Sydney Harbour
Sydney Harbour reminds me of a book I read once, where a group of children find a tree in the backyard which is so tall it reaches to the clouds. After you climb a ladder at the top you find yourself in another country. Every few weeks things shift and a different country comes to rest at the top of the tree. With the harbour things change with the weather, or the angle of viewing.
I never tire of looking at the harbour. Every morning, I scheme for a window seat on just that side of the train where, after Wynyard Station and a length of tunnel, there’ll be a view of the harbour with tugs steaming out from under the bridge. There might be a cargo boat with a deck full of containers or one of those massive Japanese floating hulls. Up against a wharf there might be tourist boats, a paddle steamer or a Chinese restaurant boat. The colours of the harbour are blue and grey, green and brown or yellow and white. Yellow and white are for sunny days, with Blues Point Tower standing above the park and any other building. Directly opposite are little green islands, whose names I don’t know. Below are brown terrace houses being restored. On cold days, everything is sharp and the lines of the houses are clearly marked, the areas of colour sharply divided. On rainy days everything mists over and is grey and dark blue. I assess every day’s chances and fortunes by how the harbour looked that morning.
I take the ferry at night from some point on the North Shore and sit up front to see Circular Quay. It’s like sitting in the middle of a black bowl. Above and to the left are the lights in the trees of the Botanical Gardens. To the right is The Rocks where Sydney was first settled and is now being restored. There’s a clock tower outlined in lights and almost directly below it a sailing ship with strings of lights replacing its rigging. Directly above are the stars.
Ahead are the lights of the central business district. At Christmas, office lights in the AMP building are left on in the shape of a Christmas tree. There are neon lights halfway up to the sky. They look best when the sky is cloudy. Sometimes there are the bright cones of searchlights from some point on the foreshores. I always imagine they are looking for flying saucers.
Maps of the harbour remind me of treasure maps. I like to buy postcards of Sydney Harbour to send to friends overseas and mark an ‘X’ on the spot where I live. My father and I set out one day to discover all the coves an inlets on his navigator’s map. We found a naval base in one, with squat green military type barracks line up above the cliff and stairs and lifts to the base below. We found houses bult into the cliff itself above another bay, only the windows gave them away and I formed a passion to live in one and call myself a troglodyte. We found an old power station with crumbling bricks and round white cylinder buildings with BP on their harbour faces. Eventually we anchored at the entrance to the Lane Cove River and watched the tourist boats make a U-turn while they told their passengers about rich people with houses in Hunters Hill. The sunshine was like a searchlight with our boat under its beam and I fell asleep.