by Scott Bevan
Pulbah Raider slides onto the sand in a tiny cove indented on the island’s north-eastern side. I climb some rough stone stairs through a glade and onto an emerald lawn. The main building I could see from the water is even more beautiful up-close. It is an old dance hall, sheathed in corrugated iron, and with a long veranda pressing the slanting sun off its decking. But the magic appears when I peer through the window into the hall. Its wooden floor is so polished and gleaming, it is like a mirror reflecting the view through the hall’s windows. So I can see the reflections of Port Jackson figs and palms, a snippet of the older Iron Cove Bridge, and the harbour, pooled and shimmering. It is as though everything beautiful about Sydney Harbour is contained in that hall.
Before it held dancing feet and magical reflections, the hall was part of a research centre, set up to try and find a biological method to combat the rabbit plague that was ravaging the landscape and rural industries. The New South Wales Government had offered the massive reward of £25,000 for the development of a method. In 1888, the renowned French microbiologist Louis Pasteur sent his nephew, Adrien Loir, to Sydney to conduct experiments, and the island became his base.
Loir and his team’s research were deemed ineligible for the reward, but they stayed on the island to develop a vaccine for livestock. The island also became a de facto quarantine station. Sarah Bernhardt, who was one of the biggest stars in the world at the time, arrived in Sydney in 1891. The actress was travelling with her dogs, and when the pets had to go into quarantine, Loir suggested they be held on the island. In that way, the French actress could see her pets, and quite possibly Loir could see Bernhardt.
By 1894, the laboratory was closed and the island had returned to being what the Rodd family loved about the place – a picnic spot. Apart from being used as a training depot for the United States Army during the Second World War, the island has remained a public reserve, and a place to escape from Sydney in the middle of Iron Cove.
HEADING NORTH, I arrive in Half Moon Bay. I’m attracted not by the prospect of paddling into something lunar but a rare sight on the harbour: a fibro shack on piers, with a deck and jetty, and a ramp. It wears on its side a slipway and a shaggy fringe of mangroves. A well-dressed man is leaning over the railing on the club’s deck and smiles as I approach.
‘This is the Half Moon Bay Yacht Club,’ he answers, when I ask about the building. His name is Craig Kann, and he’s one of twenty-eight club members.
Membership is closely guarded, he explains. Basically, you have to wait until ‘someone goes to the big boatshed in the sky’. Craig had to wait fourteen years and has been a member for four years. He is now the Vice Commodore.
I ask Craig how’s the water quality around here, and he tells me it’s healthy.
‘It’s not uncommon to stand here and look down and see stingrays, kingfish,’ Craig says. ‘Look around you. It’s awash with bait fish. Something big will come in and eat that.’
Perhaps it’s that comment that encourages me to ask Craig if I can land and have a quick look at the club. He invites me up. I paddle under the piers and pull the kayak onto the sand and crawl out from under the building. The entry takes you through a long shed, lined with dinghies. The number of dinghy places basically determines how many members the club can have, Craig explains, as we walk through the no-nonsense shed. A peek into the club room tells me the members don’t spend their dues on interior decoration. But this club was never meant to be fancy, right from the time it was formed just after the Second World War.
Craig tells me I should meet life member Harry Downie to talk about the club’s early days. And later I do. Harry lives just up the road from the yacht club in the same house he’s been in for donkey’s years.
Harry’s a welcoming bloke. And he’s the working harbour personified. Harry tells me he was born in Balmain in 1927. He began work at Cockatoo Island in 1944 and was apprenticed to Ken Fraser, Dawn’s dad. He talks about going to sea in 1950, working on ships, and sailing from New Guinea into Sydney Harbour with a cargo of animals, Noah’s Ark-like, for Taronga Park Zoo. Harry still has his ‘Seaman’s Document of Identity’, even though it is many years since he has worked on a ship. Actually, he still does – in a miniature way. He meticulously creates ships in bottles.
Harry mourns the loss of the working harbour, and shakes his head at what his workplace and favourite pubs have become.
‘There was history then, there’s nothing now!’ he says. ‘You know, the Ship Inn was full of wharfies. Now it’s full of la-de-das drinking cocktails!’
Harry is a wonderful talker, until the conversation turns to the Half Moon Bay Yacht Club. He’d prefer not to talk about that, in the hope I don’t write about it. Basically, he doesn’t want people to know about the club. Sorry, Harry.
Although he does tell me that, when the club started, there was no building. The members sat on a large rock on the shore. If it was raining, they met in a nearby house.
Perhaps to divert me from asking him any more questions about the club, Harry directs me to another long-time member, Frank Matthews, who lives just around the corner. Frank lives in the same house he grew up in. His grandfather, a shipwright, bought the home a century ago. Its big windows offer a view straight down to Half Moon Bay and the yacht club. Through those windows, young Frank watched the Half Moon Bay Yacht Club take shape around the rock.
Most of the men, Frank recalls, were wearing white singlets and shorts, so when his mother saw them gathering around the rock, she nicknamed them ‘the seagulls’. Those blokes mostly worked in the maritime industries. They were tradesmen and labourers at Cockatoo Island or worked at Mort’s Dock at Balmain. And that was handy when it came to building the club’s facilities.
‘Those industries made their contribution to the club’s slipway and cradle,’ Frank smiles.
Frank joined the club at sixteen, when he started work. The club’s rule was you had to be employed to be a member, so that it didn’t cost the family. Frank has been a member for about sixty years. As for the club’s profile, Frank says, ‘we don’t advertise and we decided to remain a mystery’.
Frank turned water into a livelihood. He worked on the waterfront and on the harbour, from woolstores to tugs, from lighters to the Maritime Services Board at Goat Island, before buying Rosman ferries. For about twenty years, he operated the company’s historic ferries, transporting people around the harbour, from Cockatoo Island workers to school kids.
‘Ferries had a fascination,’ he says. ‘The movement of people outweighed the movement of cargo. It was more complex but more satisfying.’
However, Frank vividly remembers the moment he realised change was creeping along the shores and leaching into the water. It was the mid-1990s, a Monday morning at 7.30, and Frank was out on the harbour in one of his ferries. What Frank saw – or didn’t see – disturbed him.
‘We were the only moving thing I could see on the water,’ Frank recalled. ‘Years ago, there would have been boats heading in all directions; barges being towed, ferries running, a hive of activity at that time of the day. That’s when I understood the change. It was no longer a working port.’
Frank sold the company in 2008 and retired from operating ferries, but he remains in love with boats and the harbour. That is reaffirmed every time he looks out his window.
Back down at the clubhouse, Craig Kann says one of the shining qualities of this spot is that it remains a gathering place for ordinary folks who love being on boats.
‘I think it adds to the diversity of the boating public,’ Craig says. ‘It’s not just for rich people. It says you don’t have to be a “multi-”[millionaire].’
PADDLING OUT of Iron Cove, past the Drummoyne Pool on the western shore and under the bridges, I’m struck by the lack of boating traffic in this part of the harbour. For more than half a day I’ve been kayaking in Iron Cove, and Pulbah Raider has been barely nudged by another vessel’s wake. Little wonder there are still a few rowing clubs in this part of the
harbour.
At Birkenhead Point, which marks the western side of Iron Cove’s mouth, I pass the former Dunlop rubber factory. It has been turned into a massive shopping and retail hub. This is consumerism on an industrial scale. Even the nearby Birkenhead Point marina advertises ‘Shopping Berths Available’.
While I’m heading back out into the main part of Parramatta River, the waterway looks like something more expansive. Before me I can see three islands; Cockatoo to the north-east, Spectacle and, a couple of hundred metres ahead, Snapper Island.
When the British first sailed into Port Jackson, there were fourteen harbour islands. The sight of those islands enriched the first arrivals’ wonder. In his description of the ‘truly luxuriant’ port, naval surgeon George Worgan, noted ‘a Number of small Islands, which are covered with Trees and a variety of Herbage, all which appears to be Evergreens’. Yet natural beauty was never going to save the islands from being put to work, scarred, or obliterated, as they were joined to the mainland or each other. Of those fourteen islands, eight remain. The three I can see in front of me used to be four; Spectacle was once two islands connected by a sandy isthmus, but that was filled in. Even the colonial government knew something had to be done to save the islands and ensure they were still accessible to the public. In 1879, the government set aside Snapper, Rodd and Clark islands as public recreation reserves.
Approaching Snapper Island, however, it is glaringly clear this place is off limits to the public. ‘DO NOT ENTER. UNSTABLE STRUCTURES. TRIP AND FALL HAZARDS’, reads one sign. ‘HAZARDOUS MATERIALS AREA’ and ‘ASBESTOS’ read others. The island looks run-down and abandoned to moulder in the middle of the river. Yet someone had hopes for it at some stage. There are two palm trees, one denuded and the other looking as though it will soon give up on island living, along with rusting buildings and sheds. On one shed is a sign fading into the corrugated iron but still able to provide a clue to what this island had been used for: ‘SYDNEY TRAINING DEPOT’.
For many years, the smallest island in Sydney Harbour was barely visited, and for a time was used as a storage base for the navy. But then in 1930, Leonard E. Forsythe, the founder of the Navy League Sea Cadets at nearby Drummoyne, saw Snapper Island as like a ship on which he could train his charges. He leased the island from the Commonwealth Government and set about making it ship-shape. He blasted about 1000 tonnes of rock from the crown to flatten it, he reclaimed land to make the island larger, and he built a seawall to sculpt the island’s outline into that of a vessel. He referred to the buildings and sheds as decks and cabins. Forsythe named his creation the Sydney Training Depot, in honour of the Australian warship that had sunk the German raider Emden during the First World War. When Sydney was stripped at nearby Cockatoo Island in 1932, he even retrieved items to display as memorabilia on his island/ship. And it was Leonard E. Forsythe who planted those cabbage palm trees.
During the Second World War, Forsythe had to share the island with Allied troops who used it for training and recreation, but it was returned to him in 1946. After the war, the cadet unit flourished, and the public could visit the island and see Sydney relics in a small museum. But when Forsythe died, his vision foundered. The island is now in the care of the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust, which has written there is a plan for rehabilitating and maintaining the island. But from where I sit in the kayak, the warning signs suggest there is still a vast gap between plans and reality, and, with each passing year, Forsythe’s ‘ship’ sinks deeper into ruin.
I HAD intended to paddle to Spectacle Island. When I stood on the foreshore at Drummoyne Sailing Club, I could clearly see the island, a few hundred metres away, hunkered in the harbour and covered in historic buildings. I could even see on the south-western shore a little beach on which to land Pulbah Raider. But the navy put that intention in its place. There would be no landing of a kayak on the beach. Surrounding the island are ‘naval waters’. Even from the shore, I could see the sign warning vessels to stay 100 metres away from the island, otherwise risk imprisonment or a big fine.
The navy runs Spectacle Island. Naval officers have had a connection with the island for a long time really. They were the first British people onto the island, when John Hunter and his crew camped here while surveying the harbour in February 1788. Hunter named it ‘Dawes Island’, after his colleague Lieutenant William Dawes, but by the 1820s it was called Spectacle Island, possibly because the two lumps of land joined by the sandy isthmus resembled a pair of spectacles.
So to visit Spectacle Island, I play by the navy’s rules. No kayak. I’m delivered by a navy workboat. The skipper steers the boat past a couple of old concrete lighters standing sentinel in front of the island like those lion statues you find at the front stairs of many homes, and we nestle into the east wharf.
Waiting on the wharf to guide me around is Lindsey Shaw. Lindsey is a former senior curator at the Australian National Maritime Museum. She now helps out on Spectacle Island as a curator.
‘This was a dangerous island,’ Lindsey says. ‘Now it’s the main repository for naval heritage.’
We begin with the ‘dangerous’ era. From the 1860s, the island was one big storage depot for gunpowder. It was also an armaments depot for the Royal Navy.
‘Every time a new [navy] ship came in or went out of the harbour, this is where the gunpowder came from,’ Lindsey explains.
She shows me some of the original buildings. One of the powder magazines has the date ‘1865’ cut into the stone above the front door. On the island’s north-eastern point is a two-storey building with a veranda. It looks both elegant and immovable, as though neither gunpowder nor a blast of the fiercest wind across the harbour could affect the building. This was the residence of the island’s superintendent and family. While the town was close by, the occupants were expected to be largely self-sufficient. Below the seawall outside the superintendent’s house, a rock platform is exposed at low tide, and Lindsey says it is a happy hunting ground for archaeologists and historians. All manner of artefacts, from tiles to bottles, have been uncovered. The archaeologists’ treasure was trash then, and the island garbage disposal system was simple: ‘Just toss it into the water.’
We walk around the island, past sandstone walls and over long shadows. The island doubled in size over time to 2 hectares, with the rock dug out of nearby Cockatoo Island for the creation of its Sutherland Dock transported here for land reclamation.
As we pass one building, Lindsey says, ‘somewhere around here we would have been walking into water’. This was where the isthmus was, before it was filled in. On the western end of the island, the land rises. Aside from a Second World War gun emplacement on top, Lindsey reckons the hillock is perhaps the best indication of how the island looked before it was reshaped by the military, ‘a bit lumpy and scrubby’.
Fifty-eight buildings were constructed on the island to hold gunpowder or accommodate those guarding it. During the world wars, this was a major munitions factory. In the Second World War, hundreds worked around the clock, preparing ammunition for the Allied nations’ navies. So for the best part of a century, this was an island dedicated to destruction. It was built for it. Lindsey shows the thickness of the buildings’ walls, and their design, so that any blast or shock pushed inwards, not out, over the island and across the water. But I imagine that wasn’t assurance enough for those living nearby, particularly along Drummoyne’s shores. The potentially volatile island must have looked too close for comfort to those residents. What’s more, there was more danger on the water. Ringing the island were moored ammunition storage lighters. By the 1980s, the armaments had been moved up the river to Newington.
Today, this defused island is beautiful, not just because of the view when you look out but also for what you see inside the buildings. For many of them hold the artefacts and stories of a naval power, a harbour city, and an island nation.
In a former workshop, memorabilia are on the walls, floor, and they hang from the ceiling. They are part of a s
ubmarine history collection, transferred from HMAS Platypus, when the base in Neutral Bay shut. Some exhibits you expect to find, such as models and an old periscope, its metal sheath still gleaming, as though it were still polished by sailors. Others are arcane and tell much about life on the subs, and for submariners on shore: a cricket trophy mounted on a beer can, and a board marked, ‘Drinking Records’. On the workshop’s mezzanine floor are stacks of maritime art, and the walls are lined with commemorative plaques, most from visiting ships, and they are but a small sample on the island. ‘We have 50,000 commemorative plaques,’ says Lindsey. She reckons you can tell how much a ship has cared about its visit by the quality of the plaque or trophy its company has given. If the visitors didn’t really care, the trophy often suggests some sailor rummaged through the cupboards, found something they wanted to get rid of, and presented that. It sounds like the naval equivalent of re-gifting.
Lindsey takes me through the doors of a cavernous old store, which now holds the bulk of the navy’s heritage collection. In here, basically, is an example of everything ever used in the navy, no matter how menial, from the tiniest buttons to old canvas shoes. Lindsey estimates there about 150,000 items in the collection. We walk under a banner that reads ADVANCE AUSTRALIA and into an Aladdin’s Cave. The treasures and touchstones of history are packed in and seemingly go on and overwhelmingly on. I see barrels and casks that would have been on some of the earliest naval ships in these waters. There are captured German guns and uniforms, meticulously kept. There’s part of the bow of HMAS Warrego – ‘the first one’ – mounted like a trophy, and the captain’s cabin from HMAS Parramatta. Lindsey opens drawers to reveal ceremonial swords, and an original letter, which may not tell a story about this harbour but is intriguing. The contents are night orders for the Battle of Cadiz. It is signed by Horatio Nelson.