The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  As Phil settles his rowboat out of its metronomic sway, I keep paddling south, passing apartment blocks and swimming pools built right on the harbour’s edge, before rounding Manly Point. The tip is marked by Kilburn Towers, which looks like a multi-lensed lighthouse as the windows of its apartments reflect the afternoon sun. Around the point is Little Manly Cove. Along the top of the point is the desired habitat of humans, with a row of big homes, and along the shore is a designated critical habitat of the Little Penguins.

  On the other side of the cove is a part of Sydney reimagined. Little Manly Point was the site of a gasworks for more than eighty years, until it closed in 1964. The buildings were demolished in the early 1970s. It remained a contaminated wasteland, fenced off and unloved, for a couple of decades, until it was transformed into a park. The industrial scars have become beauty spots. The concrete wharves where sixty-miler ships laden with coal would berth are now recreational fishing platforms. But the stain of the past can still be seen on rocks close to the water. They are blue. The council has attached a sign to the rocks explaining the discolouration is a substance known as Prussian Blue and is due to a by-product of the coal gasification process. It has gone into the ground then leached out of the sandstone. The notice assures that the substance is ‘not known to be toxic’ to human health or the environment. Still, those blue rocks are a surreal reminder of what was once here, and an indication of just how difficult it can be to fully remediate a site.

  In the next cove is the sight of more blue, but not in a way that disturbs me. It is the water in the long indent of Spring Cove, fringed by bush, and at its head is the delightfully secluded Collins Beach. Never mind Manly being a thousand miles from care; Collins Beach feels a million miles away. Long before a kayak slid into this cove, there were the original inhabitants’ canoes. A few days after the First Fleet sailed into Port Jackson, William Bradley was surveying around here when he noted in his journal that ‘we were joined by 3 Canoes with one Man in each, they hauled their Canoes up and met us on the beach leaving their Spears in the Canoes’. As I paddle out of the cove, I catch a bare glimpse of the city, as the top of Sydney Tower pokes over the headlands.

  Collins Beach is but one strip of sand nuzzling into the bush along this stretch, before the harbour opens to the sea. The harbourscape is wonderful to look at, and to listen to. Just near Shore Beach, an amazing rock formation is guzzling the harbour water through a series of holes. It sounds like the earth is gulching and belching, as the water swills about in the sandstone guts, while above, the twisted branches of an angophora look like the scan of intestinal tracts.

  In a line off Shore Beach are bright yellow buoys warning that this is a penguin breeding area and no dogs are allowed on the beach, and threatening a $5500 fine if that is breached. As I paddle through the shallows, the water suddenly shivers as thousands of small fish skitter like a silver cloud in the afternoon light.

  It is only a short paddle around to Quarantine Beach, which is marked by another string of buoys to protect the penguin breeding area. Just near one of the buoys is a large cruiser with a dog standing at the stern. The dog jumps into the water and begins swimming towards the shore, its owner frantically calling it back. The dog finally listens and returns.

  Quarantine Beach offers protection to penguins these days, but for a century and a half, this site was designed to protect Sydney from the unseen invaders coming through the Heads, the diseases carried by passengers on arriving ships. This was the North Head Quarantine Station. More than 13,000 people passed through here. Many stayed for a while, in the barracks and huts dotting the hill. And hundreds remained here, in the earth on North Head. The site was chosen for the station because it was just inside the Heads, it was far enough removed from the centre of Sydney, and there was a spring nearby to provide fresh water for the internees.

  From the water, I can see held in the cleft of the hill an old brick building with a tall chimney, a couple of smaller corrugated iron structures and a sawtooth-roofed warehouse. On a ridge, sitting aloof and peering down into the cove, is a mustard-coloured two-storey building, and, jutting into the water, the wharf, a single finger counting all the ships that berthed and moored here. Between 1828 and 1984, about 580 ships were quarantined at the station. It looks like an old industrial site, which, in a way it is; the station was a fear-reduction industry. It produced a reassurance for a city whose isolation bred concerns about what the rest of the world might bring. Sitting in my kayak, I’m looking at a somnolent place, far removed in atmosphere from the bubbling mix of excitement, anticipation and frustration felt by the ceaseless tides of humanity washing up here for more than 150 years. All I can hear today is the water kissing the kayak’s hull.

  Once on the beach, I wander into a few of the buildings, which have been preserved and are open to the public. A pale green corrugated iron building looks like a beach shack but it was an inhalation chamber, set up in 1919 in response to the Spanish flu outbreak. Inside, the walls are timber and white. Up to sixty people were packed in here to breathe steam and zinc sulphate. The practice was soon stopped because it didn’t work. Standing in the chambers, I can still hear the call of the whipbirds and the waves outside, but in my imagination I’m listening to the heavy, anxious breathing of those placed in here.

  The next building, the large brick structure clearly visible from the water because of its chimney, is where passengers’ luggage was steamed in large autoclaves to rid them of bugs and disease. These days, the building is a restaurant. Nearby is an old shower block, built in 1913. It held twenty-four showers in corrugated iron cubicles, where new arrivals would wash with water and a solution of carbolic acid to be disinfected. The building feels eerie. Perhaps the fear and uncertainty of all those who showered in here have soaked into the floor.

  From here, the quarantined passengers and their steamed luggage would head up the hill, where like on the ship – and in life – they were divided into different precincts: First Class, Second Class and Third Class, along with the ‘Asiatics’. The First Class occupants had silver service in their dining hall, a smoking room for the men, and a sewing lounge for the ladies. Irrespective of your ‘class’, in each precinct you could find tormentingly fine views over North Harbour and down towards the city you were hoping to reach, so near, yet so far. Ironically, these buildings are now used by people who willingly pay to experience the sensation of getting away from it all while still being close to Sydney; they are tourist accommodation.

  The name of a road snaking around the border of the Third Class precinct captures how many would have felt, killing time on this headland: Isolation Road. In their daily existence, this was a road the occupants would not have wanted to travel. For it meant your status had changed; you were journeying from ‘healthy’ to ‘sick’. The road led to the isolation precinct and, a little further down the hill, the hospital area, which includes the mustard-coloured building I saw from the water. Here, people were quarantined within Quarantine, when they were diagnosed with contagious diseases. In the hospital precinct, I walk around the verandas that wrap the weatherboard building, taking in the view down the harbour to the city. From the hospital’s northern veranda, I can see snippets of Quarantine Beach through the trees. Up the hill, some of the residential buildings can be seen behind the foliage. It is a desperately beautiful place. But from here, the patients could not look back; there are no views of the sea. For that, you have to go much further up the steep headland. But no one wanted to end up there.

  The Quarantine Station’s Third Cemetery is one of three burial sites that were used by the facility. In all, about 570 people who died while in quarantine are buried on North Head. About 240 are buried in the Third Quarantine Cemetery. The site is overgrown with hardy native bushes that can withstand the buffeting of the winds. The cemetery has fantastic views. The headstones face towards the Heads and along the harbour. It is as though the orientation of the headstones is reminding all who stand before them of where their o
ccupants were hoping to reach, and never did.

  While many of the inscriptions have been eaten away by the years and the elements, the headstones still tell stories of the lives and deaths of those they honour. One is etched with anchors and a cross. It is to the memory of William Hay, ‘For 20 Years Quarantine Officer’. He died 19 November 1902. There are the graves of children, of a former Customs worker, and a nurse, who died just after the First World War, with the epitaph, ‘Her Life Was Sacrificed to Duty’.

  One grave is a reminder that not everyone who was sent to the Quarantine Station travelled from the sea; some came from the city. It is the resting place of a woman from a farm in Condobolin, in western New South Wales. Her gravestone says the 40-year-old died while in quarantine in 1900 of bubonic plague, which she contracted in Sydney.

  Standing here among the dead, looking at the water, I think of a few lines from an epitaph I had just read, dedicated by a wife to her young husband. It read, ‘By the sad and mournful sea/The dearest one that was to me/Lies sleeping here.’ I continue looking at the view, looking at the distant city, where so many are clamouring to own an outlook that is not a patch on this. But as the souls of all those beneath me could attest, a multi-million dollar view is worth nothing if you can’t see it.

  Yet the most intriguing monument is inscribed in a sandstone escarpment back down near the wharf at Quarantine Beach. The great lump of Sydney sandstone has been etched and crafted into something global. As time dripped and dribbled away for the internees, they would leave their mark on the rock. It is at once an art gallery, diary, memento mori, headstone, and, above all, an extraordinary piece of history. It is cold stone fashioned by the scratches of humanity into something moving to behold. The stone wears roughly hewn names of people and ships, and the dates they arrived. The inscriptions are mostly in English, but I also see Chinese and Japanese characters. The rock also has beautifully composed and delicately etched memorials to those who landed here, and those who never left. A Scottish stonemason, John Howie, who arrived on Samuel Plimsoll, carefully carved into the stone that ‘462 emigrants arrived June 11th 1879’. One who didn’t arrive was Howie’s one-year-old son, who died at sea. So the tablet is a headstone of sorts to his little boy. RMS Niagara appears in a few places on the wall. The reason for this ship having to moor in the cove is summed up in one carving. It is of a fluttering pennant, which reads, ‘RMS Niagara. Influenza. Oct 1918’.

  The names of troopships and servicemen returning home from distant battles are also noted in carved panels. Reading those names reminds me of a story my friend Guy Warren told me about his brief stay off Quarantine Beach. He was among a shipload of soldiers returning from the islands off New Guinea after the Second World War. After a few years away on active service, Guy had been waiting for months in the torpor of the jungle at war’s end to be finally given a berth on a ship. He was so excited as they sailed through the Heads and then was thrown into bitter disappointment when the ship veered into Spring Cove. The ship was to moor off the Quarantine Station for its passengers to be checked. The anchor had not even dropped before an arsenal of souvenired Japanese guns and ammunition was being tossed overboard. As he watched this shower of contraband, Guy noticed a couple of blokes sitting in a rowboat, fishing. He gave them a wave. They waved back, and one called out, ‘What did you come back for, mate? There’s a bloody beer strike on!’

  ‘And in that moment, I knew I was back in Australia,’ Guy recalls, chuckling at the memory. ‘I knew I was home.’

  IN THE grounds where the authorities tried to shield the harbour city from contagious diseases, Little Penguins seek protection. They have built nests just up from Quarantine Beach. The nests are monitored by cameras and are guarded by volunteers and National Parks and Wildlife Service staff. The penguins are also microchipped, so they can be monitored.

  I meet up with Mel Tyas, a long-time NPWS ranger. If I were an endangered species, I’d want Mel looking out for me. She is passionate about protecting the penguins. She is constantly scanning for even the faintest signs of trouble.

  As we walk along the beach, she points out a penguin track heading down to the water from a shallow gully filled with a scrabble of lantana. Mel says the penguins have been nesting in the lantana, probably for protection. Before sunrise, she explains, they form up like a train and head down to the water, because there’s ‘safety in numbers’.

  Mel also notices tracks that she thinks could be those of a dog. She looks at the marks in the sand more closely and mutters, ‘Or it could be a fox.’

  In 2015, in just four days, not far from here, a fox killed twenty-seven penguins. It was devastating to the population; there were just forty-two breeding pairs left.

  Among NPWS staff who stayed out until dawn through the winter to protect the remaining penguins were snipers to shoot the fox. None was shot down near the shoreline, but a fox was later killed further up on the headland. It’s not known if it was the fox, but in any case it was a threat to the penguin colony.

  To deal with foxes, there is now baiting all year, and lures are set, using the intoxicating aroma of seal poo. It’s enough to make a human retch, but apparently seal poo is like perfume to a fox.

  Just off the beach, Mel leads me through a locked gate and wire fence. There is a wooden nesting box, and inside is a penguin with two eggs. It looks beautiful, with its slightly bluish feathers. Mel says it could be either the male or female, because they take turns in minding the eggs.

  ‘Equal opportunity,’ she whispers. ‘We’ve got a lot to learn from these penguins.’

  I ask Mel why the penguins have come to this part of the harbour and, in particular, Manly Wharf, with so many people around.

  ‘Maybe they’ve always been here,’ she replies, ‘but dogs and foxes have wiped so many out. Prior to that, they didn’t have as many predators.’

  We head over to Store Beach. Mel leads me down a track through the bush. The path dips towards the bay, the gaps between the angophoras scooping up the water. I thought Store Beach was dazzling from the water; it is equally so from the land. We slide down a rock onto the sand, choreographing our steps between the rush of water. Mel peers into a gap in the rock but there are no penguins, just moulted feathers.

  We walk along the beach, passing a rock with a small emblem carved into it. Underneath the emblem one word has been chiselled and wrapped in a carved ribbon: ‘Smallpox’. Mel says the carving would almost certainly have been done by someone from the Quarantine Station. At the northern end of the beach, we clamber up rocks and into the bush. About 50 metres from the water’s edge and perched on the slope are about a dozen nesting boxes. Most of them are plastic. Mel says the penguins don’t use those. There are also a few wooden boxes. There is a sign on each box warning the lids are not to be opened; the risk is a $5500 fine. Good thing I’m with a ranger. Mel gently opens the lid, shuts it and whispers for me to come over. I hear the squawking noise within. I figure it’s a protest or Penguinese for ‘Get lost’. But it transpires it may have been amorous squawking. For when Mel opens the lid again, we see two penguins, looking at us with a ‘Do you mind?’ expression. I ask why there are two in this box. ‘They’re getting to know each other.’

  The wooden boxes have been made by students at a nearby public school.

  ‘We try to invite kids and the community as much as we can,’ explains Mel. ‘The more people who know about this the better, as they will try to conserve it.’

  We walk amid the little boxes, with Mel gently and discreetly checking if they hold occupants. In one other wooden box, there is a solitary penguin, who shuns the light and our presence.

  ‘It’s cool that they’re here; it’s a shanty town,’ she says.

  Mel is hopeful that the sum of efforts of the volunteers and her colleagues will mean there will be forty-two breeding pairs again this season. But it is a constant battle for the penguins to survive all the threats that await them in the sea, and on the land.

  FROM THE
Quarantine Station, I head up the time-welted and weather-beaten headland to another fort designed to repel invaders. Whereas the station faces inward, the North Fort is perched on top of the headland and stares out to sea.

  To help mariners into the harbour, an obelisk was erected on North Head as early as 1809, and the strategic importance of the headland was recognised early in the colony. But facilities to deter any enemy coming towards the Heads were built much later, in the mid-1930s. In a newsreel produced in 1940, the defences were called Sydney’s own Maginot Line, an assertion probably tinged with wartime hyperbole. But the two guns installed on the headland were powerful, firing 9.2-inch shells up to 30,000 yards, or 27 kilometres, towards the horizon. Under the guns were tunnels and storerooms burrowing into the sandstone. The big guns were tested for the first time in 1938, as war loomed, and, according to a newspaper report at the time, Manly residents were warned to keep their doors and windows open to avoid damage from the concussion. In the same year, the handsome barracks for the 1st Australian Coast Artillery Brigade were grafted onto the headland, and in the years ahead, as the Second World War flared, radar buildings and observation posts were installed amid the scrub and rock on the continent’s edge.

  With the war’s end in 1945, the gradual transition of the site from a strictly military zone to a public sanctuary began. But that would take many years, and the army dug in. Coastal artillery was considered obsolete after the war, so the big guns were removed from the fort and cut up for scrap, and, in time, the fort would become an artillery museum. But from 1953, the School of Artillery took up residence in the barracks complex, and it remained until 1998. One of those soldiers who attended the School of Artillery was Ron Ray.

  I had met Ron over at Georges Heights, where he was a volunteer guide around the historic defences. He is performing the same role here, leading tours of North Fort and giving a voice to the nation’s military past.