by Scott Bevan
From what was Great Sirius Cove, I paddle around to what was Little Sirius Cove. However, no doubt because Great Sirius Cove is now commonly known as Mosman Bay, the next inlet to the east has been promoted, and the ‘Little’ has been dropped. So I paddle into Sirius Cove. At its head, dogs scamper in the shallows, while their walkers call in vain from the reserve, and along the eastern shore, just beyond a Sea Scout hall tucked into its own little cove, is a visually intoxicating picture of an oyster-covered sandstone shoreline buttressing thick bush leaning over it. The scene is at once refreshing for the eyes, and familiar. For along this stretch was the bush idyll of a couple of enormously influential late 19th century artists who helped open Australians’ eyes to who they were and the beauty of where they lived. Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts painted and stayed here, in what was called Curlew Camp. Near the head of the bay, I stand roughly where Streeton stood in 1892 to paint his Near Streeton’s camp, Sirius Cove and pretty much see what he saw. The scene is little changed from what Streeton captured with his paints, although the young lady in a sunhat in his picture has been replaced by two women in bikinis lying in front of the Scout hall, and the steamer off the point has metamorphosed into a navy landing barge undergoing trials.
Streeton loved the boating activity, the way in which the light pulled colour out of the water, and ‘the soft, dark breath of the harbour playing through my hair’. He thought the area around Mosman Bay was a land of passionfruit and poetry. It was all intoxicating to his eyes; little wonder he considered Sydney an artist’s city. Streeton went on to London, but he was drawn back to the harbour city. He wrote to Roberts in 1907 about Sydney’s ‘fascinating, warm, grey sky and yellow rock . . . and long, undulating shore lines and luxurious languor of expression’.
Under a Streeton sky of cerulean blue, I kayak around Little Sirius Point (some names don’t change) and listen for lions and elephants. From Athol Bay, I had been told, you might hear these animals. I hear nothing but water murmuring. On the slopes, however, live thousands of creatures, including lions and elephants, in Taronga Zoo.
The zoo has been by the harbour for more than 100 years. The original site was at Moore Park, on the city’s south side, but the animals needed more room. In 1916, they were transferred across the harbour on barges and ferries to Athol Bay. Boats followed the floating cavalcade, so that if any animals jumped overboard, they could be picked up.
Before the zoo was built, this section of the northern shore had already housed creatures from around the globe. In the early years of the 20th century, there was a quarantine station for livestock and imported dogs. The landscape above the bay, as photos of the time show, was fairly sandy, dotted with low scrub and trees. These days, from the water, the slopes around Athol Bay are thick in foliage and with tourists wandering the paths through dozens of replicated habitats for about 4000 animals.
Yet it’s no longer enough to merely look at animals in a zoo. You can also sleep with them (but not in the same compound), and wake up to a harbour view, with accommodation offered at Taronga. And in its grounds, you can experience that most beguiling of creatures up close, the rock musician, with a series of outdoor concerts staged over summer. As the sun slid towards the eucalypts on a perfect March evening, I wandered through the zoo’s grand entrance and down its paths to attend the concert of Colin Hay, the co-creator of Australia’s sardonic unofficial anthem, Down Under.
On the journey to the amphitheatre, I passed a tree kangaroo dining on a branch, brush turkeys ambled across the path, and Gung, the male Asian elephant, was moving a few things around with his trunk. From the sloping lawn in front of the stage, I could see vast swathes of the harbour, which looked gauzy in the late afternoon light. Just before the sun set, a sea-bound cruise ship cut across the diamond harbour. The setting was a superb opening act for Colin Hay and his band. Near the end of the show, the band played a cover version of You Shook Me All Night Long, but the Sydney night flowed by unruffled.
The shore of Athol Bay is a gem. A couple of beaches are set between the bush-encrusted rocky outcrops like gold between emeralds. During the Second World War, the great Queen liners from Britain moored around the bay, as they were transformed from the epitome of floating luxury to troop carriers. In 1940, Queen Mary sailed out of the Heads with about 5000 Australian troops on board, bound for the Middle East. Queen Elizabeth was also fitted out and loaded with troops in the harbour. Cruise ships still occasionally moor around Athol Bay, if they are so large they can’t fit into Circular Quay or under the Bridge, or on special occasions such as Australia Day.
As those troops destined for a distant war sailed out of the bay, on the first headland they passed on their port side, they could have seen a monument to the feats of Australians in another conflict. Standing tall on Bradleys Head since 1934 has been the foremast of HMAS Sydney. The tripod crowned with an Australian naval flag looks like some giant survey marker embedded into the point, as if helping ships gain their bearings. When you are sailing east and pass Bradleys Head, you have a sense that the sea and adventure lie before you, as the Heads come into view. Conversely, when you are sailing into the harbour and round the head, you feel the embrace of security and the binding of routine as the CBD appears.
Long before the foremast was planted on Bradleys Head, naval men made their presence felt here. No sooner had the British arrived in 1788 than they began renaming the harbour’s landmarks. What had been known as Borogegy for generations was named after the Royal Navy lieutenant involved in the initial survey of the harbour, William Bradley. While that may be the official reason behind Bradleys Head’s name, whenever I paddle around the point, I look up at the great swathes of bushland marching up from the water to the ridges and I figure its name is, by default, a tribute to two tenacious local sisters. Eileen and Joan Bradley spent decades gaining an understanding of the bush along the northern shores by walking through it and helping it to regenerate. The sisters would hand-weed where they walked, carefully returning the bush litter as they went, after they noted how the authorities’ slashing-and-clearing approach ultimately didn’t help. They formulated what became known as the Bradley method of bush regeneration. One of the core principles was to let the bush itself determine the pace of work; when it regenerated, continue. Eileen died in 1976 and Joan in 1982, but the Bradley sisters’ memory flourishes in the undergrowth and under the shade of the gums not just along the harbour’s edge, but in bush regeneration programs around the country.
If the bush is a memorial of sorts to the Bradley sisters, the HMAS Sydney foremast on the headland is a reminder for all members of the Royal Australian Navy of who they are and what they do. The naval men and women acknowledge the foremast every time they sail past it, and a commemorative service is held on the headland each year to honour Sydney’s defeat of the German ship SMS Emden in the Battle of the Cocos Islands in the early days of the First World War in 1914.
The significance of that battle has reverberated through the years undimmed. On 8 November 2015, underneath the foremast, a service commemorating the 101st anniversary of the battle was held. In the audience were descendants of those who served on Sydney I, which is remembered on this site, and Sydney II, which was sunk with the loss of all 645 on board during the Second World War. A group of those who served on Sydney III and Sydney IV were also attending, along with RAN representatives, dressed in their whites that shimmered against the oyster sky, sulking and threatening to rain at any moment. A friend of mine, Commodore Peter Leavy, who was representing the Commander of the RAN Fleet, read ‘The Naval Ode’. Pete was ideally suited to do the reading. He is a former commanding officer of HMAS Sydney IV. As the ode’s solemn words were recited, and The Naval Hymn was sung, beseeching that mariners be protected from ‘rock and tempest, fire and foe’, life on the harbour flowed on in the background. The ferries ploughed determinedly past the headland, yachts leant away as they grasped at the wind, and tourist jet boats created whirlpools of spume and shrieks from their
passengers.
The passing of time, and the creating of history, was perhaps most keenly felt by those from Sydney IV. Just the day before, their ship had been decommissioned in a ceremony across the harbour at the RAN’s Fleet Base East. As they well knew, and the crowd at that ceremony was told, Sydney had inherited more battle honours than any other ship in the fleet and had added to that tally through its own actions. This Sydney had cruised 959,627 nautical miles or about 1.78 million kilometres, the equivalent of circumnavigating the globe forty-four times, and about 4000 men and women had served on her.
A day on, a few of those members of the now-decommissioned ship’s company were gazing wistfully across the harbour. I didn’t notice what they were looking at until one of them pointed out Sydney IV berthed at Garden Island. There was much speculation about what would happen to the frigate, with one ruefully muttering, ‘She’ll be turned into scrap.’ But on this day, she looked beautiful in the distance, giving shape to the sum of words we had heard during the commemorative ceremony.
Just below the tripod, incongruously rising out of the harbour like some ancient Greek ruin is a single Doric column. It was once part of the General Post Office in the city but when that building was demolished, the column was salvaged and placed here to mark a nautical mile from Fort Denison, so ships could measure their speed. The ships rounding the point sailed into the verse of Henry Lawson, in his paean to the harbour city, ‘Sydney-Side’, in 1898.
And the sunny water frothing round the liners black and red,
And the coastal schooners working by the loom of Bradley’s Head;
And the whistles and the sirens that re-echo far and wide –
All the life and light and beauty that belong to Sydney-Side.
Bradleys Head may be a long-standing landmark for mariners, but that finger of land has occasionally conspired with Mother Nature to catch out shipping. The ferry Curl Curl ran aground on the headland in 1936. Despite the small lighthouse just off the point, thick fog had dissolved any distinction between land and water. Off Bradleys Head and sitting on the harbour bed close to the shipping channel is the wreck of SS Currajong. The steamer collided with a much larger ship, Wyreema, in 1910, and quickly slid under the water.
Tim Smith is a maritime archaeologist and has done so much to bring to the surface knowledge about our nation’s past. He has dived on Currajong. His first impression of approaching the wreck was watching its shape form through the gloom. Where it sits, on the edge of the shipping channel and in an area where any silt carried down the harbour is likely to rest, is often gloomy and beset with poor visibility. But when she does come into view, Tim says, Currajong is a sight to behold.
‘It’s the biggest intact shipwreck in Sydney Harbour,’ Tim explains. ‘You feel the bulk and scale of it when you land on the bow and follow it down to the harbour bed. Then you look back up and see the bow towering over you.
‘If you follow the port side down, you can come to the damage caused by the collision. You pass across a couple of metres of this big gaping hole.’
While hundreds of ships have sunk in Sydney Harbour, Tim says there is comparatively little on the bottom of the harbour. Many shipwrecks were salvaged, and, in the past, recreational divers picked the bones clean, because much of the harbour is relatively shallow and accessible. Still, to dive on a wreck in Sydney Harbour, he says, is ‘just magic’.
‘It’s such a spectacular setting, and every time you dive into the water, you’re jumping into these pages of history,’ he says.
If Bradleys Head signals a change in direction for shipping, it can also mark a change in the harbour’s mood for a kayaker. When I’ve paddled around the headland, past the Doric column and the HMAS Sydney sign set into the rock below the mast, I’ve often been smacked in the face by a north-easterly, along with a few waves that have ridden in through the Heads. The calm of Athol Bay is already a memory. The Sydney Morning Herald editor and writer, J.M.D. Pringle, observed, after arriving from Britain in the early 1950s, that Sydney was ruled by three winds, ‘which command the city in turn like the chiefs of an invading army’: the southerly, the north-easterly and the westerly. He reckoned those winds set the different rhythms of the city’s life but also represented the conflicting elements that shaped Sydney’s character. The southerly, Pringle reckoned, was the wind of conscience, cooling the city down and reminding its inhabitants to work hard. The westerly was the voice of Australia, hot and dry as it blew in from the heart of the continent. The north-easterly, he wrote, was intent on turning the city into a South Pacific town, with its warm and humid character impelling people to slow down and take it easy. Mr Pringle must never have kayaked around Bradleys Head into a north-easterly. The wind that he reckoned makes Sydneysiders relax can make the going tough for a paddler.
NO SOONER had the British ridden those ‘invading army’ winds into Sydney Harbour than the colonists began worrying about who else would come through the Heads. And that worry never abated, because Britain was usually arguing or fighting with some power or another: France, Spain, Russia, the United States of America. For many years, in response to the concerns, there was more debating and fretting about how to protect the harbour than any actual fortifying. Still, there were some bursts of activity, and the shape of those fears of attack is still particularly evident along the harbour’s northern shore. Many of the points jutting into the harbour from Bradleys Head to the sea were reserved for defence. Camouflaged in the bush, gouged into the rock and sticking out from the sandstone are gun emplacements and old buildings, their faces turned eastward, constantly watching what the seas have carried in.
Ultimately, the installations sort of achieved what they were built for. They defended much of Sydney Harbour’s northern shores. They saved the headlands on which they were based from being overrun by residential development. At the end of the 20th century, large tracts of Defence land were handed back to the people. So while the old defence facilities are a monument to history, the bushland saved is a testament to a quirk of history.
In the bush just above the HMAS Sydney monument are the remains of gun emplacements dating back to the 1870s. The emplacements have a stone inscribed ‘VR 1871’, and one cannon, steadfastly pointing towards the east. While the ‘VR’ spells out the ties to Britain and Queen Victoria, the presence of the emplacements represents the colony standing on its own feet, or being forced to. In 1870, the soldiers of the last of the British regiments providing protection to the colony boarded ships in Circular Quay and sailed away, leaving the local authorities to determine how to best defend New South Wales. The Bradleys Head emplacement was part of a broader plan of fortification, recommended by a government commission into the Defences of Sydney Harbour in 1870. And as far as some were concerned, the facilities were grossly overdue, with the Illustrated Sydney News at the time being critical of the reliance on a ‘few fragile forts’ to defend the harbour.
I kayak around Bradleys Head and follow the shaggy and rock-studded shoreline along Taylors Bay, which is the picture of serenity – even if it doesn’t sound it. A moored yacht is playing a Jimi Hendrix song at a leaf-curling volume. I head out of the storm of Purple Haze and paddle on to the next cove, Chowder Bay. Its name is courtesy of 19th Century American whalers who moored in the bay and collected oysters from the rocks to cook up ‘clam’ chowder. Those with the patience to rely on the harbour for a meal still head to Chowder Bay. The long jetty pushing into the bay is often prickled with fishing rods.
The area around the bay was also dressed in a resplendent name, Clifton Gardens. In the early years of the 20th century, Clifton Gardens was described as the most extensive playground in Australia, with ferries bringing hordes of visitors to the bay. They would bathe in the large circular swimming pool, dance in the hall, picnic in the grounds, or stay in the three-storey hotel that overlooked the harbour. The hotel and dance hall may be gone, and the great circular pool has been replaced by less imposing netted baths, but the pleasure-seekers
still come to Clifton Gardens. When I paddle by early one April morning, part of the baths’ netting had collapsed into the water, leaving it open. Just as I’m contemplating whether that would deter swimmers, an older bloke comes along, drops his towel and wades in. He has the look of someone honouring a daily ritual. Just before he finds his rhythm in the water, I ask him how long the net has been open. A month, maybe two, he replies. Then, reading my mind, he says, ‘Only small sharks could get in.’ He smiles and starts swimming. His strokes are syncopated by a hollow drumming sound bouncing across the water. The harbour is playing a tune on a large mooring buoy in the bay, as the waves slap against the metal and knock out some wonderful polyrhythmic energy.
On the bay’s eastern shore are old wooden and stone buildings, which have been converted into cafés, restaurants and offices, and the headquarters of the Sydney Institute of Marine Science, a training and research facility involving scientists from four universities, and government agencies.
One of the institute’s major programs laps at its feet. The Sydney Harbour Research Program involves scientists from a range of disciplines, and it aims to improve decision-makers’ and the public’s understanding of the waterway’s natural systems – and the impact we have on it. Much of the research is designed to determine not only the harbour’s health now, but to provide direction on how to make it healthier, or at least do less damage to it, in the future.
Some of the research SIMS is engaged in is there for all to see on a wharf at Chowder Bay. Tanks pumped with harbour water are being used to study threats from climate change to the biodiversity on rock shelves. The researchers manipulate the water’s temperature and acidity to see what effect that has on mussels. The study could well help ensure there are mussels and oysters in the future, so that those diners sitting on the restaurant verandas above the tanks can continue to enjoy seafood – even ‘clam’ chowder – by the bay.