becke, who as a boy lived at Hunters Hill in the 1860s, recalled how, having heard the tell-tale sounds of a sentry’s rifle shot and the clamour of a bell in the night, he went down to the rocks at dawn and saw ‘a wretched, exhausted creature clinging with bleeding hands to the oyster-covered rocks beneath our house, too weak to drag himself from his pursuers’. The only known successful escapee was horse thief Frederick Ward. With the help of his wife, who had swum to the island and left tools for him to use to break out, Ward and another prisoner swam towards Birchgrove at night in September 1863. His fellow escapee drowned, but Ward made it. He resumed his career as a criminal, becoming renowned as the ‘gentleman’ bushranger Captain Thunderbolt, before he was shot by a police officer near the town of Uralla in 1870.

  All the prisoners finally escaped the island in 1869, when they were transferred to Darlinghurst Gaol. Two years later, the island was once more a prison. It became an industrial school and reformatory for girls, which was named Biloela, an Aboriginal word meaning ‘white cockatoo’. In the same year, Vernon, a sailing ship that had been converted into a training vessel for boys, was moored off the north-eastern part of Cockatoo Island. Hundreds of boys lived and learnt trades on the ship, and they grew vegetables on the island.

  Inevitably, the residents of Biloela and the company of Vernon found each other. The girls’ institution moved on in 1887, and the buildings reverted to a prison to relieve overcrowding at Darlinghurst Gaol.

  Cockatoo Island closed as a prison in 1908. However, by then, the island had been fulfilling another major role for more than half a century. Indeed, the island had become bifurcated, not in shape but in function. As well as being a prison, it was also the centre of shipbuilding in the colony. The industry was built on a sandstone base and with convicts’ sweat, for, like so much development in the colony, before any ship could be docked or built, a lot of rock had to be hacked out.

  Construction on a dock began in 1847 on the south-eastern part of the island, with a 91-metre indent cut into the rock. It was designed to be long enough to take a large man-of-war ship. Overseeing the construction was Captain Gother Kerr Mann, a former Royal Engineer. Aside from this gash in the island, Mann is remembered by a headland on the northern shore opposite. It’s called Manns Point.

  On Cockatoo Island, Mann had to deal with an obstinate convict labour force. As a result, it took about ten years to build the dock, even though the original estimate was less than sixteen months. The dock was named after the 10th Governor of New South Wales, Sir Charles FitzRoy. It finally opened in 1857.

  More shipbuilding facilities were grafted onto and carved into the island. In 1870, the government’s Harbours and Rivers Department built slipways on the southern shore. Over the next half a century, more than 150 ships, including tugs and barges, were built on this part of the island. These days, next to what’s called the Shipwrights’ Shed, is one of the old slipways. It is fenced off and its cradle is empty. Where the harbour laps at the slip there is a fringe of rubbish.

  In 1880, the New South Wales Government proposed building a second dock on the island, one that was capable of accepting the largest ships in operation. The Sutherland Dock was cut into the south-western part of the island. This time free labour was used. It was completed in 1890 and, at 193 metres long, was the largest dry dock in the world. More than cradle ships, Sutherland Dock was also a training pool for Barney Bede Kieran, a world champion swimmer who worked in the carpenters’ shop on the island. Kieran broke a string of swimming records in 1904 and 1905.

  The docks were never busier than in wartime. Just before the First World War, the Commonwealth Government took over the island from the New South Wales Government, and it became the first dockyard for the young Royal Australian Navy. Sutherland Dock was extended to accommodate the RAN’s battle cruiser, HMAS Australia. When war was declared in August 1914, the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force left from Cockatoo Island on
board HMAS Berrima. The ship had been converted into a military cruiser from a liner in just six days. This was just one of twenty-seven vessels converted to troopships. The island’s workforce of more than 4000 maintained, refitted and repaired hundreds of ships during the war.

  After the First World War, the island seemed to grow taller, with the construction of the Titan floating crane. The massive crane, sitting on a pontoon half a football field long, would be manoeuvred around the harbour by tugs for the next seventy-two years, doing the heavy lifting on some of the city’s major projects, including the building of Sydney Harbour Bridge and Gladesville Bridge. As well as being able to stretch its main jib more than 58 metres above the harbour, Titan could also be used to reach deep into the water, fossicking sunken tugs and ferries from the floor.

  Between the wars, the island was scratching for work. In 1933, as the Depression gnawed deeper into the economy, the Commonwealth Government leased the island to the Cockatoo Docks and Engineering Company. The lease came with a lifeline, as it guaranteed naval ships docking there each year. Still, the company looked for further cost cutting. Some of the gardeners were replaced by sheep, which grazed on the island for many years.

  During the Second World War, the island surged back to life, with more than 3000 workers. The island was further reshaped and its sandstone face shaved in places to accommodate new buildings, and additional wharves and another slipway were installed. When the war ended so did the busiest time in the dockyard’s history.

  The focus for naval vessels moved further east along the harbour. In 1945, a larger dock was opened on the other side of the Harbour Bridge, at Garden Island. At one point after the war, there were plans to join Cockatoo Island to the mainland, as there were concerns about the costs of having a dockyard on an island. After all, everything had to be transported across the water – including the payroll. The risk of that was revealed in April 1945, when almost £12,000 was robbed by machine-gun-wielding robbers at a Drummoyne wharf, as the dockyard payroll was about to be taken by launch to the island. It was one of the biggest payroll robberies since the bushranging days.

  Despite the expansion of Garden Island, some work for the navy still flowed further up the harbour. During the 1950s, the RAN destroyers Voyager and Vampire were built on Cockatoo Island. The Voyager was lost, as were the lives of eighty-two of her crew, when she collided with the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne during exercises off Jervis Bay in southern New South Wales on 10 February 1964. She was split in two by the impact and sank. With a badly damaged bow, Melbourne limped to Sydney Harbour and into Sutherland Dock for repairs. She would undergo the same operation in the same dock five years later after a collision with an American destroyer during night exercises.

  In addition to being a cradle for new ships and extending the lives of vessels, Cockatoo Island was a nursery for skills and ideas. In a cavernous, convict-built sandstone building on the south-eastern side, and from the sum of experience brought onto the island by older workers each shift, apprentices would learn their trade. One of them was Ross Gardner. He left school as a 16-year-old and trained as a fitter and turner on the island that he could see from the family boatshed.

  ‘There were 300 apprentices [on the island] the year I started,’ Ross says. His abiding memory of the apprentice training school was that the building measured the seasons by being either boiling hot or freezing cold. He gave little thought to the history in the walls. Instead, he gained a sense of the island’s heritage from his co-workers.

  ‘There were people on Cockatoo whose fathers or grandfathers had been warders in the prison,’ Ross says.

  ‘It was a very interesting place to work, because there was a lot of knowledge there.’

  Ross worked on harbour ferries, the Mortlake colliers, which often came in for a ‘haircut and shave’ (painting and anti-fouling), and he helped with the building of the Empress of Australia passenger ship, which was the largest vessel of its type constructed in the world at the time. He also worked on naval ships and was on the island both times the damaged Melbourne arrived for repairs. He particularly remembers his reaction when the aircraft carrier docked after the Voyager disaster.

  ‘Everyone was terribly upset; when the ship came in with bits hanging off the bow, it was very distressing,’ he recalls. ‘I knew someone on Voyager. He survived, but I didn’t know if he was alive or dead at that time. It was all very close to home.’

  At the end of the 1960s, Ross was moved to the drawing office at the top of the island for three weeks. He stayed there for twenty-seven years. He was involved in purchasing, a role he loved, since he was dealing with every trade on the island. Ross learnt that the building where he was based had been home to an aircraft factory during the late 1920s and early 1930s. The workers had rebuilt Sir Charles Kingsford Smith’s Southern Cross after it crashed.

  At the launch of HMAS Vampire on Cockatoo Island in 1956, the Governor-General, Field-Marshall Sir William Slim, told the gathering, ‘An island which does not provide itself with ships, and with the means to protect them, gives, as tragic hostages to fortune, its own people’. A quarter of a century on, Cockatoo Island’s future as a shipbuilding centre was clouding. The contracts were drying up, the facilities were ageing and in need of an overhaul, and the very element that had made the site attractive in the first place – it was an island – was increasingly seen as a problem. The last navy ship built on the island, HMAS Success, was launched in 1984. It was the largest naval ship ever built in Australia. As always, the launch was a celebration, which Ross watched from the roof of the Planning, Estimating and Supply Offices building. At that time the workers didn’t know this would be the final naval vessel to be built here.

  A major refit program on the navy’s Oberon submarines continued, but that was not enough to ensure the dockyard’s future. The yard ground to a halt at the end of 1991. Ross’ own employment ended early in 1992. He returned as a contractor to help oversee the stripping of the dockyard and the removal of materials off the island. As he describes those six weeks of work, ‘it was sort of like getting ready for a funeral’.

  Then the final day arrived. Ross vividly remembers the date: 3 January 1993. The island had already gone from being a shipyard to a graveyard. There was next to no one on the island, and the machines were still and silent, the rust and rictus setting in. At the end of the day, with the facility handed back to the Commonwealth, Ross, along with the dockyard’s chief executive and the production manager, hopped onto a workboat and left the island.

  ‘And that was it,’ Ross shrugs. ‘It was the most anti-climactic end to 150 years. We didn’t even stop to say good-bye. I now know why we didn’t. It was upsetting for everyone.

  ‘To me, we’d lost a huge pool of engineering knowledge. The location was not ideal, but I don’t think the decision to close [the dockyard] had anything to do with that. It was political.’

  After it had effectively killed off Cockatoo Island as a shipyard in the late 1980s, the Federal Government wanted to sell the island. Developers were keen, but the workers and the broader community pushed back, demanding it be kept in public hands. A hundred workers even staged a fourteen-week sit-in on the island.

  The workers lost their place of employment, but the public retained the island. Under the management of the Sydney Harbour Heritage Trust, Cockatoo Island has slipped into a new role in recent years: tourist attraction. Each day, visitors step off ferries and stroll through the old buildings and among the historic machinery. They can even sleep on the island, camping in tents along the northern apron, or staying in historic cottages on its crown. You can also arrive by kayak, sliding into Slipway No. 2, where ships were built for the war effort.

  The island has been given World Heritage listing because of its remnants of the convict era, but a reminder of its maritime past bobs in Sutherland Dock and a camber wharf on the southern side. Pleasure boats are berthed where ships were brought to life. Just south of the dock, and lying under the jib of
an old crane, more boats are stored in racks on the edge of a wharf.

  If the island’s name appeals to the birdwatcher in you, then you could be in luck. As long as you love seagulls. At times there are thousands loitering and swirling around parts of the island’s sandstone faces. The birds have become a tourist attraction of sorts, particularly around nesting time, when the seagulls do their squawking, screeching, poo squibbing best to deter visitors. Those expecting to find kooky gulls crying, ‘Mine! Mine! Mine!’, like in Finding Nemo, are instead confronted by something closer to the characters out of a certain Hitchcock movie.

  Walking on the island, you can see the different layers of human effort. A patina of experience covers the buildings. There is the corrugated iron skin wrapped around some of the buildings, speaking in a guttural, no-nonsense tone of heavy industry. Inside one of those buildings, the mould loft, are the phantoms of great ships. Its top floor wears the markings of full-scale templates for the components of ships built on the island from the end of the First World War right through to when computers took over.

  From the water, the different eras nudge and flow into each other. On a gloomy winter’s morning, I paddle into Fitzroy Dock. The stepped stone walls on either side of me are like shackled arms, reminding me of the convicts who built this dock. The walls gradually press closer, following the outline of ships the dock once held, until they touch about 144 metres beyond the entrance. On the right side is a steam-powered crane, which is branded with the name of another harbourside dock, Mort’s, and is proudly tattooed, ‘Sydney 1891’. Cranes of different ages are dotted along the dock like gibbets, their hooks hanging lifeless on the jibs. On each side are also buildings from various times; a utilitarian brick office on the left, towering corrugated iron workshops and a convict-created sandstone building on the right. Ahead, beyond the dock, is a sandstone cliff, hacked and gouged out of the island’s soul. From where I bob deep in the dock, the mix of the penal and the industrial feels Gothic. The air sounds dead, punctuated by the seagulls’ shriek and the hiss of the bitter westerly trying to exfoliate the skin of the aged buildings. The cold wind is more effective on my skin. I shiver like crazy, as though a ghost has floated over me. But it’s me who is floating over ghosts.