The Harbour

by Scott Bevan

  The island had a navigation light, which was initially fuelled with whale oil. But when the fog whorled around the fort and erased any hope of clear lines of sight, the light keeper would rhythmically strike a brass gong.

  There is no need for a gong’s bass rumble the day that I, along with a bunch of tourists, step off a ferry onto the island. It is a flawless Sydney afternoon. Yet in the former barracks are reminders of the most indefatigable of enemies for the fort’s occupants: the weather. The remains of old fireplaces are in several rooms, but attempts to drive out the chill must have been futile on winter nights. And yet caretakers and their families loved living here, describing an idyllic island life, of prising oysters the size of saucers off the rocks and watching penguins snoozing in the sun.

  Fort Denison remains a wonderful place to view the vignettes of harbour life. Through the embrasures cut into the parapets, I watch sailing boats lean against the wind. I can hear the rhythmic thump of ferry engines mixed with the slap of waves against the rocks. On the island’s south-western tip is the cast bronze cannon that used to be fired each afternoon at one o’clock so ships could check their chronometers for accuracy. The gun was silenced during the Second World War, so as not to terrify the locals, but then the daily bang returned to the harbour. On this day, there is no blast; a guide tells me the gun needs to be restored. For now, the cannon at least looks as though it is guarding the island, with its barrel pointing roughly towards the Opera House, as if the greatest threat now comes not from the Heads, but from high culture.

  Perhaps the island’s greatest threat is gleaned from the tidal measurements taken at the fort. According to a panel displayed near a gauge, studies indicate that sea levels are increasingly rising, and, going by higher predictions, by the year 2100 the forecourt of Fort Denison may be under water by as much as 45 centimetres up to fifty times a year. Looking at the glass as half full, at least that would allow me to arrive on the island by kayak.

  PRODDING THE water between Fort Denison and the southern shore is a scaly-backed promontory with a slab of rocks on its headland known as Mrs Macquarie’s Chair. When Lachlan Macquarie was Governor, his wife Elizabeth would journey the few kilometres from the clatter and hard scrabble of Sydney town, through the area set aside as a public domain and along the promontory to sit at its tip and watch the harbour. Elizabeth Macquarie has been credited with planning paths and carriage roads through the bush in the Domain. Macquarie had convicts gouge a seat out of the sandstone for her. Yet, as Louisa Anne Meredith observed in her memoir of life in Sydney in the 1840s, the chair was more like a throne, from which one could observe the ‘noble estuary with countless bays and inlets, pretty villas and cottages, and dainty little islands, all bright and clear and sunny’. The ‘chair’ and the attraction to sit at the headland remain. As I can see while paddling the 400 metres across the water from Fort Denison, the memory of Mrs Macquarie has a lot of company these days, with hordes of tourists milling about, gazing out and photographing the harbour. Most eyes and lenses are fixed to the west, towards the view that frames ‘Sydney’ in one shot – the Bridge and the Opera House.

  In recent years, opera has drifted out of the House and across the bay. Each summer, production crews return like migratory birds to a stretch known as Fleet Steps and assemble a massive open-air stage over the waters of Farm Cove and erect seating for 3000 on the shore in preparation for a short season of opera on the harbour.

  From the water, the pop-up venue is an extraordinary construction, tucked into the slope yet conspicuous by its scale – and the props. When I paddle into the cove, the stage has been set for a production of Turandot. There’s a tower that looks like a spaceship, and on each side of the stage is a massive dragon’s head, scowling at the seating. A sign facing the water warns, ‘Danger. Fireworks. Keep Away.’ I heed the sign’s advice and enter the venue the conventional way, on foot. I pass under the canopy of Port Jackson figs and the arch of a red pagoda into the fabricated wonderland to meet Louisa Robertson. She is the Executive Producer of Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour.

  Louisa has been involved in outdoor events since 2000, but for her, this is ‘number one, in terms of scale, complexity and excitement’. She was on board for the first season of opera on the harbour in 2013 and has been helping realise these annual productions since.

  Long before a note is sung, a stack of work is done on the shore, on the surface, and below it. Sixteen pylons, including nine to support the stage, have been drilled into the harbour bed. The rear pylons are in 12 metres of water. Mooring lines are also used to hold the floating stage in place. A lot of the major components have been barged in, because, Louisa says, it’s simpler than having a procession of trucks. Still, the sight of a dragon’s head gliding down the harbour amid the ferries and yachts must have been something.

  From the trees’ canopy have come more challenges. Cockatoos. The birds behaved like philistines, even eating the giant prop of Nefertiti’s head during the production of Aida in 2015. To ward off the birds that ate opera, everything from chilli oil to fake snakes have been tried, but Louisa says the most effective line of defence has been ‘a rather large water gun’.

  Louisa guides me from the foreshore onto a gangway, as though we are boarding a ship. Which in a sense we are. We walk past a couple of rescue boards. Lifesavers are on duty during the production. No audience member has ever had to be plucked from the harbour, but a construction worker had to be fished out. The walkway bobs ever so slightly as we walk towards the stage looming over us.

  ‘Sometimes you feel like you’ve got sea legs when you’re coming off the stage,’ Louisa smiles. She explains this production took twenty-two days to set up, and for any given performance, there may be up to 300 workers. Seventy of those are performers, but so many more are never seen. For the stage is like an iceberg; a lot is going on under the stage, just above the waterline.

  We enter the ‘stage underworld’. A village of shipping containers has been assembled for use as dressing rooms and technical areas. The underworld is also constructed from scaffolding and netting, to ensure no one or nothing tumbles into the harbour. You can hear the water below sloshing and bouncing off the seawall, and above is the music. However, that is largely created down here by fifty-five musicians in their own area. The conductor’s image is projected onto a screen near the stage, so the singers can see their cues.

  I feel like Orpheus – only without the legendary musician’s ability – ascending from the underworld when we step onto the raked stage. It is an awesome sight, looking out across the stage dipping away to the rows of seats on the slope. Technicians are scurrying about, preparing for the night’s performance, following leads, checking bits and pieces of technology in the sound and lighting towers, all to celebrate the power and beauty of the human voice.

  ‘I often sit out here and look around. It’s a great place to work,’ smiles Louisa, a point of calm in the storm of activity. Although ‘storm’ is a word perhaps best not used at an outdoor venue. Never mind children and animals, Mother Nature must be a horror to work with, especially when you are next to, or on, the water.

  ‘People say to me, “You must stress about the weather”, but I don’t,’ Louisa shrugs. ‘It is what it is. I have five [weather] apps on my phone, and I look at them in the morning, but I don’t look at them again until three or four o’clock.’

  She says only a handful of performances have been cancelled due to wet weather. Costumes have been modified to be rain-resistant, and there are a couple of pop-up drying rooms under the stage. The performers are also rain-resistant.

  ‘I don’t recall any principals being divas about the rain,’ Louisa says.

  But it could happen the night I attend the opera. The setting is dramatic, and not only because of what is on the stage. At twilight, clouds cluster like an evil chorus, the water turns wine dark and, as though ordered by the stage director, the rain falls just as the performance begins. A few flying foxes screech and glide
back to the Port Jackson figs behind us.

  On stage, a character sings about the moon kissing your face, but it’s the rain kissing ours. Actually, it’s slapping our faces. Along with the rain comes the wind. Louisa had mentioned there is a wind threshold of 60 kilometres an hour for performances. While it is nowhere near that, the gusts are adding to the theatricality. The stage flags are flapping like a mob of angry seagulls, and the costumes are fluttering wildly. Later in the performance, as the rain intensifies, the female dancers look as though they are performing synchronised mopping, as their long cuffs swish across the stage. It is most certainly a rain dance.

  As audience members toss on plastic ponchos and squint determinedly, I wonder how the performers are coping up there, particularly the principal singers.

  ‘If they [the audience] can sit there in the rain, then I can stand there and sing,’ Arnold Rawls tells me a few days later.

  ‘But being on a raked stage, and if it’s pouring with rain, I have to try and not fall. It’s treacherous!’

  Arnold is from Louisiana. He has an easy-going lilt in his voice when he talks. The tenor has sung in the great opera houses around the world, including the one just across the water from here. For this production of Turandot, Arnold has been cast as Calaf, which means he sings Nessun dorma, the aria that has soared out of concert halls and into the universal soundtrack of, ‘Oh, I know that!’ Audiences just wait for the high notes, so they can release their voices in appreciation. In this production, the appreciation erupts into a roar, when fireworks bloom over the harbour as Arnold holds that final note. He jokes the fireworks take some of the pressure off him when he performs Nessun dorma, because, ‘I get applause – no matter what!’

  The other great distraction, or performer, is the harbour itself. The audience faces not just the stage but the view, which includes the Opera House. Yet that backdrop can accentuate the magic of the experience. During Nessun dorma, as the rain falls, the strings swell and Calaf cries out his desire for Turandot, I watch a ferry glide by, its lights glowing like a dream. The arch of the Bridge looks like a tie connecting two notes, two shores, notating the melody that is Sydney Harbour. It is a beautiful counterpoint for what is being sung on stage.

  Arnold Rawls doesn’t feel as though he is competing with the harbour for the audience’s attention.

  ‘Many of them are first-time opera goers, and they’re going to see a spectacular stage, with the Opera House, the Bridge, the harbour in the background. Many aren’t saying, “I’m going to hear the music of Puccini”, they don’t care less about that, but this is a great introduction to opera, to the art form.’

  Occasionally, when he’s on the side of the stage, Arnold himself turns around to see what the audience can. He tells me that the night before, he glanced behind, then whispered to two of his co-performers who were also waiting to go on, ‘Look at this’.

  ‘A big cruise ship was going past, and there’s the Opera House,’ he recounts. ‘It made me almost teary eyed. You can’t dream of a better view.’

  Yet Turandot turns into Cinderella. When the season ends, the venue is dismantled, at least for another year. Louisa says the dismantling and bumping out takes about thirteen days. Where there was a stage, there is once more water. That transformation holds echoes of another cultural venue that was built up the hill in the Botanic Garden, only for it to disappear, but far more dramatically and with a sense of finality.

  The Garden Palace was a grand vision, designed as a centrepiece of the Sydney International Exhibition in 1879 and 1880. Considered the greatest show on earth, this was the first time an international exhibition had been hosted by a British colony. The Garden Palace was intended to show how far Sydney had come in a century, and yet for anyone who had travelled from the other side of the globe and sailed into the harbour, the building on the hill would have looked reassuringly familiar, like something out of the Renaissance, only eucalypt-scented. The Sydney Morning Herald was more prosaic, believing it was reminiscent of the ‘fabled palace of Aladdin in the Arabian Nights’. The building had a massive central dome, which was the sixth largest in the world. In a pattern that would become familiar to Sydneysiders, before it was built, the Garden Palace stoked controversy, with objections to the design ranging from it blocking people’s views to concerns about it leading to traffic congestion. But once it was built, and the world cooed in admiration, Sydneysiders felt a flush of pride in the Garden Palace, including the harbour views it offered. Those views, according to the exhibition catalogue, were ‘fairy-like and bewildering . . . for picturesqueness and diversity there are probably few landscapes like it in the world’.

  About a million visitors attended the exhibition in its seven-month season, an extraordinary number in a city of 200,000. The newspapers were filled with laudatory prose, and, for a couple of years afterwards, the building became a centre of cultural life in the colony, housing museums and galleries and hosting concerts. It also held government offices filled with plans and blueprints for developing the colony.

  But it would all come crashing down. In September 1882, the Garden Palace was consumed by fire.

  ‘An immense flame leapt into the sky, volumes of black smoke rolled up, and with a crash like a peal of thunder the mighty dome fell in,’ the Sydney Morning Herald reported. The building and its irreplaceable contents were destroyed.

  The newspaper noted the blaze was a ‘splendid spectacle’ from the harbour, with crowds on boats watching from Farm Cove. Yet there was a typically Sydney silver lining to this disaster: ‘By 9 o’clock all was over, the residences in Macquarie-street had their view of the harbour restored to them . . .’ When the domed vision burnt to the ground, the ruins were cleared and it was landscaped to become part of the Botanic Garden.

  PLANTS FROM around the world have flourished for the best part of two centuries in the Royal Botanic Garden. But it was here at the head of the cove that the first British arrivals tried to tease some food out of the thin soil. The livestock loaded off the ships grazed on the slope, and Arthur Phillip had about 4 hectares planted with corn. The indent in the harbour became known as Farm Cove. While the name remained, Phillip quickly transferred his hopes for cultivating food for the infant colony up Parramatta River.

  Phillip, or at least his image, remains above Farm Cove. A large statue of him stands on a pedestal in the south-west corner of the Botanic Garden, with his cast eyes gazing over the failed farming land to the harbour that made his reputation. After less than five years in the colony, Phillip returned to England, where he died in 1814. His remains are in a small church in the village of Bathampton. But Australian lawyer and author Geoffrey Robertson believes Phillip should be buried here in the Botanic Garden. Geoffrey has enormous respect for Phillip, calling him ‘the first and the finest white Australian’ and, because of the founding Governor’s insistence that there could be no slaves in the colony, considers him as ‘truly our Thomas Jefferson’. What’s more, Geoffrey told me, Phillip, more than anyone else, had made the First Fleet’s voyage work, which at the time was like going to the moon. One spring afternoon in 2014, while filming a documentary on Arthur Phillip, I was walking with Geoffrey across the garden’s lawns, as he explained why it was far more appropriate that Phillip’s remains be brought ‘home’. Geoffrey argued that Sydney was where Phillip had made his mark and had given his greatest service, and this was where he would be appropriately remembered. So Geoffrey Robertson held a dream of ‘repatriation’ for Phillip. Yet that very word, let alone the notion of digging up Phillip’s remains in Bathampton and reburying them in Sydney, incensed other Phillipophiles. Sir Roger Carrick, the former British High Commissioner to Australia, told me the term ‘repatriation’ was utterly inappropriate, that Phillip was never an Australian, and, as a Brit, he was buried where he wanted to be. Geoffrey Robertson’s dream remains unfulfilled, Arthur Phillip remains where he is, and in the Royal Botanic Garden he has a classical-meets-surreal statue as his memorial – that, and t
he views of the harbour he sailed into and changed forever more.

  This ground was acknowledged as more suited to feeding the soul than stomachs in 1816, when Governor Lachlan Macquarie set aside about 27 hectares for a botanic garden. Two hundred years later, following the curve of its long seawall, I can see that the garden, more than ever, remains an oasis, no longer on the fringe of town, but in the heart of the city. Office workers have unshackled themselves from laptops for an hour to jog around the foreshore, eat their lunch in the shade of trees, or to hide from routine amid the profusion of plants.

  Behind the trees, standing upright in its rarefied position above Bennelong Point, is Government House. Its exterior may be Sydney sandstone, but its look is of another place and time. It looks fit for royalty. The architect was Edward Blore, who had worked on Buckingham Palace and whose resume would go on to include Windsor Castle. So he was well qualified to create a building that took off the rough colonial edges, smoothed the ancient Sydney stone, and spoke to all who gazed upon it in modulated tones. This Gothic revivalist building was to replace the more modest Government House that had been constructed in Phillip’s day, a little further west down the hill near Sydney Cove. A new Government House, the Sydney Illustrated declared in 1843, meant those who expected to see in Sydney a prison instead were greeted with a palace, and, what’s more, it helped create a city where any Englishman would have felt at home. And it was home for a string of Englishmen. The first governor to move into the new residence was Sir George Gipps in 1845. The vice-regal role remains, and Government House is the home and office of the New South Wales Governor. In most cities, a castellated and turreted home by the harbour, owning the high point above the Botanic Garden, would be a focal point. Yet in Sydney, this house is overshadowed by its neighbour.