by Scott Bevan
9
NORTH HARBOUR AND MANLY TO NORTH HEAD
ONCE I leave behind the assurance of the little lighthouse on Grotto Point, I feel vulnerable. As I paddle north-east, I’m but one small kayak threading between the surging force of the sea pushing in through the Heads on my right, and the great wall of sandstone, resisting the power of the water, on my left. It is a ceaseless tussle of wills, as Mother Nature stages an awesome arm-wrestle with herself. I don’t want to get caught in the middle.
If a harbour is about offering protection, this is the stretch where I feel that the least. The gentle hold of the harbour on my sense of security is loosened by the more assertive power of the sea, especially as it takes its last desperate gasps of life before crashing onto the land. I can feel the sea tugging at the kayak, as if it doesn’t want to die alone on the rocks. I paddle a little further away, out of its seductive and destructive grip.
Softening the blows between the water and the rugged cliffs is a wedge of sand called Washaway Beach. The beauty of the scene is at odds with the warning embedded in the name. I’m wondering how often this beach has been washed away by angry seas, as I ride a wave onto the shore.
It is only after I hop out of Pulbah Raider and stand on the beach that I notice a man on the sand looking at me. He has a consistent all-over tan. I notice this because he is naked. As I look more carefully along the burnished sandstone escarpment, more figures materialise out of the rocks. They are all nude. And just like the rocks, they look weathered. I seem to have landed on a nudist beach, or perhaps at a clothes-free older men’s leisure ground. And I’m the odd one out, in my shorts and shirt. I quickly turn and stare out to sea. The water looks so inviting. I feel as though I should make an effort to fit in with the dress code, rip my clothes off and go for a swim. And then my boldness dissolves. A tourist vessel sneaks around Grotto Point, its decks bejewelled with eyes and lenses. I don’t need to spoil all those holiday snaps. I dive in with my pants on.
It is time to get away from Washaway. I track the shoreline and constantly glance up at the bush-crowned escarpment, until it turns and heads to sea. In the crook huddles Crater Cove, and just above it, barely discernible, is the most extraordinary settlement in Sydney.
Fluttering above the cove is an Australian flag. Then I notice a shack on the edge of the bush. I see another shack, then another. Above the cliff straight ahead, indeed, looking like an extension of the rock face, a stone hut balances right on the edge. The hut looks like it has been carried from another sea and washed up here; it reminds me of fishermen’s huts from around the Aegean, something you would see on the island of Santorini, perhaps; not on the lip of Sydney Harbour.
The swell puts me and my kayak down gently on the rocks, and I clamber out and carry Pulbah Raider onto the shelf, just out of reach of the water. Then I see the first evidence that these rough structures of stone and wood contain flesh and blood. An older woman is peering down from further up the escarpment. I call out, ‘Good morning.’ She doesn’t reply and ambles back towards the huts. I climb the rocks. There is a hand-written note telling passers-by that this is not the way over the hill. I wonder just how many people actually arrive by water to climb the rocks, then traipse through the bush to the top of the hill. At the top of the rocks, standing steadfastly near the hut with the flag, is the woman. Her pose, the body language, is about as welcoming as that of a bouncer outside an exclusive nightclub. I smile but receive a look that could have been carved from the sandstone we’re standing on.
I ask her if she lives here. It’s a national park, she replies.
I wonder if anyone lives here. It’s a national park, she repeats.
I ask how many huts are here. That’s for me to work out, I’m told.
She stands there looking at me unflinchingly. Her silver hair is like sea spray, as it whirls in the breeze. I tell her I’m writing a book. The welcome grows cooler. She complains that whenever Crater Cove pops up in public, curious people tramp down from suburbia’s fringe on top of the hill at Balgowlah Heights, and they ruin the track.
This place has to be protected, she says.
That statement of protection has become a mantra for Crater Cove over the years. The settlement has been here for the best part of a century. Although the huts look as though they have been tossed together from flotsam and jetsam, this is a community built to survive. For it has withstood more than just what Mother Nature has thrown at it.
When the settlement took shape, it was known to only a few. It existed out of sight and way beyond the bounds of imagination of most Sydneysiders. The huts were mostly used as weekenders and fishing shacks, but during the Great Depression, they were probably lived in. Counter-culture later found its way into the cove. In the 1970s and 1980s, a commune sprung up, with people living simply and cheaply in the huts – but not altogether abandoning life in Sydney. The poet Mark O’Connor stayed in the settlement for a couple of weeks in the early 1980s, hut-sitting for a friend who had been assigned a place in the commune. Mark recalls being amused watching residents scramble up the hill, and at the top, when emerging from the bush, pulling a suit out of their backpack and changing into it, then catching a bus to work in the city.
While he is renowned for creating beautiful environmental poetry, Mark didn’t write in his couple of weeks living in a shack by the harbour. For him, it wasn’t ‘a search for poetry’, rather, it was time out, away from the more frenetic rhythms and demands of the city.
‘It was a gentle, rather hippy place,’ says Mark.
Through the years, however, the city crept closer to Crater Cove. The huts could not escape the ever-tightening net of rules and regulations. The settlement became part of Sydney Harbour National Park, and by the 1980s, the authority administering it decided the huts – and the people using them – had to go. Those using the huts fought to keep them, and the battle ended up in court. They lost. They were evicted and the huts were boarded up. In time, a deal was reached, the hoardings were removed from the huts, and a caretaker group, comprising people who had an association with Crater Cove, was formed. They could protect the huts, and all that they represented.
The woman standing before me tells me she is a caretaker. My repeated attempts to ask if that means people still live here are dispensed with effortlessly. The woman responds by staring out to sea. The long silence gives me plenty of time to follow her gaze. I tell her how beautiful the view is.
Mmmm, is her reply, stretching the consonant almost as far as we can see. She explains arrivals always notice how beautiful it looks, but they don’t notice the rubbish. It all washes into the cove, she says, jammed into the crevices, right near where I put my kayak. The biggest problem, she says, is all the plastic. She cleans it out and recently had pulled out enough plastic from the cracks to cover an area six metres long and one metre wide.
And the rubbish is getting worse, she adds.
I tell her it was lovely paddling in. She comments it’s a rare day when you can do that. Boats come into the cove, but few can disembark here. She tells me people walk in supplies, because it’s usually too rough to bring a boat in.
The woman wonders out loud if that’s tailor she can see jumping in the cove. I see nothing but water out there. I turn and look at the huts, trying to count them, as they disguise themselves in the bush and rock. The caretaker volunteers that huts have been here since 1923. She has had a connection to Crater Cove since 1948. I reply it is terrific the huts are still here, because they have become part of our tradition.
That comment seems to annoy her, for she tells me it’s not my tradition but hers. And the harbour’s.
I want to tell her that if it’s the harbour’s tradition, then it is our tradition. Because that harbour we’re looking at is our harbour. But I don’t.
Then, as if she’s been reading my thoughts, she gently says if someone is part of the harbour, they know this place and they want to protect it. Subtly, I guess she’s saying to me, you’re either with us or against us.
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The caretaker mentions some of those who have helped protect the Crater Cove huts; the water police, the passing vessels from the Middle Harbour Yacht Club and local schoolkids, all keeping an eye on the place. Once it’s seen, she says, you want to protect it. She says she’s spoken with politicians, right up to former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, to do more to protect the settlement. But for a politician to protect it, they would presumably need to talk about it. Which means they can’t protect it. For, going by the caretaker’s argument, if this place is stuck in the newspapers or on TV – or in a book – it’s hard to protect it, and it will be gone.
I thank her for her time. I would love to wander around the huts, have a look at how the salvaged and fossicked bits and pieces have been nailed together with ingenuity and a sense of adventure. I’d love to peer through the salt-mottled windows at the interiors, and get a sense of who stays here on the edge of the world. Indeed, if anyone does.
Instead, I look at her and say I should head off. She nods and walks away.
I negotiate the kayak back into the water and paddle away, figuring the caretaker would be watching from somewhere to ensure I’m gone. Not that I can see her; just a handful of huts. I’m glad to have seen them, and I hope they’re always protected, for they are part of our harbour.
The water wobbles like unset jelly, as the waves roll in and hit Dobroyd Head, splintering into spume and silvered specks. Just off the head is a bombora, ruffling the harbour’s surface. It doesn’t look like much, but that submerged reef can be deadly. In 1874, a wave kicked up by the bombora consumed a boat containing a high-ranking British naval officer, John Thomas Gowlland. He and another man were drowned. They were killed by the very thing Gowlland was in the colony to identify. An eminent hydrographer, Commander Gowlland was surveying Port Jackson, updating charts to keep those on the water safe. The reef is his monument; in 1984, it was named Gowlland Bombora. Yet just because it is known and marked, that doesn’t make a bombora benign. At least twenty-five people have died on Gowlland Bombora.
The land around here imposes itself on the skyline. The head is a great untamed slab of earth, wrestled and whittled into the beautiful bluff that it is. From the kayak, it looks untameable, as though it would throw any attempt at development off its cliffs and into the water, to be smashed by the bombora.
As I round the headland, I’ve paddled into North Harbour. On a map, North Harbour’s outline is reminiscent of a water bird, with its beak pecking along the western shores at Balgowlah Heights, its bulbous body forming Manly Cove, and, to the east, its tail feathers are a plume of inlets creating Spring Cove. However, on the water, the bird analogy dissolves, replaced by the quintessential Sydney view of the built and natural environments tussling for the harbour’s attention. I gaze north-east to Manly Cove, just over a kilometre away, but as the harbour blossoms and broadens, it looks much further. A ferry is pushing towards the cove, leaving a foamy wake. I don’t follow that trail, instead tracing the cartographical bird’s beak into Jilling Cove.
The bush gradually gives up the harbour’s edge. The shore becomes more manicured, as streets and houses and 21st century suburbia reappear. I pass the wonderfully named Forty Baskets harbour pool, but no one is swimming in it. I’m not surprised, since there is the more enticing option of a string of small beaches occupying indents around Dobroyd Head and in Jilling Cove. The cove is filled with recreational boats, a marina and commercial boatshed, and a weatherboard building occupied by the North Harbour Sailing Club. Moorings exploit the bay until the water becomes so shallow, there is enough depth for only pelicans to land.
Along the cove’s eastern shore, the houses are more packed in. But sitting just off the water, there is one handsome green boatshed that has space, and, even rarer, a relaxed air about it. That atmosphere is bolstered by the sight of two men cooking in an open-air ‘oven’ – a fireplace, really – fashioned out of a crevice in the sandstone face beside the shed. I sidle in and ask the men if I can land here.
‘Sure,’ replies a big bloke with greying hair and friendly face. ‘Fish land on here. Dead bodies . . .’ That comment strikes me as curious, but not enough to dissuade me from landing on the sand next to a rowboat.
The big fellow washes his hands in a natural basin scooped out of the rock shelf, and he shakes mine as he introduces himself as Jeff. He goes on to explain the ‘dead bodies’ comment. Some years ago, a human hand washed into the cove, probably through the nearby stormwater outlet. The fingers had been cut off. ‘He mustn’t have paid a parking fine,’ Jeff adds.
Jeff’s mate, an older American fellow, introduces himself. His name is Steve and he is originally from Minnesota but has been living in Sydney for many years. ‘Once I got my taste of the harbour, I knew I’d never leave’, Steve says.
Jeff and Steve have returned from fishing and are preparing to cook a few flathead for lunch. Jeff tosses a few potatoes in the oven, then sits down on the rocks to yarn. He tells me he bought the boatshed in 1989. The shed had been by the water since the early 20th century, but it seemed it wouldn’t have been for much longer, as it was a ‘crumbling wreck’. Jeff’s line of work is demolition, but with his shed, he was determined to do some serious restoration and rescuing. However, the first thing he did was craft his hole-in-the-wall oven, because ‘a man’s got to eat’.
The boathouse’s renovation is a work in progress, Jeff says. ‘You’ve got to take your time. You’ve got to think about things for 20-odd years before you launch into it.’ Before launching into the boatshed, Jeff restored a timber boat that came with the building. That allowed him to go fishing. Still, he has done more than think about his shed. He raised the roof and gave it a steeper pitch to discourage kids from walking on it. And he installed solar panels.
The barbecue plate is cleaned with beer, and the flathead fillets are laid on it. I ask Steve and Jeff where they caught the fish. ‘That’s the last thing you’d tell a writer,’ Jeff says. Steve then volunteers that if I look, I can see the spot where they caught the fish. From the rock I’m sitting on, I can see down the harbour, through the Heads and out to sea.
‘So you caught them somewhere between here and New Zealand?’
‘That’s correct.’
When the southerlies and south-easterlies roar in through the Heads, the winds charge up North Harbour to Jeff’s little shed, so ‘it feels like the whole of hell is blowing in’. Still, in fair winds and foul, it’s a great spot, the mates agree, being just a few steps from the harbour, sometimes not even that.
‘The water comes up over all of this at high tide,’ Steve says, gesturing to the rock shelf where we’re sitting.
‘So it’s self-cleaning,’ adds Jeff. ‘It’s on-going. The sea comes in, the sea giveth, the sea taketh away.’
But as he points out, we take away from the sea by what we dump and pour into it.
‘I’ve counted thirty-six stormwater drains just in North Harbour,’ he mutters. ‘It looks clean, but I reckon there’s a piece of plastic for every square foot of water.’
The flathead is ready, and, as he plonks it onto a couple of plates, Jeff asks rhetorically, ‘What are these fish ingesting?’ He then talks about the shards of broken-down plastic in the water, and the pharmaceuticals ingested by us that then end up in the sea, and in the harbour, when the sewerage system overflows.
‘So the fish are on the Pill,’ he exclaims.
As Jeff is talking, I think back to what the University of Sydney’s Gavin Birch told me about his research into the contamination of the harbour. Gavin and his team took samples near thirty stormwater outlets, and the results revealed surprising levels of drugs, from anti-depressants to painkillers.
Just as I’m wondering whether Jeff is talking about the fish being full of drugs and plastic as a ploy to ensure I don’t ask for any, he proffers a forkful.
‘Here, try the flathead,’ he says. ‘It tastes terrific, like the sea.’
Once I’m munching away and nodding in agre
ement, he provides the punchline.
‘Now you can say you’ve tasted microplastics and medicines.’
The tide is coming in, the rock shelf will soon be under water, and the boys’ lunch will be over.
I set off, grateful the harbour still has room along its shores for the likes of Jeff, restoring a boatshed, retaining a sense of what the harbour used to be, and, above all, maintaining a sense of humour, come hell or high water.
JEFF’S RUEFULLY funny comments about eating microplastics soon become dispiritingly real for me in North Harbour.
Fairlight is the name of the suburb along the shoreline, and that could also be a description of the quality of the sunshine. The bathers gleefully splashing around in the harbour pool look as though they are tossing coins in the air, as the light ignites the water drops.
At Delwood Beach, a few hundred metres further on, I slip into the harbour. The water is a lustrous gem, as colours are coaxed to the surface by the sun. I go snorkelling, to see where the colours come from. Yet not long after being in the water, I’m reminded surface beauty can cover something more disturbing.
No more than 30 metres from shore, I glide over a garden of kelp, with the leaves on the long stalks swaying to the rhythm of the water. A few fish float through the garden, before darting off. The garden comprises mostly tones of brown, with a few strokes of purple and mauve. Yet, duck-diving into the kelp garden, I see the intrusion of other colours. The blues and whites of shopping bags splotch the environment. As if that pollution isn’t sufficiently confronting, snorkelling back to shore, I have a cloud of plastic in my face. Initially, I presume it is turbulence, that something has stirred up the bottom, but then I realise there are thousands of tiny pieces of plastic floating before my eyes. The plastic blizzard distorts my vision but clarifies my view of what we’re doing to the harbour, usually sight unseen. What’s uncomfortable for a snorkeller is deadly for marine life. This stuff can end up in their systems, eventually killing them.