The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  AT THE head of Vaucluse Bay, I land Pulbah Raider on one of Notting’s victories. The approach is across shallow water infused with the colours of the bush. The shoreline carries reminders that this belongs to the people, with dinghies stored in racks and dog walkers letting their charges off the leash. Yet just before levering myself out of the kayak, I can see through the trees, about 200 metres away, one of those big, old statements of private wealth by the harbour: Vaucluse House.

  This was the home and fortress of William Charles Wentworth and his family. Wentworth stood out in the colony not only because he was tall but because he was an exhausting over-achiever. He was an explorer, being in the trio of the first Europeans to cross the Blue Mountains. He was an author and the publisher of the first independent newspaper in the colony, the Australian. He was a barrister and a politician, a reformer and a builder of what this nation would become. Wentworth covered all his bases, if not his past. He was the son of a convict woman, which his detractors were only too ready to remind him of. His father was a surgeon, Dr D’Arcy Wentworth.

  Vaucluse House existed before it became part of the Wentworth legend. The core of it, a stone cottage, had been built in 1805 by an Irish aristocrat, Sir Henry Browne Hayes, who had arrived in New South Wales as a convict, having been transported for abducting an heiress. Sir Henry’s house was in the bush, so he shared it with snakes. He devised a logical response. ‘Being a firm believer in the legendary virtues of St Patrick in expelling serpents from the Emerald Isle, the owner of Vaucluse sent home to Ireland instructions to have several hundred barrels of Irish earth shipped to him from Cork,’ according to a report in the Illustrated Sydney News. The report recounted how Sir Henry employed a team of convicts to dig a trench around his property, had the barrels of dirt barged from Sydney town, and, on St Patrick’s Day, ‘the ceremony of filling in the trench was performed, with the result that never a snake thereafter was found in the house or its immediate surroundings’. That wasn’t quite the case. Many years after the magic dirt was laid, Wentworth wrote about snakes on the property.

  Wentworth bought Vaucluse House in June 1827 for £1500. He loved the harbour’s southern shores. ‘Looking towards the coast you behold at one glance the greater part of the numerous bays and islands which lie between the town and the heads, with the succession of barren, but bold and commanding hills, that bound the harbour, and are abruptly terminated by the water,’ he had written some years earlier in his book, Description of The Colony of New South Wales.

  The water enticed Wentworth. He and his family would go sailing in their schooner, Alice, which was moored at the front of the property in Vaucluse Bay. Alice was once hijacked by some of Wentworth’s staff, with his butler being the ringleader, who wanted to sail it to New Zealand but only got as far as Port Stephens, north of Newcastle. The proximity to the water also allowed Wentworth to observe his enemies passing. When his nemesis, Governor Ralph Darling, sailed out of the harbour for England in October 1831, Wentworth invited the public to a huge party on his Vaucluse property. According to a report in the newspaper Wentworth had founded, and headlined ‘Rejoicings for General Darling’s Departure from New South Wales’, more than 4000 attended to have an uninterrupted view of the unpopular Governor departing – and to drink the free grog.

  After Wentworth bought Vaucluse estate, he kept extending and renovating the home, making it ever grander. Wentworth biographer Andrew Tink noted how the house increasingly looked like a Gothic Revival mansion, not unlike the new Government House that was built half a dozen bays or so further west in the Domain. Perhaps his house helped shape Wentworth’s desire for the formation of a local aristocracy, and for him to be a member of it. As a result, Wentworth was disparagingly called the Duke of Vaucluse.

  Wentworth’s private domain became part of the people’s estate when the government bought part of the land and the house more than a century ago. So I can land near the public dinghy racks and stride towards the castle-like building without fear of trespassing. The property makes an overwhelming impression. On the western side there was once a grazing paddock and a vineyard and orchard. To the left is a ‘Pleasure Garden’, an English ornament beautifully tended, which I skirt around. The native vegetation can’t be wholly denied by the imported vision, as sub-tropical rainforest plants are clustered along a creek that provided water for the household. I pass the stables, with their grand façade, and head into the house, which is maintained by the Historic Houses Trust.

  In Wentworth’s day, this was a largely self-sufficient household, as Sydney town was about a three-hour ride away. The property still has that sense of self-sufficiency, with its kitchen gardens, goat pens, and chicken coops. There is something evocatively disorienting about having the smells of the earth and farmyard animals wafting about in a modern harbour city. Curiously, the stolid containment of the house makes the harbour feel distant. Standing on the veranda wrapped around the ground floor, I can look down the valley to the bay, and from a window on the upper floor, I can see slivers of water. But from the inside, Vaucluse House doesn’t feel like what it looks like from the outside – one of the great harbour homes.

  Above everything else attached to his name, William Charles Wentworth was a proud Sydneysider. He considered himself a son of this land. He died in England, but his body was brought home, and his remains were placed in a vault cut into the rock on his estate. The family mausoleum is no longer on the property, as parts of the land were sold off. Most likely, that would not have surprised Wentworth. Even as a young man, he knew what Sydney real estate was like. ‘The value of land in this town is in many places half as great as in the best situations in London, and is daily increasing,’ he wrote. Which only reinforces the idea that some things don’t change. But the mausoleum is still in Vaucluse, and so is William Charles Wentworth. He is here, and he is everywhere in Australia. For what he did in his life would help give life to a nation.

  ON VAUCLUSE Bay’s north-western tip is a clump of rocks that constantly tease the water. Even in the calmest conditions the harbour froths and seethes when it hits the rocks. Or perhaps the harbour is imbibing on them, for they are called the Bottle and Glass Rocks. The formation doesn’t look like a bottle and glass any more. Various reasons have been offered for that; depth charges were dropped nearby during the Second World War, a ship fired its cannon at the rocks during the 19th century, vandalism, the effects of water and time. They may be shattered, but the Bottle and Glass Rocks and the shoreline still hold the promise of something delectable, for they are studded with oysters. That is, if you’d be prepared to eat them.

  The oyster has its own, not particularly imaginative, name. The Sydney Rock Oyster. Although in Latin its scientific name sounds more impressive, more complex, more in keeping with how they taste: Saccostrea glomerata. The oysters are kind of like many Sydneysiders, sweet and generous inside, but with a tough and sharp shell that can cut you deeply.

  Despite their formidable exterior, the way oysters feed means they can be hurt by what they live in. They are little pumps, constantly drawing in water and filtering it to obtain food. They take in sediment particles, and, if there are contaminants attached to the sediment, the oyster ingests them as well. Those contaminants accumulate in their bodies. Which is why scientists study oysters as a key indicator of the harbour’s health. What some people call delicious, scientists refer to as a biomarker or a biomonitor. One of those who studies oysters is Dr Katherine Dafforn, from the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of New South Wales.

  ‘One of the reasons oysters make such good biomonitors is they do tend to accumulate contaminants more than some others species,’ Katherine says. ‘So people use oysters a lot to see the exposure, to see what the animals in the water column are actually being exposed to, as opposed to just directly measuring what’s in the water.’

  Katherine has been involved in research that has shown high levels of copper, lead and zinc concentrated in th
e tissue of oysters from various sites around Sydney Harbour. Some of what the oysters have ingested, she says, is the legacy of the harbour’s industrial past. Each time the harbour’s bottom is stirred up by a storm or boating activity, the past floats back into the present. But it’s not just history being filtered by oysters; we are adding to their toxic intake each and every day.

  ‘Even though we don’t have a lot of industrial practice, we are still getting heavy metals introduced to the harbour with stormwater run-off,’ Katherine explains. ‘Things that are coming off our roads, our roofs and houses and getting into the water column, that’s an on-going issue.

  ‘We have a lot of marina moorings all around Sydney Harbour. Anywhere you get a dense accumulation of boats, you get anti-fouling paint, and it produces emissions of copper and other heavy metals.’

  Katherine is hopeful for the harbour’s future health. But it needs help.

  ‘There’s been lots of research into environmentally friendly anti-fouling coating that doesn’t have heavy metals, so it would be nice to see some of that get taken up and actually become part of policy.’

  ‘Would you eat an oyster from Sydney Harbour?’ I ask her.

  ‘I don’t actually like oysters,’ replies Katherine. ‘But, no, I probably wouldn’t eat an oyster from Sydney Harbour. Mainly because they’re the kind of animal that’s filtering whatever nasties are in the water column. It’s the same as fish that live on the bottom in the sediment and feed on things there. They’re probably going to accumulate more contaminants than a fish swimming up high in the water column or swimming off the coast. It’s thinking about what you’re eating, and what it might possibly have eaten. I think that’s something to consider.’

  GEOGRAPHICALLY, I’VE leaped a couple of kilometres ahead around the shoreline to the south-east, into Rose Bay, and I’m going to paddle my way back to Nielsen Park. Actually, I’m going backwards not just physically. I’m returning to my past, to paddle with someone I met when we were both high school students. He was cool and I wasn’t. Then we were at university. He became a rock star. I don’t know what became of me. Anyway, apart from running into each other mostly at airports, flying to somewhere for our respective jobs, I haven’t seen him in years.

  And there he is on the Rose Bay shore. Tim Freedman. He still looks as youthful as he sounds in his songs. He is lithe, still with that cheeky but curious boy’s face of his. His skin is still perfect. The only thing old about him is the towelling hat he’s wearing.

  Tim loves this city. I know, because he recorded a best-selling album of catchy, cleverly lyrical songs titled Love This City. Even if in the song, ‘You Gotta Love This City’, the character screams, ‘My city is a whore’. Surely he means the city’s like a Pretty Woman whore. I forget to ask. Tim frequently references Sydney in his songs, but I don’t recall him singing about kayaking on the harbour. Perhaps on the next album.

  Tim is to paddle my wife’s kayak, which is coloured an incredibly bright candy pink. She chose that colour so that if she was ever lost on the water, a rescue boat could have seen her. I’m fairly confident the occupants of the International Space Station could have seen her. I’m a little concerned Tim might not want to paddle something that looks like it was salvaged from a K-pop clip. Tim doesn’t bat an eyelid.

  As we push off across the sandy shoals near the Woollahra Sailing Club, Tim looks at the heavy clouds clustering to the east but is unperturbed.

  ‘A symphony of grey,’ he mutters. Bloody hell, I think. Freedman sounds lyrical even when he’s talking about the weather.

  We set off following the languorous curve of Rose Bay, the largest in the harbour. Its unblemished sand is effectively the front yard for a string of mansions and apartments. They are just the first line of eye-watering wealth splayed along the eastern shore and up the hill to the Gothic sandstone edifice of the Kincoppal-Rose Bay School of the Sacred Heart, which has been peering down at sin city and its harbour since the late 19th Century. Tim takes a performer’s view of the real estate, a performer who knows what a full house looks like. ‘The stalls,’ he says looking along the water line, then points up the hill, ‘and the dress circle. All the seats are taken.’

  We paddle into Milk Beach, which is as delightful as it sounds. It sits below a historic mansion, Strickland House. You would think this beach would be a secret, it seems so secluded. But like the best secrets in Sydney, backpackers know about it. A few girls have found a patch of sand that is glowing in the morning sun.

  We walk up the track to Strickland House. The mansion was built in the 1850s by John Hosking, the first Mayor of Sydney, when it became a city in 1842. He called his house Carrara, and it contained plenty of marble imported from Italy. So show-pony behaviour is not a recently developed trait in Sydney property ownership. The house became a convalescent home during the First World War and was named after the Governor, Sir Gerald Strickland, then it was an aged care facility. More recently, Strickland House has been a movie and television star. The Victorian Italianate beauty featured in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, but not as a Sydney landmark. It had to pretend it couldn’t see the 180-degree views of the harbour and posed as Government House in Darwin. When Tim and I reach the mansion’s semi-circular veranda, with its white colonnades gleaming like a perfect grin, we notice it has been turned into a television production set. Windows have been blacked out and crew members scurry about. I wonder if it’s a period drama, but no, a technician tells us, it’s a contemporary comedy.

  We walk back to the beach and set off, following the gnarled shoreline, bejewelled with large sandstone chunks, including one shelf that serves as a popular diving platform, especially on summer weekends. We paddle around Steel Point, and Tim notices a large boulder on the shore that he reckons looks like a skull with one eye, ‘like something out of the Batcave’. The cove that the one-eyed skull is guarding is Shark Beach, which may explain the long net defining a large pool. So it is Shark-Free Beach. The harbour beach is better known as Nielsen Park. A boardrider friend tells me when the sea is really angry and spits a large swell through the Heads, it can ricochet off the northern shore and form into surfable waves off Nielsen Park. Thankfully this day the sea is placid, and we ride a gentle swell onto the sand.

  Tim decides to do a couple of laps of the pool, while I feel the need to explore history. In other words, I head to the fancy old stone toilet block. But they are not nearly as fancy as Greycliffe House, further up the hill, with woodwork fretting its gables. Greycliffe House was on part of the Vaucluse estate and built for William Charles Wentworth’s daughter, Fanny, when she married. The couple hardly lived here, and it was leased, including to a Lady Isabella Martin, who rented the house in the 1870s so that she and her children could escape the ‘lethal air’ and ‘floating germs’ in Sydney.

  People still go to Nielsen Park to escape the ‘lethal air’ in Sydney. On another paddling journey to the harbour pool, I talk with Barbara, who is sitting in the shade, reading the newspaper. She has been coming here regularly from Sydney’s inner west for about twenty years. She points to the sand and turquoise water.

  ‘I mean, look at this. How many harbours in the world this close to the city have something like this?’ she asks rhetorically. And it’s free, she adds. Although she recalls when she came here as a child, you had to pay to enter. But free entry into a slice of paradise comes with other prices.

  ‘On weekends and summer, you have to get up very early, because it’s so crowded,’ Barbara grumbles.

  When I tell Barbara that I’m writing a book about the harbour, she implores me to write how horrible Nielsen Park is, that the water is polluted and shark-infested, there’s nothing here, and no one should visit. Tim’s assessment is perhaps more apposite, as he emerges from the water off Shark Beach.

  ‘It’s fantastic! I can see why this place is famous.’

  At his urging, I go for a swim. The floor is sand, but it drops away quickly, leaving only the creamy harbour water below m
y feet. Floating, I look at the skull rock in the foreground, and the pins and needles of the city skyline in the distance. It is not so much a view as a vision.

  We paddle away from Shark Beach and across the harbour to a teardrop of land in Rose Bay’s mouth. It is called Shark Island. Yes, there was once a highly publicised shark attack around here. In 1877, in an incident that could have further besmirched Sydney’s name in Victorian minds, George Coulthard, a champion footballer and future Test cricketer visiting from Melbourne, was sitting on a boat’s gunwale, when a shark apparently bit into the back of his coat and dragged him into the water. Coulthard escaped – minus his coat. As a Victorian newspaper breathlessly reported, the attack showed ‘how numerous, ferocious, and daring are the Sharks in Port Jackson’. However, the island apparently received its name because some inventive soul thought it was shaped like a shark. A finless shark perhaps. The Aboriginal name is more evocative: Boam-billy.

  With its curtain of trees and an old rotunda sitting like a tiara on its peak, Shark Island has the look of an English park grafted onto the Sydney sandstone. During the 1830s, the island was a quarantine station, to prevent cholera reaching the colony. Even so, intrepid picnickers still came to the island. Later it was used as a quarantine centre for imported cattle and dogs. But there was a growing chorus for the island to be opened to the public for recreation. In 1900, the New South Wales Government responded, and Shark Island became a public reserve. In the early years of the 20th century, the authorities crafted it into a ‘truly Edwardian English park’. Grottoes and shelters were carved from the sandstone. In 1975, Shark Island was included in the Sydney Harbour National Park.

  Tim and I land beside the jetty protruding from the island’s southern end. The plan is to circumnavigate the island on foot – which should take about ten minutes, since it is only 250 metres long and 100 metres wide. We explore a couple of old shelters, built from stone encrusted with shells, so they look as though they have been formed from a piece of petrified harbour. On the eastern side of the island is a modern toilet block, which Tim is rhapsodic about, because of the view. ‘It’s one of the best dunnies I’ve ever been in,’ he shouts out. I have to see this. Sure enough, it is a fantastic view, over to Milk Beach, along the shoreline, across the harbour to the northern shores, and east towards the Heads. We stand in the toilet gazing out, when it occurs to me it’s a little weird to be sightseeing in a toilet.