What hides in the murky waters of Lane Cove River?

Underwater in Sydney Harbour

An unedited extract from The Harbour by Scott Bevan

Author Scott Bevan with his kayak Pulbah Raider

As soon as I kayak under Fig Tree Bridge, I notice a change of environment. Along the left bank, in the outside bend of the river, the houses have retreated and the bank is lined with mangroves. Paddle in close, and the river’s edge looks primordial. It seems as though time itself is trapped in there, stuck in the mud and dank air. A large pile of oyster shells rests on the mud, like a cairn marking where the original Australians sourced food for thousands of years, and where some of the early colonists eked out a living. The Aboriginal people sought the oysters; the new arrivals wanted the shells.

Alexander Harris, who wrote a series of books based on his experiences as an ‘emigrant mechanic’ in New South Wales in the early 19th century, described how men journeyed up the river to collect oyster shells. They would shovel the shells into their boats then transport them downriver, where they would be sold and burnt to create lime, for building houses. While the money was good, Harris said this was filthy, hard and perilous work, especially if a boat ‘loaded down to the very gunnel’ was hit by bad weather. It could easily sink on the journey across the harbour, taking a living and lives to the bottom. Harris wrote about his brief time as a shell-getter, and a tense episode when his heavily laden boat was caught in a storm.

‘Before we got through the rough water we could hardly work the long oars to make any headway, so deep did we lie between the short, broken swells,’ Harris recounted.

The water close to the muddy banks is murkier and more furtive. When the water takes on this character, it is easier to imagine there are sharks about. Old newspaper reports don’t help quell that uneasy feeling. Along this reach there was a string of attacks in the early 1900s. One report breathlessly recounted how a young man was bitten while collecting oysters in shallow water. One of the victim’s companions grabbed him by the arm, ‘and for a moment it was a tug-of-war as to whether he or the shark should have him’. The man was saved but not before the shark tore a chunk of flesh from his thigh. Others weren’t so fortunate. In one fatal attack in 1912, a man was taken as his girlfriend watched from the bank. Only moments before he was attacked, the 21-year-old victim had reassured another swimmer there was no need to fear sharks in this part of the river, because ‘it’s too far up’. Two bystand­ers risked their own lives to bring the man ashore, but he died from a ‘frightful’ wound, which ‘bore eloquent testimony to the power of the monster’s jaws’, as the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Sharks are still in Lane Cove River. They are all over the harbour. Scientists have shown that through programs following tagged bull sharks. These creatures have a reputation for being vicious, and they tolerate lower salinity. Tracking of their move­ments has also indicated bull sharks tend to be in the harbour during the warmer months, when they are breeding.

Professor Bill Gladstone, a marine biologist and Head of the School of Life Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, points out that improving our understanding of sharks is a way of managing what is already a minimal risk: being attacked.

Source: Shutterstock

‘If we know there are certain times of the year when sharks are around, and also under what conditions you’re more likely to be attacked or encounter a shark, then you can manage a risk with that understanding.

‘The risk [of attack] is very, very small, but still it’s a primal fear that people have and respond to in very emotional ways. And sometimes it’s difficult, or impossible, to rationalise a fear with what the reality of the risk is.’

What’s more, we need sharks in the harbour for ecological balance.

‘If we take sharks out of there, the ecosystem would look very different,’ Bill argues. ‘You could predict that if you took out a big predator, that would then influence the numbers of other animals that are normally preyed on. If the next level down is a slightly smaller predator and it goes up because there’s no bull sharks, and its food is bream and whiting, then the numbers of those species would go down.’

Along this reach, the river is still a couple of hundred metres wide, but the curtain of mangroves, along with the ceaseless soundtrack of cicadas, gives the feeling the waterway is closing in. Slithering out of the mangroves along this reach are spindly watercourses. Waterbirds are pecking and drilling into the mud and sandbanks close to shore. Perhaps I’m too preoccupied watching the birds because I run onto a sandbank. It is only then I notice the navigational markers for boaties to remain in the channel and avoid the shallows. I take heart that I’m not the first to miss the signs or misread the river. Picnic parties used to transfer at Figtree from ferries into smaller boats. Even so, the little craft would frequently be grounded, and the operators would have to pole the vessels off the mud, or if they were really stuck, lead the passengers in ‘sing-songs’ until the tide rose. I don’t have to sing, just grunt and curse, as I heave and push the kayak out of the clutches of the sandbank.

The buoys and signs along the river, with one advising what I had already learnt – ‘Navigation Past This Point May Be Hazardous’ – indicates pleasure boats still make their way upstream. The river traffic used to be heavier. One of the newspaper stories on the fatal shark attack in 1912 reported a witness saying the water was muddy because it was stirred up by launches ‘that were going up and down all the time’. It wasn’t just recreation that brought boats up and down the river. So did industry.

These days, you can see warehouses and offices set back from the river, raising their heads above the riparian zone and clumped together in business parks, but few occupy the banks. Just downstream from Epping Road Bridge is an industrial plant, and while it is tucked away on the inside bend, it is conspicu­ous because it is so close to the water. I paddle right past it, while listening to the groaning of machines and sniffing at the suddenly malty air. The scent is a reminder that around here there has been a mill since 1894, when the Chicago Cornflour and Starch Mills opened. The river brought materials and people to the mill, transported in small lighters.

The mill was far from a lone presence. Along these banks and beside the creeks feeding into the river there has been a string of industries, and not all of them welcomed. In the 1880s, when a wool-washing business was proposed on Wilson’s Creek, just downstream from the modern-day Epping Road Bridge, there was uproar. Local councillors and residents protested, arguing the waste water would destroy the oysters and poison the fish, bathers would contract diseases, and, one declared, it ‘would be the means of carrying death and destruction along the banks of the river’. Another conceded while this sort of business was necessary, Lane Cove was not the place for it: ‘Lane Cove was a favourite pleasure ground for boating parties, and the establish­ment of a factory such as this would go very far to destroy it for recreation purposes.’

Industry won out; the wool wash went ahead. About twenty-five years later, when a paper mill was established in the same area, it received a warmer welcome, at least in the press. The Cumberland Paper Board mill, the Sun newspaper declared, would ‘materially improve the Lane Cove River, and add another beauty spot to that already charming waterway’. In particular, the building of a dam across Wilson’s Creek to supply water to the mill was applauded as a wonderful improvement, ‘converting what was an unattractive rocky creek into a pretty and expansive sheet of water’.

As more industries were built upstream, those further down the river were not impressed with the outfall. One resident, who had lived by the river for many years, complained in 1920 about the shocking state of the water, which was often soapy, and that ‘dirty masses of black slime are now to be seen floating about’. The resident lamented that the authorities had been unsuccess­ful in getting the river cleaned up, and ‘it would be impossible to prevent the factories from emptying their waste’.

It was a complaint that flowed through much of the 20th century. The river and its tributaries were badly degraded, and there were reports of fish kills. In recent years, the river has been cleaned up, through tighter laws and the efforts of environmental groups and volunteers. And there are fish to be caught. That’s evident not just from the occasional angler on the banks. I paddle past a bird wrestling with a mullet in its beak. For human fishers, there are restrictions, including catch-and-release rules, for sections of Lane Cove River. But this bird pays no heed to rules. While the mullet puts up a fight, flapping and floundering, the bird ensures this is not the one that got away.

Read more in The Harbour by Scott Bevan (Simon & Schuster Australia, RRP $49.99). Available now.