Category Archives: Sydney snaps

Jacaranda time

19 Monday Nov 2018

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This bowing down to the jacaranda. These tales of streets of jacarandas created from seedlings given to women by their midwives after giving birth. What is this adoration, this worship, this myth-making?

You do know they’re not native to Australia? That they’re an import from South America. In Brisbane they’re seen as an ‘invasive species’ and regulated under the Natural Assets Local Law (but, such is the strength of their mystique, feature as the image on the link to the section about street trees on the same website[1]). In Sydney they’re not classified as a weed but you’re advised not to grow them near the bush, as they can spread and crowd out native plants.

I see them from the ferry, a haze of purple between greener trees. As a child I associated them with the blue rinse of my schoolfriends’ mothers. They still retain that irksome taint of the suburbs, where the best you could do to liven up the awful grind through life was to cover incipient grey hairs with blue dye, or put on an annual show of short-lived purple blooms, doomed to fall in the first shower of rain and lie deep and slushy, tripping up every unsuspecting passerby who will slide on the discarded, slippery muck.

The flowers that fall daintily to the ground on a sunny day are even more dangerous. You walk down the path in your bare feet and tread on a dazed bee crawling out of the long bell of the bloom. Your winter-tender feet meet a sharp sting of bee on the warm spring path. You’re hopping, the bee is dying. The jacaranda, I’m sure, is laughing. It etches another notch on its trunk.

[1]https://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/laws-permits/laws-permits-residents/vegetation-local-law

Cemeteries and skeletons

09 Friday Nov 2018

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I imagine for everyone there’s a place where the air compresses with the weight of collected memory. A street or suburb or dirt track where a child’s eyes saw the days go by, horribly long, frustratingly swift. For me those places lie in Burwood and Strathfield.

Driving through those streets that I no longer know, trying to get to Rookwood cemetery – blocked off by highways new to me but probably 20 years old – I find myself driving down the street where I lived until I was 10. I didn’t intend to drive down there, through that storm of tiny long-gone moments. The drivers around me knew the streets better, knew when to take the inside lane, when to slow for a turn, but they didn’t know the landscape as I did. I saw a place invisible to them. I could barely see what was there, my eyes expecting children on their bikes and scooters, our old fence, our tiny Morris Minor in the driveway, the white stucco on the house that, unaccountably, I hated. And yes, the street is narrower, the houses smaller, all the dimensions of the place are reduced.

The cemetery is also changed, so neat and trimmed. I remember a wild place, of fallen headstones and rampant grasses, a place I would reach by bike to ride around and feel the emptiness. Now it is tamed and signposted, the roads all smooth and the various denominations carefully separate.  I drive past a sign indicating the War Graves section, then the Muslim section, where large shrubs and small trees turn a cemetery into a garden. Three men with clipped beards walk back to a car. Paying their respects. My turn-off comes soon after, and I have to find the right set of people in this sombre time, where gatherings of mourners mill around with heavy, soft faces.

Historically, the dead don’t rest in peace in Sydney. The first cemetery that we know of was created in 1792.

In the early days of Sydney’s settlement, most European settlers died and were buried within a mile of their place of arrival. The exact location of these first burial grounds is unknown. The large number of deaths after the arrival of the second fleet in 1790 made finding a suitable site at a distance from the settlement a matter of urgency.[1]

The site chosen, at the corner of George and Druitt Streets, was used between 1792 and 1820. In 1869 when that site was required for the new Town Hall, the remains of those whose graves were uncovered by construction were transferred to Rookwood. Subsequent excavation around the Town Hall has revealed that this exercise was far from thorough, with the discovery of many more tombstones, graves, coffins and skeletons.[i]

When the Old Burial Ground was closed, the Devonshire Street cemetery was established, but this in turn was officially closed in 1888 so that the main train terminus could be extended from Redfern to Central. Relatives were informed that they could move the remains of their loved ones to a place of their choosing. The unclaimed bodies, and their headstones, were removed to Botany Bay in 1901. But again, not every grave was relocated and last week the entire country heard of the discovery of bones – believed to be from the old Devonshire Street cemetery – during excavation work for the ill-fated Sydney light rail project.

 

[1]https://australianmuseum.net.au/burial-early-sydney-cemeteries

[i]www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/history/foundations/BurialGround.html8/8/06

Immigrants

28 Sunday Oct 2018

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I have been thinking about immigration. About the immigration of by-the-wind sailors, violet snails and the blue stalked barnacle. They have all been landing on our shores, washed up on Newport Beach, and noted by a friend of mine. By-the-wind sailors (Velella velella), violet snails (Janthina janthina) and blue stalked barnacles (Lepas fascicularis) all live at the surface of the water (the sailors have a sail, set either to port or starboard[1]; the snails keep afloat by ‘secreting a raft of mucus bubbles’[2]; the barnacles manufacture a ‘foamy float’[3]), their fate determined by the wind. The fate of the blue stalked barnacle is also determined by the by-the-wind sailors, on which they feed.

While the wind is blowing snails and barnacles ashore at Newport, other immigrants are spreading through our suburbs. The koel and the channel-billed cuckoo arrived some weeks ago, the koel’s eerie early-morning cry[4] laying a sheen of dread over the backyards and street trees, the channel-billed cuckoo screeching with impunity[5]. They both fly south to Australia for the summer, from New Guinea and Indonesia, and fly back at the beginning of autumn. Their chicks, who have been raised by unhappy host birds, leave a little later but return here in spring.

I watch a pair of magpies attempt to chase an implacable channel-billed cuckoo away from their nest, the whole episode conducted with a clack of beaks and a great deal of flurrying of branches. The cuckoo might be trying to lay an egg, or to feed on the eggs or baby birds already in the nest. Either way, it infuriates me. The grey butcherbird, a bird that lives in Australia all the time, is also described as ‘an aggressive predator’[6] and will eat smaller birds as well. But its song is my favourite, and even when I see it sitting on the gutter of our building, essentially licking its lips while the noisy miners fuss around their depleted nest, I watch it adoringly and wait for it to sing[7].

Am I displaying a hard-wired antipathy towards migrants in my favouritism for the butcherbird? If so, why is my day so enriched by talking to the man at the fruit shop who tells me he was born in Cyprus and has lived here since he was seven, how he loves Australia but also goes back to visit family in Cyprus whenever he can. He’s going back for a wedding in January, when there will be snow on the ground. Or the man at the stall where I buy hummus and falafel and beetroot dip who tells me that he came out here from Syria 16 years ago. He didn’t speak English so although he didn’t want to just stay in one area he had to get jobs where he could speak Arabic. Now that he’s selling his dips, which was his profession in Syria, he’s learnt English and he can talk to everyone.

My life is enriched by a picnic yesterday with an Australian woman who is now making her life in France, with a French husband. It’s enriched by the thought that at the end of the year I will see my nephew – whose parents were Australian but who was born in Northern Ireland – marry a woman in a traditional ceremony in Hong Kong in her parents’ village. Their son, born in London, has great-grandparents born in Australia, China and France.

Our borders are porous, for people as well as for violet snails, blue stalked barnacles and koels. There’s no point pretending otherwise.

 

[1]http://www.underwatersydney.org/Creatures/Floaters/By-the-wind-sailors.aspx

[2]http://www.mesa.edu.au/AtoZ/Violet_Sea_Snail.asp

[3]http://www.lhimuseum.com/species/view/180

[4]http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/sites/www.birdsinbackyards.net/files/factsheets/audio/eudynamys-scolopacea.mp3

[5]http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/sites/www.birdsinbackyards.net/files/factsheets/audio/scythrops-novaehollandiae.mp3

[6]http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/species/Cracticus-torquatus

[7]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlAb-ObjIH4

The storm hits

22 Monday Oct 2018

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The storm hit our part of Sydney on Saturday evening just before 6pm. We were in the car, a fragile bubble of dry in a liquefied world. The air was viscous. Stabs of lightning coincided with claps of shuddering thunder. Trees shed leaves and branches. The traffic lights flashed on amber. Roads became rivulets, impassable in their lowest sections.

The political storm hit about an hour later. The electorate of Wentworth had fallen, taken by an independent after representation by a conservative party for its entire existence. The person after whom the electorate was named would have been shattered by the political implications of this result – while he was often described as a ‘radical’ during his lifetime, that ‘radicalism’ took the form of fighting for Australian emancipation from British rule, with the intention that the power would be held solely by those with property and wealth. Nevertheless, given the discrimination he and his wife suffered for failing to conform to the prim standards of the day, and his reported propensity for passion and drama, I wonder if part of him may have been intrigued by this victory of a person whose most recent claim to public fame has been in championing same-sex marriage.

Established at Federation in 1901, the electorate was named after William Charles Wentworth, the eldest son of D’Arcy Wentworth. D’Arcy had arrived in the colony in 1790 on the Neptune with the NSW Corps, a free man acquitted of highway robbery on four occasions between 1787 and 1789. Wentworth had trained as a surgeon, and was sent first to Norfolk Island. He did very well for himself there as constable, acting superintendent of convicts and acting assistant-surgeon, and with a series of grants of land, on which he raised swine and goats and grew wheat and maize. He and Catherine Crowley, a convict, had formed a liaison while on the Neptune and their first three children, William, D’Arcy and John, were born at Norfolk Island (William was born while they were waiting to land in 1790). In 1796 the family was sent to Sydney. Wentworth was appointed assistant-surgeon by Governor Hunter and once again proceeded to accumulate wealth through grants of land, official appointments and trade.

In 1800 Catherine Crowley died. D’Arcy Wentworth went on to have a further eight children with Ann Lawes, the last one (D’Arcy Charles) arriving in 1828 after his father’s death.

William Charles Wentworth had been sent to school in England to become a ‘young gentleman’. He became a barrister, and wealthy in his own right, but his standing in the tight world of Sydney society was affected by his father’s past. William Charles trod in his father’s footsteps when he became involved with his client Sarah Cox, who had brought an action for breach of promise of marriage against a sea captain. Sarah was the first daughter of convicts Francis Cox and Fanny Morton[i]. While many convicts didn’t marry, this couple couldn’t marry because Francis would have been committing bigamy. He had a wife and four children in England.

Sarah and William’s first child, Thomasine, was born in 1825 and they went on to have another nine children together. They married in 1829, a month before their third child was born. Despite the marriage, Sarah continued to be seen as tainted, both as the daughter of convicts and as Wentworth’s mistress, and was shunned by the local gentry. When Thomasine married in 1844, her husband, Thomas Fisher, shocked the family by forbidding his wife to see her parents, not wanting his own fortunes to be affected by association with them. It was not until 1862 that the Wentworths, after a period of high-spending life abroad in England and Europe, felt able to hold their first ball in Sydney, with guests including the governor and his wife and other leading lights.

William Charles Wentworth died in 1873 and was given a state funeral, the first in the colony. His funeral procession was observed by as many as 70,000 mourners who lined the streets. His coffin was placed in a vault at the family’s beloved Vaucluse House. In death, he had finally arrived.

Sarah, still travelling the world to see her children and grandchildren to the end, died in Eastbourne, England, in 1880. She was buried there in a simple grave, with no monument.

 

 

[i]Liston, C. 1998. Sarah Wentworth: Mistress of Vaucluse. Historic Houses Trust NSW.

The Opera House

12 Friday Oct 2018

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Many years ago I struggled over French philosophers and terms like ‘metonym’. The example to explain it was always something about fleets and ships and I would get lost in images of looming grey warships parked at Garden Island, their war navigation technology twirling and twisting over their decks. Correct me if I’m still wrong, but my understanding of metonym is that it is where you use one word to represent something to which it is related. Two images vie in my mind for metonym of the week. One is the sight of cockatoos in a bottlebrush, systematically, wilfully, wastefully stripping the tree of its luxuriant flowers, nipping off each branch and letting the flowers drop to a blood-red mass on the road below. The other – and maybe it is in essence saying the same thing in its metonymy – is the Opera House.

It has been a week of outrage over the pimping of the Opera House to the horse racing industry and Alan Jones. It may be seen as a drama worthy of an opera house, but is so much more distressing than entertaining, from the current prime minister proclaiming the Opera House ‘Sydney’s biggest billboard’ to Alan Jones, a radio commentator, suggesting he can ask the premier to sack a public servant – and everything in between.

The silver lining in this cloud is the avalanche of letters to the Sydney Morning Herald. Apart from the couple in support – parroting the parrots with their ‘take a chill pill’ line – a quieter form of bullying that dismisses an opposing opinion by implying the speaker is hysterical – many of the rest point out the differences between this current use of the sails and previous uses. I’ve seen it blue, and pink; covered in paisley patterns and butterflies; I’ve seen it with ‘No War’ gallantly painted on its sails, the red paint dripping. I came to my first viewing of the projections for Vivid unwittingly, sitting at the Opera Bar after a film, startled to see swirling colours where I was used to seeing white.

I’ve seen the Opera House as the backdrop to an opera (walking along dark paths overhung with trees, our way lit by fairy lights, the Botanic Gardens as I’ve never seen them before, I emerge into a clearing with an amphitheatre of seats, the set out in the cove and beyond, the Opera House, ready to dissolve into the background as Egypt is conjured on the stage and the fruit bats flap lazily overhead); I’ve sat in the opera hall for opera and the concert hall for concerts (these days we have the seats at the front, so close you can see the conductor’s baton and singers’ sweat – our approach is navigated, along the smooth path in the forecourt that becomes evident within the more gappy, bumpy pavers, up the lift then through the green room, where people uncostumed eat meat pies and chicken wraps); I’ve sat on those steps and watched concerts and ‘events’ (a car, smashed by a boulder; a bath filled with milk; Tim Minchin’s mad energy); I see it dissolving in rain or glistening with sun every time I take the ferry. Its sails tell me where I am on the harbour. It has, without me realising, become a part of my life.

But back to metonyms. My favourite letter was the shortest, from Barbara Simmons of Mirador. It reads in full, ‘Oh Sydney: all fur coat and no knickers.’

 

Labour Day

01 Monday Oct 2018

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On this public holiday, Labour Day or Eight-hour Day, we should be singing the songs of the workers. Songs like The Eight-hours System, a little history lesson in its own right, ending with the rousing stanza:

Eight hours to sleep in midnight deep.
Eight hours of toil a day:
Eight hours to rove in learning’s grove.
For pleasure and for play.

Or something more recent, like The Eight-Hour Day, which just seems to become more and more relevant.

But no, we spent the day at the Manly Jazz Festival, listening to songs of a different ilk. It was good to be in Manly, with the sun on my face and a light breeze blowing, as I’ve just read the section of Grace Karskens’ essential book, The Colony, in which she talks of the naming of Manly Cove. The core of the story is well known – as Governor Phillip entered Port Jackson, seeking an alternative to Botany Bay for the settlement, his boat was approached by about twenty Aboriginal men who Phillip found to be so ‘manly’ that he called the place ‘Manly Cove’. Those men would have called it Kay-ye-my but Phillip failed to ask the men about this.

In passing near a point of land in this harbour, the boats were perceived by a number of the natives, twenty of whom waded into the water unarmed, received what was offered them, and examined the boat with a curiosity which impressed a higher idea of them than any former accounts of their manners had suggested. This confidence, and manly behaviour, induced Governor Phillip, who was highly pleased with it, the give the place the name of Manly Cove.[1]

Two years later, Manly Cove was the place of an important interaction between the Aboriginal people and the British. The story started with a whale. In July 1790, four British men in a small boat came upon a whale in the harbour, ‘… (for the first time since we have been here) …spouting and dashing about in their usual manner. This monstrous creature, either through being mischievous or playful, no sooner espied the boat then he pursued and never left her till he had overturned and sent her to the bottom.’[2]Three of the four men drowned (the fourth was ‘sadly affected, and indeed disordered’) and the whale was subsequently pursued and harpooned. It died of its wounds and washed up in Manly Cove.

In September, a small party of British, accompanied by Nanbaree, an Aboriginal boy adopted by the colony’s surgeon, John White, when he was orphaned by the smallpox, landed at Manly Cove, intending to walk to Broken Bay. They came across a large group of Aboriginal people, including Bennelong, feasting on the remains of the whale. The two groups met without incident, and as the British were leaving they were given ‘three or four great junks of the whale … the largest of which Bennelong expressly requested might be offered, in his name, to the governor.’ Phillip was nearby, at South Head, and on hearing the news ‘procured all the firearms which could be mustered there, consisting of four muskets and a pistol’ and set out for Manly Cove.

According to Watkin Tench (an officer of the First Fleet commissioned by a publisher before his departure for Botany Bay to write an account of the voyage) this second boat was also well received by the feasters, and Phillip was conversing with Bennelong when ‘a native with a spear in his hand came forward, and stopped at the distance of between twenty and thirty yards from the place where the governor, Mr Collins, Lieutenant Waterhouse and a seaman stood.’ Phillip threw down the knife that he wore on his belt – an act which he understood to be one of peace – and walked towards the man, but the Aboriginal man – Wileemarin – threw his spear, wounding Phillip in the shoulder. [3]

This incident is the subject of much analysis by Inga Clendinnen, the author of the other essential book on early Sydney – Dancing with Strangers. She argues, very persuasively, that this spearing was a ritual act, ‘where Phillip would face a single spear-throw in penance for his and his people’s many offences’.[4]She conjectures that Wileemarin would have expected Phillip to deflect it, as Aboriginal warriors would have done, and was confused by Phillip approaching him rather than standing his ground in order to evade it.

I wonder if the timing of this ritual act may be explained by the arrival of the Second Fleet in June 1790. This was a disaster for all involved, with hundreds dying during the voyage and hundreds more sick and dying landed at Sydney. If the Aboriginal people hadn’t been worried by the ‘many offences’ of the British up until then, how would they have felt on seeing this new group of settlers?

[1]The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay, 1789 http://adc.library.usyd.edu.au/data-2/phivoya.pdf

[2]Daniel Southwell, 27 July 1790, quoted in The birth of Sydney, Tim Flannery, Text Publishing, 1999, p104.

[3]Watkin Tench, 7 September 1790, quoted in The birth of Sydney, Tim Flannery, Text Publishing, 1999, p107.

[4]Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers, Text Publishing, 2003, p124.

The Freedom Ride

26 Wednesday Sep 2018

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A friend recently blogged about a book for young adults titled Freedom Ride, so it seems only proper to blog myself about the Freedom Ride that it’s referring to. And given that the Freedom Ride started at Sydney University, which is located on 128 acres of the Grose Farm site, this also follows neatly from my previous blog about ‘Grose’s Hill’.

In 1854 Edmund Blackett was appointed architect for the university, with James Barnet his Clerk of Works. Work began on the main building in 1855, and lessons commenced in the unfinished building in 1857.

The two storey sandstone building features high quality carved Gothic Revival style decorative details and tracery, coats of arms and medallions. The sandstone is thought to originate from Pyrmont but it is possible that quarrying occurred in front of the east range forming the terrace. The roofs are clad with Welsh Slate. The east range largely retains its original interiors with fine carved cedar joinery (also Gothic Revival in style), massive timber staircases, marble and timber floors and plastered walls. Externally the Great Hall is crenellated with a corner turret to the north east. The eastern gable has central stained glass window with carved tracery, as does the western facade.[i]

Outside that main building 110 years later, on 12 February 1965, 29 students boarded a bus that travelled to Orange, Wellington, Dubbo, Gulargambone, Walgett, Collarenebri, Moree, Boggabilla, Goodiwindi, Warwick, Tenterfield, Inverell, back to Moree, Glen Innes, Grafton, Coffs Harbour, Bowraville, Kempsey, Taree and Newcastle. The bus had a banner along its side saying ‘Student Action for Aborigines’,[ii]and it became known as the Freedom Ride. In the two weeks of the tour the students surveyed people on the stations, reserves and shanty towns along the way about health, housing, racism, education.

Wellington was the first stop on the Freedom Ride. Ann Curthoys and others went to the settlement outside the town.

We got a tremendous shock. We really had no idea until this moment what it was we were protesting about. Here it was, the utmost poverty in our well-off First World industrialised country.[iii]

She started to write a diary. On that first night she wrote:

Interviewed about ten tin shacks of people. Most of us found the questionnaires unsuitable. Houses of tin, mud floors, very over-crowded, kids had eye diseases, had to cart water (very unhealthy) from river. People fairly easy to talk to, kids quite friendly. General picture of extreme poverty but not a great deal of social discrimination.[iv]

Despite that last statement, the combined surveys showed that:

When asked for examples of discrimination, the answers included ‘up to twelve months ago not allowed in pubs’, ‘Courthouse Hotel’, ‘hotels, shops’, ‘employment’, ‘putting them out of town’ and ‘won’t let them live in town even if can afford [it]’.[v]

They filmed an Aboriginal man going into the Courthouse Hotel – he is served, but possibly only because of the students’ presence. Then Charles Perkins is sent into the same hotel, ‘and there was some discussion between the barmaid and the publican before they served him’.[vi]

This was the pattern for the tour. Surveys, feeling out the town’s reactions, then sometimes demonstrations – outside segregated swimming pools and picture theatres, pubs and cafes. They received increasing levels of local, national and international attention and burst the bubble of apathy that surrounded the treatment of Aboriginal people. Aboriginal people in many of the towns visited gained strength from the students’ visit, forming groups to maintain the momentum that had been started. Although criticised at the time for ‘just stirring up trouble’, many of the students on the bus returned to the towns again and again, to assist in particular demonstrations, forming strong bonds with the Aboriginal inhabitants of the towns.

[i]http://www.facilities.usyd.edu.au/afm/reports/heritagesection170-r01.cfm?pkID=4726003Section 170 Register Report: 4726003: MAIN QUAD / EAST RANGE AND GREAT HALL

[ii]Ann Curthoys. Freedom ride: a freedom rider remembers. Allen & Unwin, 2002.

[iii]Ann Curthoys. Freedom ride: a freedom rider remembers. Allen & Unwin, 2002 p71

[iv]Ann Curthoys. Freedom ride: a freedom rider remembers. Allen & Unwin, 2002 p72

[v]Ann Curthoys. Freedom ride: a freedom rider remembers. Allen & Unwin, 2002 p72

[vi]Ann Curthoys. Freedom ride: a freedom rider remembers. Allen & Unwin, 2002 p73

Grose’s Hill

17 Monday Sep 2018

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‘Sydney from Paroquet Hill, Parramatta Road. From Grose’s Hill’ by Edward Charles Close (once attributed to Sophia Campbell) is a watercolour painted around 1820 showing the view from a partially fenced paddock over a landscape that appears to be recovering from bushfire – thin trunks of eucalypts with bushy remnants at their tops; low shrubs at their base; a fallen tree with blackened trunk and brown leaves. In the distance are two windmills – one on Observatory Hill, and one closer to the military barracks (now Wynyard). Sydney’s first windmill wasn’t built until 1797, Governor Hunter bringing the parts with him from England in 1795. The windmill was built where Sydney Observatory now stands, but can’t be the one in this painting as it was, by 1820, no longer in use, having lost its top and sails and left only with its stone tower. This painting probably shows the wooden windmill that was built in 1803 or 1804 on the southern side of Observatory Hill – the third mill built. The other mill in the painting is probably the Military Windmill, finished in 1802 and given over to military use in 1814.[i]How do I know so much about windmills? A few weeks after interviewing Mona Brand I found a book called Old Sydney Windmillsby her husband, Len Fox, in a second-hand shop. I bought it for the joy of the synchronicity before seeing how useful it was.

The distant straggling town, with the newly built Hyde Park Barracks and Rum Hospital dominating, is similar in two paintings by Joseph Lycett. They are painted from the same spot, but dated one year later. They show a green rolling hill with a picturesque wooden fence – bucolic, compared to Close’s more believable sparse bush. There are four windmills in one (Mitchell Library ML 55) but at least seven in the other (National Library of Australia RNK Accn. T 1631) – two at Miller’s Point, the same two as in Close’s painting, two where the Conservatorium now stands, and one at Darlinghurst.

Now when you stand on Grose’s Hill you’re standing in front of the Great Hall at the University of Sydney. When I look out and try to see Hyde Park Barracks my view is blocked by massive fig trees, and a cluster of tall buildings beyond. I have to go to the ninth floor of Fisher Library and peer through the narrow slits of windows to see where I am. I see the Anzac Bridge and Rozelle Bay and Pyrmont. The glimpse of water in Edward Close’s painting must have been Blackwattle Bay, when it came right up to Bay Street. He’s looking across the ridge of Pyrmont, the city in the centre of the painting and North Head an unexpected feature in the distance. I can see the fall of the land in front of me to the water, the ridge of the city, and the plateau of the northern suburbs that reaches to Middle Head. I can’t see North Head, but from the windows on the other side of the building I can see Botany Bay, its blue waters deep and glistening from this distance, its damaged seagrasses and degraded shoreline invisible.

 

[i]Old Sydney Windmills, Len Fox. Self-published 1978.

The Glebe

10 Monday Sep 2018

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Glebe Island, where Bill Gosling used to work, was once an island. Then it was connected to the mainland by a causeway. This was enlarged when abattoirs were constructed there in the 1850s, and the island was later further flattened for wharves and grain stores.

This was one of many different schemes that have changed the shape of the harbour foreshore. Blackwattle Bay is shown on an 1836 map as reaching up to Parramatta Road, where a small bridge crosses it – now only the street names, and some observation of topography, show us that it went that far. By 1854 Bay Street runs down to the head of the bay; by 1866 there is a bridge linking Pyrmont and Glebe about a third of the way up the bay; by 1868 the bridge is labelled as an embankment and Wattle St is a straight line marked where Black Wattle Creek used to run.

By 1885 the area that was filled in was called Wentworth Park.[i]The park provided space for the same late-19thcentury leisure activities as at the Sir Joseph Banks Pleasure Grounds, or the Como Pleasure Grounds, or the Avenue Pleasure Grounds at Hunters Hill: concerts, picnics and sports. In 1939 it became the permanent venue for a different kind of sport: greyhound racing.[ii]On the other side of Glebe, a similar story: Johnston’s Creek and Orphan School Creek met at the head of Rozelle Bay, where a little bridge now crosses a stormwater drain at the lowest point of Wigram Road.[iii]The area was reclaimed for parkland, and Harold Park Paceway – another racing venue, this one for trotting horses – established on its edge in 1902.[iv]

Glebe’s southern edge is formed by Parramatta Road, its intersection with Glebe Point Road opposite Victoria Park, filling in the angle between Parramatta Road and City Road as it has done since some of the earliest maps: behind that is Sydney University.

This stands on land granted in 1792 to Lieutenant-Governor Grose who had a lease of 30 acres out of the 400 acre Crown reserve that had been set aside for Crown, church and school purposes – ‘The Glebe’. He sold his lease on when he left the colony in 1794, but the name stuck as ‘Grose Farm’. This was the edge of the city for many years, as the old boundary marker at the end of Glebe Point Road shows. Paintings of Sydney in 1818 by Sophia Campbell (1777-1833), and in 1819 by Joseph Lycett (c.1774-1828) show the growing city from its periphery.[v]

[i]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000.

[ii]http://www.wentworthparksport.com.au/history.php

[iii]Leichhardt: on the margins of the city. Max Solling and Peter Reynolds. Allen & Unwin, 1997, p10.

[iv]http://www.haroldpark.com.au/racing/history/history.html#hphistory

[v]First Views of Australia, 1788-1825. A history of early Sydney. Tim McCormick. David Ell Press, Longueville Publications, 1987.

On the waterfront

03 Monday Sep 2018

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The Waterside Workers’ Federation of Australia (WWF) was a force on the wharves until 1993, when it was amalgamated into the Maritime Union of Australia. The WWF had presided over massive changes on the waterfront, always battling for improved conditions – slow battles, with reports still appearing in the 1940s commenting adversely on the huge danger to a man’s health in working on the wharves, and the lack of even basic sanitary facilities. One of its early battles was around the weight of the bags that the workers had to carry into the ships: in 1904 it asked for a weight limit of 150 lbs (68 kg) – the weight limit at the time was 240 lbs (109 kg) but this was often exceeded. In 1970 the safe limit for lifting was deemed to be 55 kg. The WWF also conducted political actions, such as the Pig Iron dispute, where waterside workers refused to load pig iron onto ships bound for Japan in 1937-38 as a protest against Japan’s aggression against China, or the embargo of 1945-49 against Dutch shipping in support of Indonesian independence from Dutch rule.

In the 1950s the WWF expanded into social and cultural areas. The Sydney branch set up a Women’s Committee and organised the first WWF sports carnival. The Sussex Street headquarters were remodelled to include a range of facilities – a canteen, a library and reading room, an art studio, and even a theatre.[i]A film production unit was established, making short films to balance depictions in the mainstream press. The heroes are the trudging men bearing loads that bend them double, working in dirty and hazardous conditions.

In 1900 the NSW state government took control of the Port of Sydney under the Harbour Trust Act, following public shock over the outbreak of plague, attributed to the rats that infested the privately-owned waterfront. It wasn’t only rats that made conditions grim on the wharves – no toilets, shelter sheds, or even water taps; 30-hour shifts; no continuity of employment, with workers being chosen on a daily basis by the foreman.

The rats persisted, despite the Act, and in 1947 the Stevedoring Industry Commission authorised the WWF ‘to cease work on rat-infested ships in the port of Sydney’.[ii] I asked Bill Gosling about the rats when I interviewed him.[iii]

The rats around the wharf, the Sydney grey rats around the wharf are fairly common. But on this one occasion, the rat catcher came in to see me and he said, ‘I might have my lunch while I’m here’, so he opened his case, there was a dead rat, in a plastic bag. ‘It’s alright,’ he said, ‘I stored it in a plastic bag first.’ He thought nothing of eating his lunch with a dead rat alongside of him. Another occasion, this concerns the same rat catcher, he went into a shed and one of the clerks said to him, ‘Look at that scabby old cat there, why don’t you give him a shot of something and put him out of his misery.’ He turned round, he said, ‘That scabby old cat’s my chief officer.’ He turned to the clerk, ‘If you touch that cat,’ he said, ‘you’ll have me to deal with.’ He said, ‘That cat works at night when I’m home in bed.’

 

[i]Wharfies – The history of the Waterside Workers’ Federation. Margo Beasley, Halstead Press, 1996.

[ii]Wharfies – the History of the Waterside Workers’ Federation. Margo Beasley, Halstead Press 1996, p133.

[iii]Interview with Bill Gosling, 9 April 2005.