Blog – Page 3 – Ian Hoskins

May 3, 2015May 10, 2015

Sydney Harbour’s Bays Precinct – watch that (huge) space

Last month I took advantage of the public open day at the Bays Precinct – White Bay and Glebe Island specifically – in Sydney’s inner western harbour and went for a walk by the water. That area has been the heart of Sydney Harbour’s working waterfront since the mid-19th century. An abattoir at Glebe Island in the 1860s was followed by timber yards, boatyards, and a coal gas works. In the 20th came ever bigger things – the White Bay power station, huge grain silos and, later, a coal loader and deep water long-shore wharf front that accommodated containers, bulk carriers, tankers and car carriers.

The Stolt Vanguard chemical tanker at White Bay in April 2015 with power station behind, Photo by Ian Hoskins

Seven years ago, as I was writing my history of Sydney Harbour, the sight of thousands of vehicles parked on the concrete apron beside the harbour awaiting delivery by truck to yards around the city raised several questions in my mind, among them: Was there a better use of waterfront? What would happen to the ‘muscular’ working harbour if this commercial use ended?

It only dawned on me after finishing the book that the Y-shaped configuration of bays – White, Rozelle and Blackwattle – form an extraordinary inner waterway within the larger harbour. This could be such a vibrant mixed use ‘lake’ which might even see a revitalisation of the harbour as a means of transit and possibly maintain a vestige of the working harbour.

The departure of the last ‘roll on, roll-off’ [RORO] car carrier at White Bay in November 2008 prompted rumination about the loss of the harbour’s soul. It seemed that the writing for the working harbour was on the wall. The container terminal at nearby East Darling Harbour had just closed. The high density residential development, Jackson’s Landing, was underway on the old Colonial Sugar Refinery site at Pyrmont opposite. The White Bay Power Station had been redundant for years.

Storage silos on Glebe Island with Anzac Bridge behind. Photo by Ian Hoskins

My recent walk by the Bay – seven years after the ROROs had left – impressed upon me that the working harbour is not quite dead. There was a large chemical tanker berthed at White Bay and cement is still being stored at Glebe Island. A new cruise ship terminal has just been completed to cater for small top-end and domestic liners.

Because this area was refitted in the second half of the 20th century, there is none of the fine-grained waterfront of Walsh Bay where finger wharves survive to maintain texture and wonderful scale in the new guise as cultural and residential precinct. The open space at White Bay is vast and waiting to be filled. Redeveloping the area is a huge opportunity to produce something wonderful; or something very wrong. When there is nothing little that is layered or organic – ie developed over time – the master plan has to be extraordinary. The ever-increasing bulk of Barangaroo does not augur well. Hopefully UrbanGrowth NSW, which is the government instrumentality overseeing the Bays redevelopment and several other huge Sydney projects, has learned something from that process.

White Bay Power Station and vacant land, April 2015. Photo by Ian Hoskins

The upside of the wind-up of the working waterfronts is that public access to the harbour is improved. The downside is the potential transformation of a busy waterway, with all the interest and excitement that goes with that, into a pleasure pond which is largely empty during the week and full of yachts on the weekend. Along with the oil tankers that continue to dock at Gore Cove, the large vessels arriving and departing from White Bay add working texture to a waterway that has lost so much of that. The retention of waterfront jobs is far less an issue because there are relatively few workers needed at White Bay.

The Port Authority of NSW, who manage the facility, are keen that this work be maintained alongside greater public access to the waterfront. It will be fascinating to see how that is achieved. And a good thing if it is done successfully. There are many, myself included, who would regret the passing of the last remaining parts of the working harbour.

But although there has been much anguish expressed over the shrinking working harbour, those sites and upmarket residential waterfronts mix about as well as oil and water. Security and safety make access to working sites difficult while, noise, pollution and heavy traffic offend the sensibilities of those who regard the area as home rather than a workplace. This has been the case in the Harbour’s working west since gentrification began apace in the 1980s. The prospect and realisation of the new cruise terminal has caused angst in neighbouring Balmain for years now.

The question of how many people will live in the wider Bays Precinct has already prompted suspicion. In November 2014 the State Treasurer, Andrew Constance, suggested as many as 16,000 people would be accommodated there, pre-empting the results of a masterplan and community consultation. It is ‘essential’, he said, ‘that UrbanGrowth captures a fair return on the value of the Government’s land assets and commensurate with their development potential’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 19 November 2014).

At exactly the same time, UrbanGrowth was convening an ‘International Summit’ of 71 experts – planners, architects and politicians for the most part – which arrived at a set of 20 principles. These say all the right things about sustainability, liveability and transparency. One of the 20 is diverse housing which I’d like to think includes affordable housing – so that this vast 80 hectares doesn’t become simply another prohibitively expensive and exclusive enclave. I love visiting Walsh Bay but I am aware that the lower income population that called that area home for over a century are now invisible on the waterfront (one or two rod fishers aside) and the present Government is determined to remove the last vestige of their presence from nearby Millers Point public housing.

Walsh Bay finger wharf, 2014. Photo by Ian Hoskins

Remarkably enough the very first of the 20 principles is to ‘build on’ of the ‘unique’ history and heritage of the area. Given the strange absence of any historians in the select 71 that is heartening. It suggests that the huge Power Station that sits in a wonderfully picturesque state of decay will be reused in some way. That will be a challenge for I really can’t see it working as a ‘museum’ – the most-common off-the-cuff solution to its obsolescence. Our present set of collecting institutions are having trouble enough keeping their heads above water, so to speak.

White Bay Power Station, 2015. Photo by Ian Hoskins

It is still relatively early days. There is public consultation planned – see http://sydneyyoursay.com.au/bays-precinct – and have your say.

I share the scepticism of many that the Sydney property market is the ‘magic pudding’ that can deliver equity with the proceeds of leasing or selling public land. I suspect it is hoped that it can at least underpin some of the 20 ‘International Summit’ principles. But chasing top market dollar may undermine those very principles.

View the principles at UrbanGrowth NSW.

March 21, 2015February 17, 2022

Solastalgia, Sunset Strip and losing my local DVD store

I’ve just watched Hans Fjellestad’s 2012 documentary Sunset Strip – a good exploration of that famous Hollywood thoroughfare otherwise known as Sunset Boulevarde. There are plenty of rock stars reminiscing and a lot of salacious detail. One theme that emerged for me was the paradoxical relationship between change and stasis.

The Strip has changed dramatically since the first club was built. Each entertainment epoch has risen and fallen with consequences to the look of the thoroughfare. But its extraordinary role as a place transformed from a rural road to somewhere where excess was largely tolerated throughout from the speak-easies of the 1920s through to the next century. Police crackdowns in the late 1960s notwithstanding, it seemed that the Strip was a place of perpetual carnivalesque inversion.

Keanu Reeves referred to it as a ‘sacred place’ with resonances of the past still present. However, many with some regret at the people and styles that have followed their own heyday – thinking perhaps that the essence they cherished has been lost.

One event that had an impact on many was the closure of Tower Records around 2006. The building was a landmark that defined the Strip, and the music it made available was pivotal to the culture of visitors. Technology it seems had moved and people were no longer buying CDs in the volumes necessary to keep the huge outlet open.

I watched Sunset Strip on DVD rather than by download rental. The transience of that tangible technology (ie a disc rather than a digital stream) and the reality of lost places became weirdly convergent almost immediately afterwards when I popped up to the local DVD rental store, Network Video+DVD in Sydney’s inner west. The staff told me store would close in a month or so. Their whole library was being sold. People were streaming from home not coming in to borrow. Faced with that I bought some documentaries I would not find easily on-line.

Network Video at Stanmore, March 2015 photograph by Ian Hoskins — Network Video, Stanmore, March 2015, photograph by Ian Hoskins

Network is one of the only DVD rental stores left in Sydney. It has long been the best with an extraordinary stock and great staff (including the genial and knowledgeable Charlie who could pass for David Crosby’s twin). For this reason I thought it would live on indefinitely, providing a service to a niche but viable demand in a big city where such things should be possible. The apparent incontestable logic of the market has dictated otherwise.

The news was upsetting. Network Video+DVD, as the name suggests, has been there a long time – it predates the digital age and my arrival in the area. It is an institution, and its demise will sadden many, for Network disseminated culture and connected people in a way not dissimilar to the local municipal library. DVDs, like books, can be discovered on a shelf in a way they usually are not by browsing a catalogue. Were the store to be replaced by homes, it’s loss would be easier to accept for Sydney is in the grip of a perpetual housing crisis. But it seems that the Network site will become another liquor outlet – evidence that the market isn’t always ‘right’, as if that wasn’t already clear.

The connection between the sense of loss and place has interested me for a long time because I feel it so often and hear it expressed by so many others. At its simplest it might be dismissed as ‘remember the good old days’ nostalgia, something I can find annoying and try to circumvent in my own reactions. There was a bit of this in the Sunset Strip memories.

As an historian I’m also aware that there is some relativity about profound feelings of loss. Change has been a part of ‘Western Society’ for a long time. The poet Henry Lawson decried the ‘brand new throng’ who were displacing his local community back in 1909 – a time we now look on as one that was surely slower and conducive to close knit community. Indeed this sense has affected people for centuries. Oliver Goldsmith’s lamentation ‘The Deserted Village’ was written in 1770.

But capitalism is dynamic – indeed ever more so since Goldsmith’s time. Places are disappearing or altered and damaged more quickly than ever. Environmental change intertwined with economics is increasing the pace. Change is now so fast it is hard to maintain orientation and perspective; so Australian academic Glenn Albrecht has identified a new malaise, ‘solastalgia’, a homesickness one feels while still at home – such is the swirl that envelopes us. It has, he argues, implications for mental health and social cohesion.

Given the profundity of the forces involved, this all seems irreversible but Glenn clings to optimism: ‘as recognition of the damage that degraded and desolated environments do to our mental health increases, it is possible that we can respond more effectively to simultaneously restore mental and ecosystem health.’ I hope so. In the meantime I guess I’ll be watching fewer DVDs.

There is an introduction to Glenn’s ideas with specific reference to climate change at ‘The Conversation’.

http://theconversation.com/the-age-of-solastalgia-8337

December 23, 2014

Deciphering church buildings

It being nearly Christmas, some may be considering things loftier than the usual splurge on gifts and food. My mind was turned to religious architecture again during a recent wander around Armidale in northern New South Wales – a country centre with two fine cathedrals (Anglican and Catholic) and a very handsome Presbyterian Church adjacent to the retail centre.

St Mary and Joseph's Catholic Cathedral Armidale NSW. Photo by Ian Hoskins — St Mary and Joseph’s Catholic Cathedral Armidale NSW. Photo by Ian Hoskins

I often tell those who come on my guided walks around North Sydney that architecture provides the most accessible way of comprehending the material culture of past generations. Unlike clothing, cars or other forms of technology, the structures of the past are still all about us.

Few buildings wear the ideological intent of the architect or owner more clearly than places of worship and their associated structures. These were literally built to express and evoke religious sentiment. And what I find especially fascinating is that, despite the apparent immutability of the truths presented in them, buildings erected by the various Christian churches in Australia reflect changing architectural fashion and thought just as non-sacred structures do.

Gothic architecture, in its various forms, was the dominant mode of sacred expression in this country through the 19^th century and the first half of the twentieth. It is not surprising given that the consolidation of British occupation of the Australian colonies coincided with the revival of the Gothic in the ‘mother country’. Americans, by contrast, were far more willing to erect a church that looked like a Greek or Roman temple, something that would have appalled John Ruskin for whom classicism was synonymous with paganism.

The spiritual message of much Gothic architecture is clear. Cathedral spires and pinnacles reach for the heavens. Even in their absence the pointed arch window directs one’s gaze, and hopefully thoughts, upwards. Then, of course, in Catholic and some Anglican churches there is the obvious iconography apparent in statues and stained glass windows.

All this is very apparent with St Mary and Joseph’s Catholic Cathedral in Armidale. It was designed in 1910-11 by the firm Sherrin and Hennessey who did a huge amount of work for the Catholic Church at the time. Heavenly thoughts are conveyed to all who enter or pass by with the spire, pinnacles and pantheon of saints.

The Cathedral is built of brick rather than stone, as was the case with many Federation-era Gothic churches. In this instance the construction also shows off the characteristic local light and dark bricks and the polychromatic brickwork of the prolific local builder, GF Nott. St Mary and Joseph’s looks like it belongs in Armidale because of this localism.

The extravagant expression of Gothicism was pared back during the first half of the 20^th century by the impact of Modernism, which celebrated mass production and tended to eschew ornamentation. Accordingly the celebration of the craft of the carpenter, bricklayer, and mason, so apparent in earlier Gothic structures, was muted and then lost altogether.

Cathedral Hall, built 1938, photograph by Ian Hoskins — Cathedral Hall, built 1938. Photo by Ian Hoskins

This move to austerity is so apparent in the ‘Cathedral Hall’ that was built by Armidale’s Catholics near the sublime structure from which it gets its name. It is clearly a building that has been designed rather than simply erected as a functional shelter. The Gothic ancestry is referenced by the stylised battlements on the bay front. The decision to leave the grey concrete render unpainted seems to be part of the original intent of the architect or builder. There is a grimness about it that may reflect the impact of the Great Depression, just past when the place was built. Possibly cost was an issue. To me it also expresses an age when totalitarian ideas were in conflict with democracy and the Catholic Church was trying to find its place within this turmoil. But was arrival at the Cathedral Hall meant to uplift and express hope in the future through its modernity? Or was the bleakness an attempt to cower a congregation and secure their allegiance? Either way, for such as small building, it is amazingly affecting.

September 13, 2014October 31, 2015

‘sometimes you get lucky and this year we did’: harvesting the endangered Southern Blue Fin Tuna

Winter has ended and with it the peak season for catching Southern Blue Fin Tuna off South East Australia. And apparently it has been a bumper season. Long-lining commercial fishers are happy and so too are recreational anglers using rods and spear guns. The internet is replete with images and footage of men (they only ever seem to be men) proudly holding up their trophies or beaming over fish flapping around decks.

The tuna caught off NSW had already run the summer gauntlet along the South Australian coast where commercial fishers use purse seine nets to corale juvenile fish into port for fattening and then sale to Japan – the world’s biggest market for the Southern Blue Fin Tuna. South Australian Tuna Industry spokesman Brian Jeffriess was ecstatic: ‘It’s not just the size but the better condition of the fish that you would have expected at this time of the year’. The Leeuwin Current was strong this season, favouring the fishers rather than the fish. As Jeffriess acknowledged ‘Sometimes you get lucky and this year we did’.

Most Australia-caught Southern Blue Fin Tuna is exported to Japan. Frozen Tuna at Tokyo Fish Market 2009 (Photo by Ian Hoskins)

The odd thing is that these fish are widely regarded as endangered – a result of devastating over-fishing in the post-war decades. That was the status recommended by the NSW Fisheries Scientific Committee in 2004 and it still is so classified under the NSW Fisheries Management Act. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) goes one further and lists the Southern Blue Fin Tuna as ‘critically endangered’. The population is less than 10% of its pre-fished size.

This is not surprising given the Tuna’s physiology. They are apex predators – muscular, warm blooded – quick in the water but slow to mature to reproductive age. A tuna can live as long as 40 years but doesn’t reproduce until it is at least 8. Animals with this profile are more vulnerable than most to over-fishing.

So why are we still killing them?

One part of the answer is that, like so much in science these days, the figures are contested. Because it is a migratory species harvesting of this Tuna is managed by an international body – the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Blue Fin Tuna. Quotas set by this body have fluctuated over the years but have recently gone up because monitoring has indicated a rise in population. However the migratory habits of the Tuna also make monitoring difficult. The good news is that Australia’s commercial fisheries are among the best managed in the world. But that doesn’t alter the differing conclusions drawn from science which are pause for thought for fish eaters.

Another part of the answer has to do, perhaps unsurprisingly, with economics. There is money to be made both in commercial fishing and recreational fishing with its ripple effects in tourism. This is not to necessarily imply a few making huge dollars – though some may well be doing very well – but rather the harvesting of tuna supports the livelihoods of commercial fishers and small communities, and is therefore supported by governments.

A third consideration relates to our peculiar attitude to marine creatures. Denizens of the deep are somehow different to those that roam the land. In Australia we have largely marginalised the hunting gun culture that is still so prevalent in the US. But fish are the last wild harvest and catching them is still widely regarded as a right – a link to something elemental and basic perhaps. We are not only far more amenable to killing fish, regardless apparently of their conservation status, but we celebrate the activity. One of the You-Tube clips I accessed through the Ulladulla Game Fishing Club website, shows recreational fishers bagging Southern Blue Fin Tuna off the south coast of New South Wales. It begins with a proud shot of a gleaming power boat, follows through with the fight and finishes with the last gasps of a bleeding fish and big smiles and thumbs up from the victors. The action is accompanied by the muscular riffs of Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’.

All of this is, of course, quite legal. It is also pretty clearly a demonstration of humanity’s ‘right’ to dominate nature and take what we want, not necessarily what we need. I know that the recreational Tuna catch is far smaller than the commercial, but there is something especially problematic about killing an animal that is, at best, struggling back from the brink – simply for fun. Professional fishers may well enjoy their work but it is ultimately a livelihood. Recreational fishers have more of a choice about what they catch.

Things change and sometimes very quickly. Our casual toleration of whaling persisted up to the 1960s at least. By 1979 Australia had harpooned its last whale and over the following decades whale watching rather than killing became profitable. Our centuries’ old hatred of sharks, so spectacularly demonstrated by countless photographs of crowds surrounding the hoisted carcasses of these ‘monsters’, is also shifting. People are actually protesting against the culling and hunting of sharks in the wake of fatal shark attacks. The refrain ‘we enter their world at our own risk’ is the common, and remarkably humble, response.

I wonder when caution and respect will be accorded the Southern Blue Fin Tuna at least by the recreational anglers.

August 14, 2014September 16, 2014

On being optimistic – and being able to see the trees

Just what gives someone charisma or presence is intangible. I do know it is often bound up with some attribute or characteristic such as reputation, physical size or beauty. Sometimes it is oratorical skill that wins over in the absence of any other obvious factor.

Bob Brown in discussion with Sophie Cunningham and Ashley Hay (photo by Ian Hoskins)

When I met Bob Brown briefly in the book signing tent at the Byron Bay Writer’s Festival last week, it was clear that presence could also be generated by serenity. Australia’s best-known environmentalist had a very palpable friendly gentleness. I had asked simply for a signature rather than a dedication but Bob enquired after my name, shook hands and said ‘nice to meet you’ – and seemed to really mean it. I was one of 30 or 40 queued for that signing. I think there was least one other. I assume all were greeted with the warmth I witnessed.

Bob's signing - the front of a long line — Bob’s signing – the front of a long line (photo by Ian Hoskins)

Bob Brown was there to talk about his latest book, Optimism: Reflections on a life of action – which is essentially a memoir that runs from the young doctor’s encounter with Jimi Hendrix in his last moments at the emergency ward of a London Hospital in 1970 through an extraordinary life of political action, saving rivers and forests. But the purpose of the book’s introduction, and that of the talk I heard (the second of two that morning), was to inspire and encourage others on the ‘progressive’ side of politics to endure despite all the bad news and apparent impending environmental cataclysm.

Bob’s is the story of an activist who has experienced depression and hopelessness but found energy in being optimistic. It is a strategy that draws upon ‘learned optimism’, an influential strand of modern psychology which aims to counter depression through behaviour and without reliance on drugs.

It is ‘the intelligent’ that the Doctor appeals to, for they are ‘unsure’ and ‘weigh things up’. But ‘Mulling things over while the stupid and greedy ravage the planet’ leads to individual misery and collective disaster.

This psychological framing is not surprising given Bob Brown’s own training as a medical doctor. It also presents a counter to the faith-based lunacy of what the environmentalist calls the new religion of Growth, with its gods Materialism and Consumption and its ‘high priests’ in the Murdoch press. This new religion masquerades as ‘rational’ but has all but displaced the faiths of old.

Conversely, because it holds the key to planetary survival, environmentalism is entirely rational. That we are consuming the equivalent of 2 ½ times the Earth’s resources is stark evidence of that.

But acting upon that evidence, of course, is where clarity ends and policy, and therefore politics, begins. It is where black and white merges to grey. There was not much in Bob’s discussion or in the book that grapples with complexities such as the definition of ‘wilderness’ when Indigenous people claim pre-colonial occupation of the land. The fraught politics of the Wild Rivers Legislation in Queensland that saw Aboriginal groups ally with the conservative State Government to repeal the river protection Act earlier this year is one example of this.

The ferocity of the Marine Park debate in the lead up to the 2011 NSW election was grounded as much in culture as it was in science – a belief in the long held ‘right’ to fish versus the desire to exclude the impact of humans from some areas. It was indicative of the difficulty of convincing people to act effectively in a democracy when individual interest does not always immediately align with the collective good of all of us ‘Earthians’, to use Bob’s term. So in creeps the grey fog.

Bob Brown does not have a typical orator’s voice – its actually something of a monotone. But by sticking to the black and white, and delivering that with gentle certainty, Brown kept his Festival audience enthralled and in agreement. It was admittedly a receptive and sympathetic crowd. Byron Bay is possibly unique in its politically powerful blending of Anglo-Celtic counter-culture and affluence. So somewhat ironically the atmosphere in the great tent – a most appropriate venue – was one of religious revivalism. As the place filled to capacity, those who wanted to remain within were compelled to sit or kneel towards the front. That was where I found myself, having arrived too late to claim a chair. And it was there that I came to sit next to a kneeling woman who began quietly sobbing and rocking back and forth, hands together almost in prayer.

Seeing the light inside the tent (photo by Ian Hoskins)

I admire very much the courage and conviction of people such as Bob Brown. But I do find myself often mired in the grey complexity – and sometimes in melancholy – ‘mulling things over’ trying to understand competing interests; to work out which are valid and which are mendacious, who are the ‘stupid and the greedy’ and who are simply defending their own place on the planet. I’m not sure if that means I sometimes can’t see the wood for the trees, or the trees for the wood.