On the Fringe of the Harbor by John Arthur Barry

There are in Sydney Harbor hundreds of bays also hundreds of miles of foreshore. There are lovely sequestered bays where wooded heights slope abruptly down to the rock-margined water, and where all day long you will hear no sound save the sudden jumping of fish and the metallic song of cicadas. Other bays there are, too, where all day long, and, as often as not, all night long there is never silence, either on water or on foreshore; where the clank of machinery, the din of iron hammers upon iron plates, the roar of escaping steam, and the voices of the workers afloat and ashore seem never to cease. Some day, a century or so hence, the quiet bays and foreshores around the lower reaches of the harbor, as well as those nearer the city, will, perhaps, also resound with the insistent voices of the arts and crafts; and ships from oversea drawing through the Heads will at once find themselves surrounded by docks and factories and flaring furnaces and the incessant clangor that ever arises where industry has superseded nature. Those days to come, however, need not concern as overmuch. Just now I am going to tell you of one of the busy bays and its crowded foreshores, and attempt to describe something of the varied evershifting panorama that condemns its waters to perpetual restlessness, its margin to be ever streaked with flame and smoke, and to echo with the loud callings of its people, leading laborious lives of hardy toil, rising even to sun and stars. To the poet I leave those others nooks and caves and sandy beaches and wattie-clad acclivities, mirrored in the blue and limpid sea that laves their bases. "Arma virumque cano!" And the waters of my bay are stained and turgid and grimy with the waste from the "works" that line its shores, and the debris from ships that move ever to and fro on its breast; its few trees are stunted and scraggy; and the thump of engines, ring of the rivetter's hammer, shriek of syren, and clean, clear song of caulking mallets form the music its people dance to.

Many of the busy bays--the commercial bays--seen devoted to some particular line of business. Mine appears to be concerned principally in the timber trade, and the repairing of "lame ducks" of all sorts and descriptions, from the great four-masted sailer, which, with shorn spars and swept decks, tugs snorting ahead, and tugs panting alongside-- stately even in her disarray--swims deeply to her anchorage, to the little ketch that with broken wings beats slowly and painfully up to, if she can afford it, go into the floating dock at the head of the Bay, or, if she cannot, then snug herself in some odd corner, put herself "on the mud, '' careen, as did the Buccaneers of old, and have a look at her bottom. Indeed, my Bay may almost be said to be the headquarters of Sydney's smaller ships--the mosquito fleet of the coast. Brigs, schooners, ketches, and an odd--a very odd--cutter or two. From Narrabeen and Newport and Barranjoey and Broken Bay; from "the rivers;" from far Northern Queensland ports even come the little ships bringing timber, maize, sugar, anything, apparently that they can pick up, from firewood to oysters. They are the fowls of our coast, and when they fill their crops they come running home again, and sail proudly up the harbor and into the Bay, and each picking out its own particular little wharf, puts its helm up, lets go the peak-halliards, and ranges alongside in a style that would make a man-o'-war coxswain's heart ache with envy. Of course, with a hard head wind they are bothered; but then a black little coffee-pot appears from somewhere, and panting and screeching viciously, making more noise than a liner in distress, catches hold of them and drags and pushes them into the havens where they would be--the funny out-of the-way wharves, dozens of which you will find cropping up in all sorts of unexpected spots around the foreshores, and mostly with a single little ship moored alongside them.