by Scott Bevan
My fellow Gentleman Kayaker and great mate of Clive James, Bruce Beresford, made the same voyage, sailing for England just a year after his friend, in an Italian cruise ship, Castel Felice. Bruce remembers the feeling of the final ties to his homeland and loved ones literally falling away and breaking.
‘My parents were on the wharf,’ he recalls. ‘The whole ship was full of young people, I guess all headed for England, and we’d throw streamers to the dock. After a little while, as you were pulling away, the streamers couldn’t reach the wharf. It was a very strange feeling.’
Clustered around the cruise terminal are markers of different eras but all are married to the water in front of them. As you face the cove, to the left of the terminal is a row of sandstone warehouses, known as Campbell’s Stores. This was where Robert Campbell’s mercantile empire blossomed, as he helped gradually prise open the strict controls imposed on trade in the colony, after he arrived in 1798. More than reshape commerce in Sydney, he changed the scalloped bite out of the shoreline that became known as Campbell’s Cove. He built his wharf and warehouses and a large home nearby. Its name acknowledged where his money came from: Wharf House. Onto his wharf, Campbell unloaded products ranging from cattle to spirits, and he became involved in other ventures, including sealing. The existing Campbell’s Stores were built later in his career, in the late 1830s. These days, they house restaurants.
Just up from the stores and behind the passenger terminal is the former Australasian Steam Navigation Company building, a Flemish red-brick confection, built in the 1880s. If the architecture looks far removed from its location, the building’s ground floor now looks very much a part of the harbour. Its windows radiate colour, as it is a gallery and studio of Ken Done.
Further south along the shore, past stoic stone buildings that once housed the Mariners’ Church and the Sailors’ Home, is the former Maritime Services Board building. The MSB was a state agency that oversaw most of the public facilities and functions on and around the harbour. The MSB’s headquarters at the quay were built on the crushed bones of the convict-built Commissariat store. It was completed just after the Second World War. Harry Seidler, who was developing his name as a modernist architect, hated the building, calling it ‘an utter disgrace, regressive, copying old Greece and Rome’. That ‘regressive’ building is now the repository of the cutting edge; it has been recycled as the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Just back from the water is one of the oldest remnants of the colony’s connection with the harbour. Cadman’s Cottage was built in 1816. The stone cottage was the home for many years of John Cadman. He came by ship as a convict and ended up as Superintendent of Government Boats. So that little building is more than a rare reminder of the convict past; it symbolises that in Sydney town, you could leave behind your convict past.
Yet if I’m looking for how the past can flow into the present around Circular Quay, I find it just near Wharf 1. Aboriginal musicians, daubed with ceremonial paint, are playing the didgeridoo and rhythm sticks, while a young man dances. The performers are silhouetted against the sun-lit water, which is shimmying and shaking. I know it is just the churn of the ferries, but I’d like to think that it is the culture of the Gadigal people enticing the harbour to dance.
IN SYDNEY, the fortunes of where you live seem to be set on an east–west axis. Generally speaking, the Eastern Suburbs, close to the sea and southern shores of the harbour, have been for the well-connected and well-off. The Western Suburbs, out on the sun-baked plains, have been home to the ‘battlers’. The East–West real estate and social divide has been there since Sydney’s foundation. The division was roughly marked by the creek that gave them all, regardless of class, drinking water, the Tank Stream. The Governor and his staff took the ground to the east of the stream, and the convicts, along with the marines, were mostly on the western side. As the settlement developed beyond tents, many of the convicts picked their way along the craggy spine of the western shore, over the rocks. And so their home became The Rocks. To the east, Phillip imposed a sense of order, creating something that looked planned. To the west, the terrain shook off regularity. And the terrain suited the character of many of those who lived there. They built rough homes from the rocks and stones on the rocks and stones, paying little heed to roads or tracks, rules or order. Most didn’t wait for land grants, they just put ground beneath their feet and a roof of sorts over their heads. When he was Governor, Lachlan Macquarie tried to push order between the cracks and boulders, with street names and numbers. But the locals largely ignored that. They knew who lived where, and they had their own paths to follow. It may not have been orderly, as the government would have liked, but for the residents it worked. And that’s how The Rocks grew; organically, wildly and insistently.
If early colonial visitors were searching for a part of Sydney that matched their preconceptions or prejudices of what a penal settlement would look like, The Rocks provided it. After his examination of the colony near the end of Macquarie’s governorship, John Thomas Bigge reported back to London that The Rocks area was mainly inhabited by the most profligate and depraved part of the population. When a merchant, Richard Jones, was asked in 1819, as part of a House of Commons inquiry, whether a stranger arriving in Sydney would view it as a settlement principally populated with convicts, he answered, ‘No; I should think if he kept from the Rock part of the town, he would rather regard himself as in some country town in England’.
Yet the inhabitants of The Rocks knew which way to look. They faced not towards authority, but down the harbour. Historian Grace Karskens, in her study of The Rocks, noted how the area’s townscape was unified by the houses’ orientation towards the sea. This, she said, defined the character of early Sydney as a maritime town. After serving their time, many who lived in the area worked as labourers, or in transporting goods and people. But through the years, The Rocks attracted plenty of money that washed in from the harbour. Many a sailor walked past the moral gatekeepers of the Mariners’ Church on the waterfront and lurched into the maze between the rocks, seeking out inns, licensed and unlicensed, and the pleasures licentious to be found on the peninsula. The Rocks had a reputation among sailors for being a dangerous place, and they were sometimes assaulted and robbed. But more likely, they would lose their money in establishments with wonderful nautical names such as The Three Jolly Sailors and The Sheer Hulk. In his memoir of Sydney around the 1830s, Alexander Harris recalled how he would visit The Rocks and find it hard to keep a straight line because of the ‘crags, quarries, and rows of houses’. But it was even harder to stay on the straight and narrow. He mentioned The Sheer Hulk, which was ‘full to suffocation of the lowest women, sailors and ruffians’. As Harris noted, because of its terrain, you didn’t so much walk but tumble or climb in The Rocks – especially after visiting one of its inns.
As the city grew, the public gaze receded from The Rocks, and the convict generation died away. Yet it remained a ramshackle home to many on the fringes of the city. Those who lived there often described themselves as residents on The Rocks. Not in The Rocks, but on, as if they were squatting. Just as a eucalypt works its way through the toughest of terrains to embed its roots, perhaps the very landscape of The Rocks has taught its inhabitants how to adapt, and to tenaciously hold on. In their history, the people of The Rocks have had to face forces trying to uproot them.
Bubonic plague broke out on the peninsula in January 1900. The unwelcome import was brought ashore by ships’ rats and spread through the crowded quarters on The Rocks and neighbouring Millers Point. The area was effectively quarantined, and authorities set about cleansing the peninsula, lime-washing homes, sweeping and collecting huge amounts of rubbish, which was dumped out to sea, and catching more than 100,000 rats. Within eight months, there were 303 plague cases, and 103 people died in the city. Politicians responded by introducing legislation that was like a bureaucratic broom sweeping around the harbour’s edge. The Sydney Harbour Trust was formed in 1901. The Trust’s main
thrust was to administer the port, taking control of much of the commercial areas of the waterfront. But its power extended beyond the shoreline, with the Trust resuming more than 600 properties. The Trust pushed into The Rocks, and it seemed that as part of the ‘cleansing’, the area regarded by many as a slum and a moral sewer would be flattened. Fearing ‘Old Sydney’ was about to disappear, a group of artists, led by Julian Ashton, traipsed through The Rocks, preserving the straggly streets and stone buildings on canvas. Homes were demolished, but the community survived. Yet The Rocks continued to be gnawed away at through the 20th century. The building of the Harbour Bridge in the 1920s and the Cahill Expressway’s construction three decades later led to many homes and businesses being toppled.
In the 1960s, as the eastern pillar of Sydney Cove was being transformed with the Opera House’s construction, the State Government decided to smarten up the western side as well. It held a design competition for the redevelopment of The Rocks. In 1970, it established the Sydney Cove Redevelopment Authority, and, once again, it seemed as though Australia’s oldest suburb was under threat. The historic terraces were to tumble in favour of high-rise development. But the people of The Rocks clung on. A residents’ action group was formed and enlisted the help of the Builders’ Labourers Federation, which applied a green ban to the area. The fight intensified, and a clash between protesters and police in 1973 became known as the Battle of The Rocks. The protesters may have lost that battle, with seventy-seven of them arrested, but they eventually won huge concessions to save the area. The retention of many of the buildings allowed tourism to flourish. What was once considered old and ugly came to be seen as historic and beautiful – and profitable. Yet those qualities have pushed The Rocks once again into the sights of government planners and developers, who have had bigger plans for the peninsula. But first, they had to move residents. A new battle had begun.
In 2014, the State Government began selling off almost 300 properties in The Rocks and Millers Point. Politicians argued that it would have cost $100 million to restore and maintain the historic properties, and with the money raised from the sell-off, it could build many more public housing homes.
Those buying the historic homes have to be wealthy. One property alone, Darling House, was sold in February 2016 for $7.7 million. The smaller terraces are selling for seven-figure sums. Those moving out of the homes are public housing residents. But they have not been leaving without a fight. Walking around the peninsula, I see the protest signs stuck outside houses, and hanging from wrought-iron-adorned verandas.
A focal point of this battle is a building that arose after the last fight to save The Rocks. The Sirius building is just to the east of the Sydney Harbour Bridge approach. It was built in 1979, in response to the plans to redevelop the area. Sirius looks like a neatly stacked pile of cubes in concrete and glass. It is a prominent example of what is called brutalist architecture, but many feel it has been the residents’ lives that have been brutalised by government policy in recent years.
Sirius has seventy-nine units and, when I visit, just a handful of occupants. The New South Wales Government has been moving out the social housing residents, because it wants to sell the building. Walking across the Harbour Bridge, I have noticed how much the soul of the building has been stripped. In the window of one unit almost at eye level with the Bridge’s deck, there used to be a ‘One Way. Jesus’ sign always on display, much to the bemusement of many passers-by. The sign has gone, and I can now see to the other side of the unit, as though I’m peering through a ghost. To better understand how much the soul of Sirius, and the lives of those who have called it home, has been changed, I meet up with one of the few still living there.
Cherie Johnson has lived in the Sirius building since 1980. She moved in with her ‘Mumma’, Betty. Cherie still recalls that first day, when they opened the door and looked straight through the apartment to the main window. As Mumma said, ‘Gosh, Cherie, it’s like winning the lottery.’
The view is like something that would feature in a lottery ad. Sydney pours into the unit through the window that reaches from just above the floor to the ceiling. We walk to the window. Cherie, with her mass of hair backlit, looks down at the roofs of old terraces and smiles wistfully – ‘there were families in there, but only a couple remain’ – then points at a former clothing factory that is now a luxury hotel with a rooftop pool. Further on, over the stepped gables of the former Australasian Steam Navigation Company building, is a massive cruise ship. If the ship weren’t there, we would be able to see the Opera House. To the left of us, we can see ferries pushing across to the North Shore, and if I really turned my head, I would be able to see the Bridge. To the right is Circular Quay, and the CBD buildings behind, and off in the distance over the ship are the Eastern Suburbs, from where Cherie and Mumma moved.
‘It’s like an enormous TV screen, always has been,’ Cherie says. Through that window, she has seen so much life, so much of Sydney. She has seen the spectacular, with each New Year’s Eve and Australia Day, the sublime, with whales just near the Bridge, the historic, such as the Bicentennial celebrations, and the everyday.
Cherie’s life has been entwined with that world out there. It has been since they moved into the area, and on that first morning, when Cherie went for a walk to buy a newspaper, she realised, ‘My gosh, it’s like I’m in a little country town’. She worked for many years at the historic Fortune of War Hotel, a popular watering hole down near the Quay, and she made friends in her area, and in her building. Never mind that many thought it was a monstrosity.
‘When we first moved in here, people used to say, “Gosh, you live in the butter boxes, or the beehive. It’s an ugly building”,’ she recalls. ‘I think anyone who doesn’t like the look of it is uncultured and ignorant. That’s how I feel. They say it doesn’t fit in with the area, but I think it does. It was state of the art when it was built.’
Cherie says the most beautiful thing about the building is what people can’t see, the community that formed inside it. She recalls the diversity of residents – young, old, families – and many who had long and deep links to work and life on the waterfront. One neighbour’s family had lived on the peninsula for five generations.
But that community has largely gone, leaving little more than a concrete shell. Cherie finds it bitterly ironic that Sirius was built for those who were being displaced by a previous government’s vision, and now they are being moved on to accommodate a new regime’s grand plan. A prime reason for them being moved on, she says, is that view out her window. When it was built, many felt Sirius had no place being in The Rocks. Now that this is a highly sought after area, Cherie feels the attitude is that Sirius is no place for social housing residents. Her life and those of her neighbours, she believes, are being sold out for a view.
‘It was an area where many moons ago no one wanted to live,’ she murmurs. ‘It was only full of workers. It was okay before for us to move into the area, whereas now, all I can see are the dollar signs in their [the government’s] eyes. Suddenly we’re not worthy of living here.’
Cherie catches her breath and looks out the window. The source of pain brings her pleasure once more.
‘You never felt alone, even if you were alone,’ she says, using the past tense, as though she has already left. Housing NSW has offered other accommodation. But she’s holding on, not for the view, but mostly for what this place means to her, for the memories it holds and the community it once had.
For now, Cherie is alone. Her Mumma has died. And she is the last one to be living on this floor. The last of her neighbours moved out about eighteen months earlier. There is a resident upstairs, but she is the only one on that floor as well.
‘It’s like a ghost town,’ she says. ‘It’s social classing, it’s getting the working class out [of the area].’
Just as her future remains unclear, so does that of Sirius. Despite expert advice, the government said it would not heritage list the building. Now that i
t has lost its soul, Cherie worries Sirius will have its body crushed.
‘I’d hate to see this torn down, it shouldn’t be,’ Cherie says with a determination that can’t be softened by even her smile. ‘That would be sacrilege. It’s not a holy place, but it’s my holy place!’
BACK IN the water, having timed my paddle between the flurry of ferries and their angry wakes, I reach the western point of Sydney Cove. Or, in the language of the first Australians, War-ran, or Warrang. We know this is what Sydney Cove was traditionally called because of the man after whom the cove’s western point is named, Lieutenant William Dawes. In the earliest days of the colony, he must have stood out as an extraordinary man. Dawes was practical. No sooner had the First Fleet arrived than he had built a simple earthen redoubt on the eastern point, cradling two guns from Sirius. It was the first fortification built in the colony. He then built a redoubt on the western point. Yet Dawes also gazed at infinity. On the western point, he established an observatory. Dawes studied this strange night sky through equipment given to him back in England by the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne. As payment of sorts, the promontory was named Point Maskelyne for a time. But it quickly became known by the name of the man living there, looking outwards and up. The observatory itself was accorded permanence on the point’s high ground. That was initially known as Flagstaff Hill, as it held the signal station that communicated with South Head to alert the town of any ships approaching. But with the construction of a stone observatory, it became Observatory Hill. From the 1850s, a time ball on the observatory’s tower would plummet at one o’clock each day, a simple action keenly observed by mariners in the harbour, so they could set their ship’s chronometers. Sydney’s night sky may be smeared and scrawled on by the city’s lights, making it harder to see the stars, but there on the hill, rising above, and remaining aloof from the commotion all around it, is an observatory still. And people still seek the infinite here; Observatory Hill is a favourite place for wedding photos.