by Scott Bevan
‘I know you’re one of them, but we don’t worry about kayakers,’ says the skipper, with the hint of a smile, when I point to the paddler just off our bow.
What makes our victory better is that in fairly light conditions, the skiff is packed, with a crew of eleven. The artist James R. Jackson, who was renowned for depicting harbour life, loved sailing on the 18-footers as a young man. He recalled when the boat had to be lightened for the run home, he would be ordered overboard and left to swim back. As tempting as it must have been, Ian orders no one overboard during the race. As a competitor on another boat, Tangalooma, quips when he sees the crush of us on board, ‘You look like a ferry!’ Still, James R. Jackson said in his day there could be up to eighteen on board a skiff, so we still have plenty of room.
The pleasure of the skiffs is not just in the pain while racing, but also yarning with members of the other crews on the shore. Occasionally, sailors wear T-shirts that hint at their life and near-death connection to the water. Members of Top Weight sometimes wear shirts that read, ‘Careening Cove Swimming Club’. This is an invitation-only club you don’t want to be welcomed into; it depends on how many times you capsize.
A T-shirt worn by Marshall Flanagan, a crew member of Tangalooma, is not so lightly earned or worn. The message and insignia on the front of Marshall’s shirt look like a joke, ‘Bite Club’, with a drawing of a shark fin. At first, I think he might be wearing it as good-natured psychological warfare, to make competing crews think twice about entering the harbour. Yet the back of the T-shirt reads, ‘Shark Attack Survivors Support Group’.
I ask Marshall if the Bite Club is real. He lifts his cargo shorts to reveal the upper part of his left leg. A divot has been dug out of his skin. Marshall was attacked by a great white shark while surfing in South Africa in 1976. He escaped only by repeatedly punching the shark in the snout until it opened its jaws and released him. During the fight for his life, Marshall was bitten on the arm, and had a tendon in his hand torn through.
The shark was estimated to be three to four metres long. That estimate is based on part of a tooth that had been embedded in Marshall’s knee. The tooth was removed and given to Marshall. He still has it, which is either a jagged reminder of how he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or a good luck charm.
‘It was tough,’ Marshall says of the attack, ‘but, hey, at least I got this T-shirt.’
FOR ALL the joy they bring to the harbour, and despite the heritage they carry in their varnished wooden hulls, the 18-foot skiffs are not assured of a future on Sydney Harbour, Ian Smith fears.
‘I’ve got to say I’m not optimistic.’
‘There is a bit of an element that wooden [boat] sailors are looked at the way vintage car people are looked at – “It’s nice they’re doing it, but they’re nuts!”’
Many sailors, he reckons, are only interested in replicating their life on land, ripping along at great speeds and in maximum comfort.
‘They don’t want to be one of these weird people sailing these funny old boats,’ Ian shrugs.
‘There are a few younger people but not in the numbers to keep the fleet going for too many more decades. I’ll keep going for as long as I can physically handle it.
‘We have to interest more people in maritime history, and in the sheer joy of sailing.’
ROUNDING THE point from Careening Cove into Neutral Bay in Pulbah Raider, I feel momentarily lost. The ferry terminal is marked ‘North Sydney’. Lesson learnt – don’t navigate by ferry wharf signs. A little further along is an imposing 115-metre-long wharf where submarines once berthed. This is the site of the former HMAS Platypus base. Platypus was commissioned in 1967, and for more than thirty years the navy’s Oberon submarines slid in and out of the bay to this base. The black fenders, which would have softened the nudging of the subs against the wharf, remain. Those who knew this area when it was a navy base can still hear the submarines in their memory. Kayaking with a friend in Neutral Bay, he pointed to where his father had lived, just a few doors from the base. My friend used to listen to the subs’ engines rumble to life and see the smoke billowing out of them.
The submarines were hardly the first contributors to pollution along this section of the harbour. In 1876, the farmland that existed on the western shore became the home of a gasworks, tucked into the excavated sandstone cliff. Colliers would unload at the long timber wharf at night, sending out great plumes of coal dust. The works survived until the early 1930s, but their closure spelt only a change of industry for neighbours. During the Second World War, part of the gasworks site was resumed for a torpedo manufacturing and maintenance factory, servicing the Australian, British and US navies. Then, after the war, the submariners came.
The sites’ industrial stories are scattered around the site in the surviving buildings, from the gasworks’ coal stores to the massive RAN Torpedo Maintenance Establishment factory and the Platypus facilities. The Sydney Harbour Federation Trust – the agency formed in the late 1990s to oversee the return of Commonwealth land, particularly former Defence properties, to the public – has been given the task of moulding this rich yet dirty industrial past into something useable for the future. The site is to be a foreshore park, and some of the historic buildings are to be reinvented for public and commercial use. Change is already under way. A few buildings have been demolished or dismantled, and teams have been undertaking stonework and landscaping. There are even plans for a facility that is surprisingly sparse around the main harbour: somewhere to launch a kayak. More than $40 million have been spent on remediating the site, and another $20 million have been earmarked to bring new life to the old base. Whenever waterfront land becomes available, there are many ideas and not enough money to create something everyone will be happy with. But at least a slice of the harbour is being opened to the people, particularly in an area where much of it is in private hands.
AT THE head of Neutral Bay, as with so many of these harbour inlets, there was once a stunning creek and waterfall, which attracted picnickers. And like so many of the bays, its head was trussed behind a seawall, filled in and converted into a park. On 17 July 1934, the park became a runway for the famous aviator Sir Charles Kingsford Smith. His plane, Lady Southern Cross, had been shipped from the United States then transferred on a barge to the park. Kingsford Smith had lived near here years before and remembered the park, so he figured it could be used as a runway. Crowds gathered to watch the plane take off. They collectively held their breath as Lady Southern Cross hung low over the bay before it climbed above the harbour. The following year, Kingsford Smith, his flying partner J.T. Pethybridge and Lady Southern Cross were lost without a trace on a flight from England to Australia.
Near the park on the bay’s western shore and staring across the water at the former navy base is a training centre for Australian Customs, or, as it has been rebranded, Border Force. I’ve paddled past clumps of earnest-looking people, swaddled in Customs overalls, combing over yachts berthed outside the depot. Border Force’s presence, and its efforts to control what comes in and out of the harbour, echoes how the bay received its English name.
Governor Arthur Phillip didn’t want foreign ships mooring wherever they wanted in the harbour, with all its discreet coves and inlets. So, in 1789, he ordered that all visiting non-British ‘neutral’ ships were to drop anchor in this bay. In that way, the colonists could keep an eye on them. Yet the expected foreign ships were slow in arriving. Phillip himself was readying to sail out of the Heads and leave Sydney when the first foreign trading ship, an American brig named Philadelphia, sailed into the harbour in November 1792.
The Customs complex sits on land that once held the home and business of a man who arrived in the colony in the sort of yacht that its officers could have searched for hours. Ben Boyd was a Scot. He sailed into the harbour in 1842 in a luxurious schooner, Wanderer, bringing with him plans to develop the resources of the colony and promises of funding to realise those ambitions, by way of money through t
he appropriately named Royal Bank of Australia. Boyd had formed the bank back in London, where he had been a stockbroker. In time, the bank would turn out to be little more than his cash cow. But he milked that cow and turned it into sheep. He established sheep stations, built up a steamship business, and, to transport the livestock and wool from his properties to Sydney, he built towns on the New South Wales south coast, modestly called Boyd Town and East Boyd.
On the shores of Neutral Bay, Boyd built a large dam and facilities to wash the wool, and a multi-storey building in which to store the bales, ready for shipping to England. Boyd lived in a large home, Craignathan, by the bay and was renowned for being a generous entertainer. Yet it all came crashing down and, by the late 1840s, he lost just about everything except his yacht, in which he sailed away in search of new fields of gold. Boyd went to California, but when that did not work out he sailed back across the Pacific, possibly with grandiose plans of starting his own Papuan republic, only to disappear, presumed killed, in the Solomon Islands. When Boyd’s woolstore was dismantled in the 1870s, some of the great sandstone blocks were recycled and built into the seawall in Neutral Bay.
Just beyond the Neutral Bay ferry wharf, with its lavish Art Deco entrance, and a slice of sand with the urban name of Hayes Street Beach, sits the home of magical bushland creatures. Nutcote is a house built by gumnut babies. For this was where author and illustrator May Gibbs lived for more than forty years. Gibbs had already made her name with Snugglepot and Cuddlepie by the time she moved into Nutcote, but the property would inspire more book adventures. She would sit on the balcony of her home, nestled in the curve of the bay, or walk in the cottage’s gardens down to the shore, all the while conjuring characters and settings that made their way from the harbour into children’s imaginations, such as Bib and Bub, and Scotty in Gumnut Land.
In the days after the controversial opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932, Nutcote housed another almost mythical character. Captain Francis De Groot stayed here after he had been released from detention for defiantly cutting the official ribbon before Premier Jack Lang could. May Gibbs’ husband James Ossoli Kelly was a friend of De Groot.
While the design of Nutcote has Mediterranean influences, further along the point a touch of Venice seems to have been plonked right on the shore. Next to the Kurraba Point ferry wharf is a three-storey apartment block with sumptuous curves, like an ocean liner’s. Living in there, you would feel as though you were on a boat. On the ground floor, the harbour is just a couple of metres below the windows, so the sound of water would be a constant companion. In ‘A Portrait of Sydney’, Kenneth Slessor saw his harbour town as a kind of Venice, comparing the coves and inlets to the Italian city’s canals, and the ferries to the gondolas.
Around the point is Shell Cove. Along the cove’s eastern shore, which is Cremorne Point, the sense of the landscape remaining how it’s always been is palpable. On the waterline there are no houses, just oyster-clad rocks and bush, like nature’s own green ban. It is part of a 30-metre reserve skirting the point, ensuring the waterfront is kept in public hands. Hiding under the trees are overturned tinnies, waiting to take their owners out to the larger boats clotting the cove. The bush slowly surrenders its territory to housing as I near the tip, but the feeling of another time stays. With its waterfront reserve and behind that a row of predominantly older homes, Cremorne Point, from the water, looks like some seaside resort town from a century earlier. There is even a fantastic swimming pool, hiding behind a curtain of Port Jackson figs, on the water’s edge.
The MacCallum Pool may be made of concrete but it is virtually a rock pool. Indeed, it began life as a pool defined by rocks, assembled by an Olympic swimming gold medallist, Fred Lane, in the early 20th century. A local, Hugh MacCallum, took over the pool’s maintenance, and, for his efforts, the facility was named after him in the 1930s. The pool is set like a jewel into the sandstone shoreline. As I float in the water, I can hear the waves splashing onto the rocks, just on the other side of the picket fence. I could well be swimming in the harbour. I’m undoubtedly, gloriously, swimming in Sydney. For what makes Sydney magical washes through the spaces in the wooden fence and into the pool. It’s the view, not the early-morning water temperature, that takes my breath. I can see down the harbour to the Bridge peering over Kirribilli Point, and on the opposite shore, there’s the Opera House, the Botanic Gardens, the warships at Garden Island. Between there and here is Fort Denison. MacCallum Pool is hardly Olympic standard in dimensions. An older man, whose freestyle stroke has the gentle rhythm of Tai Chi, tells me he’s paced it out to be thirty metres. Not that it matters. I spend most of my time at the end of the pool, gazing out. This utterly beguiling pool is perhaps the least conducive in the harbour, if not in the world, for swimming laps. Or, as the Tai Chi swimmer proclaims with a sweep of an arm across the harbour, ‘Who needs New York, eh?’
Cremorne Point has a beauty that attracted admirers from the early days of the colony. Some wanted to be nurtured by what the point offered, others wanted to be made wealthy by it. The owners of the Cremorne Gardens combined the two motives, when they opened their pleasure ground in 1856. The owners had named their venture after the renowned Cremorne Gardens in London. Steamers brought revellers across the water from Sydney Cove. The commercial pleasure gardens shut after a few years, but, as a picnic destination, Cremorne Point remained popular. However, some wanted the land for a few. James Milson junior sought to subdivide the point – right down to the waterline. He was told the waterfront reserve would remain, but he advertised in 1889, anyway, showing blocks for sale with nothing between them and the harbour. The matter went to court, the developer lost, and the point still wears its green trim. The predominance of green slides around the tip into Mosman Bay, as residents in the Federation homes along the point’s lip maintain the foliage between them and the harbour. Stone paths and stairways shyly reveal themselves between the plants and trees on the steep slope. The residents are tending to not just a garden but a tradition. For one section along here has been revered locally for more than half a century. In 1959, a resident, Lex Graham, planted an elephant ear bulb that he had grabbed as it floated past while he was swimming in the bay. From that one act, more than the elephant ear grew. Lex and his wife Ruby cleaned out the garbage – some of it very old, including women’s whalebone corsets – that had been thrown over the edge, removed the weeds, and slowly created a wonderland that holds the slope firm and sets your mind free when you wander into it. Birdsong sprinkles from above, and the rhythm of water on the rocks is whispered from below. The secret of Wendy Whiteley’s garden in Lavender Bay is well and truly out, but somehow Lex and Ruby Graham’s harbourside creation remains barely known – which is probably how those who care for it, and use it, want it to remain.
Cremorne Point’s beauty was once threatened from below the surface. A couple of bores were sunk in the late 19th century, in the search for coal. A thick seam was located, and the coal company wanted to push ahead with a mine. The locals pushed back. The debate whether to approve the development raged in the parliament, and the Illustrated Sydney News featured a drawing in its 2 December 1893 edition, titled ‘A Glimpse of the Future: Cremorne 10 Years Hence’. The illustration is a dystopian vision of a ruined suburb, with a colliery chuffing away, and ships clustered around the point to load the coal. Yet the picture never came to life. The mine was not given the green light.
I paddle on past the Sydney Amateur Sailing Club headquarters and a ferry terminal with the evocative name Old Cremorne. A creek trickles down a steep gully and into the bay through a rainforest bower. The bay itself holds maritime history. The vessel that carried the unprepossessing beginnings of a nation into this harbour, the First Fleet’s flagship Sirius, was careened in this bay in 1789. Apparently the frigate was to be repaired on the other side of the harbour to remove its crew from the temptations of idleness and bad company in Sydney town. Sirius was in the bay for more than four months, and as a result
it was named Great Sirius Cove. However, that name seems to have largely drifted off the map. Instead, the bay’s name is attached to a prominent early local landholder, the shipowner and whaling industry pioneer Archibald Mosman.
Mosman Bay became a haven for whalers chasing their fortune in the southern seas. The bay had been selected largely because it was beyond smelling distance from the main town. The pungent smell of whale oil filled the air. What was repugnant to many of the good folk of Sydney town was the sweet scent of money to those in the industry. In 1826, the value of whale oil and other products exported from New South Wales was £34,850. A decade later, the whale exports were valued at £140,220. At this stage, the colony was riding more on the whale’s back than the sheep’s; the poor creature was a huge earner. The mix of oil and water was particularly lucrative for Archibald Mosman. In the early 1830s, he developed a whaling station in the bay. After he sold up in the early 1840s, Mosman left behind infrastructure for an industry that had already peaked, and a name for the bay. For a while, the ships continued to sail into Mosman’s Bay, their masters praising the facilities and ‘the locality would be very favourable to a ship of war from the absence of the temptations of grog, &c., &c., which she would be exposed to at the Sydney wharves’.
Commercial shipping gradually moved out, but the picnic boats steamed into Mosman Bay. It was advertised as a largely undiscovered wonder, ‘a rough, rural and romantic place worth seeing’, with ‘magnificent scenery; such nice shady nooks for picnic parties’. More than a century and a half later, the bay is far from rough, and at the bottom of the steep slopes curling around its head is a congestion of facilities devoted to water and fun: a marina, dinghy racks and boatsheds, and the Mosman Rowers Club.