The Clyde River

 

I don't know if Stuart Magee is still around but if he is I shouldn't think he would mind my quoting from his excellent little booklet "The Clyde River and Batemans Bay" which, published in 2001, is now out of print. Here we go:

The Nepean/Hawkesbury is in big trouble, and the outlook for the Murray and the Darling is gloomy indeed. All of which brings me, gasping for fresh clean water like some poor old murray cod in a drought, to the wonders of the crystal-clear Clyde River.

Those of you who have peered down at the river from the bridges at Nelligen and Batemans Bay will likely concede that it is at least a nice river but some may jib at the suggestion that it is a wondrous thing. Well now, bear with me.

When English settlers first appeared on the river the people in possession around the area to become known as Nelligen, at least by some accounts, were the Dhurga people. Possibly they were much one and the same as the Bugelli-Manji people, in possession at Moruya, whose language is recorded as Djurga.

Lieutenant Robert Johnston, Australian-born son of the officer who led the Rum Rebellion, seems to have been the first white man to explore the river, sailing or rowing up it for 25 miles in 1821. He described it as a "fine, clear, capacious river" and those good people who have followed him have done little to change that. His boat, the Snapper, returned in 1822 under the command of William Edwardson with an interesting party of three. Firstly, there was the ubiquitous Hamilton Hume. Then that rumbustious adventurer Alexander Berry, at whose disposal the Snapper had been placed.

Berry, a Scot in his forties at the time, had set off after school to do medicine. After completing the preliminary course of study he broke his father's heart by opting to join the navy. The navy gave him a certificate as a surgeon's mate but he changed aim again to become a merchant buying and selling trade goods around the world.

In 1809 he was loading a ship with spars in New Zealand when word came that another English ship nearby, the Boyd, had been attacked by natives. At considerable risk he set off to assist but found that the crew and passengers of the ship, bar a woman, a 15-year old boy and two younger children, had all been most brutally massacred and eaten. Depending on which account you read, from 40 to 70 people had been killed.

The boy, Thomas Davison, who Berry took with him, was the final member of the party exploring the Clyde in 1822.

Leaving the Snapper in the Bay, at the island which now bears its name, and taking the Snapper's boat, they proceeded up the river an estimated 25 miles till they reached a "stony ford" which barred their further progress by water. Berry, in a paper he read to the Philosophical Society of Australia later that year, wrote "the river winds in a beautiful manner among the hills which slope gradually to the water's edge. These hills are moderately wooded. The spotted gum is prevalent. The soil is rather barren and is covered with low ferns, prickly shrubs and a kind of dwarf palm called burrawang by the natives. As we advanced up the river, the alternative projecting points, on either side, consist of rich alluvial soil but are of small extent." The burrawang, with its lovely rich red nut about the size and shape of a date but with five flat hard flanks, still grows profusely in the area. It interested Berry. He had it analysed by a chemist to find it was nutritious but toxic. On further inquiry he found the aboriginals knew this well but eliminated the toxin by maceration in running water. Berry, as we will discuss shortly, was not the only man attracted to the burrawang.

When the boat could go no further Berry, Hume and Davison set off on foot for a four-day tramp about. Not a venture to be undertaken lightly. There are only two prior landings in Batemans Bay recorded with any certainty - in 1808 and 1821 - and both of those ended in members of the landing party being speared to death. West of the river he found "the sides of the hills are too steep for the plough but the soil is admirably suited to the culture of the vine. We did not find a piece of good pasture, or what is called good forest land in the whole district."

Whether or not he was correct in suggesting the land was suitable for "the vine" has not yet been put to any significant test that I know of, and hopefully the revelation in these pages will yet escape the ears of Penfolds and Hardys. For the rest, his analysis of the country was spot on and the lack of pollution in the river today is due largely to the lack of agriculture. That, plus the fact that the limited industry has been essentially clean.

Branching sideways again, like one of those creeks that feed the river where you may find all sorts of interesting things before returning to the main stream, Alexander Berry's dalliance with the Clyde was brief. Within the year he was seduced to the Shoalhaven where he took up a grant of 10,000 acres near the mouth of the river at the foot of Mount Coolangatta. Through subsequent purchases he expanded the property to 40,000 acres and built a magnificent home. The rump of the property and many of the buildings erected by him are there yet for you to see, and you may purchase good wine made from grapes grown on the property. It seems our man had a good eye for the grape.

However, it was not all wine and roses at Coolangatta as he called the property. Approaching the difficult mouth of the Shoalhaven in a ship on a rough day in May 1822, Berry lowered a boat and sent a party to check the way forward. The boat overturned in the surf and two men were lost. One of them was his friend, Thomas Davison, still in his twenties and never to be seen again.

It was Lieutenant Johnston on his first visit in 1821 who named the river Clyde - for reasons not stated in his report to Governor Macquarie by wholly in step with practices of the time of aligning colonial geographic features with British parallels. Seven years later a surveyor in the area had the good sense to ask the local aboriginals what they called the river. "Bhundoo" they cried. It's a shame the name wasn't reinstated, and unfortunate the surveyor didn't continue to ask about for the names of the places. He it was who named the two islands at the mouth of the river The Tollgate and the Tollhouse. Would you believe!

Not far out to sea from the Tollgates as the islands are called today, where the water is still muddy when the river is in flood, if you look north you can spy that odd-shaped mountain to Captain Cook called Pigeon House. A bit beyond Pigeon House mountain, about 120 kilometres upstream from where you are bobbing about in the ocean, is where the headwaters of the river rise.

Pondering on that one day in the year 2000, when the fish off Tollgates were offering little distraction, it seemed a good idea to retrace Alexander Berry's journey up the river. He might have missed something.

So it was, some months later, that yours truly accompanied by one Garth Hay - staunch sailorman of Broulee, well suited to follow in the wake of Alexander Berry - found themselves up the creek so to say. There, at a spot 40 kilometres or 25 miles up the Clyde from Snapper Island we felt ourselves bumping on a stony bottom at a place where a promontory of stones comes across two-thirds of the river. We were at the "stony ford" which barred the progress of Berry's boat.

At that spot, if things have changed since Berry's day it was not apparent to us from the river. Not a roof, a fence, a road or a path, nor sheep nor cow. Nothing but native scrub and trees, the lovely river, and peace - peace you could carry in a bucket. There was, of course, nothing remarkable in taking a boat to where we were. It is easily and commonly done. Nevertheless there was a certain sense of occasion.

Others have done more interesting things on the river. In 1936, John Fairfax and two friends set out from Pigeon House to paddle two canoes to Batemans Bay - see here. That, in the first two days of the five that it took them, required a fair bit of portage from waterhole to waterhole when they ran out of river. In his book, Run O' Waters, so beautifully illustrated by Cedric Emanuel, Fairfax has this to say of the river:

"The Clyde is not a vigorous tumultuous stream such as one finds tumbling down from the tablelands. It flows very stealthily and steadily down through the valley it has quietly eaten away for itself amongst the foothills of the mountains. It does not pound over waterfalls and cascades like the Shoalhaven or the Snowy. Rather does it win its way by peaceful penetration. Occasionally, of course, when a cloud bursts over Pigeon House or the upper valley, the Clyde becomes a large dignified river and swings down to the sea in a broad-bosomed matronly manner."

 

One Man's Kingdom The Life of 'King' Carson of Nuguria

Nuguria is at the top of the map

 

He came back to his island home with his mother and sister at the end of World War Two. They were returning from wartime exile in Australia to Nuguria Atoll and the devastated wreck of a coconut plantation. His father, Lewis Carson, was one of the Australian prisoners-of-war lost at sea when the Japanese ship Montevideo Maru was torpedoed by an American submarine while transporting them from Rabaul to Hainan for use as forced labourers.

Graeme Carson

Nuguria is one of the Polynesian outliers which ring Papua New Guinea. Its people are handsome, golden-skinned islanders; their original Polynesian heriditary characteristics have been modified by Micronesian and Melanesian genes contributed by arrivals from visiting canoes from Kapingamirangi Atoll to the north, from New Ireland to the west, and perhaps by visits from the ships of passing seafarers ranging from Admiral Zheng He's fleet on its voyage of exploration in 1421, to later ships carrying European explorers as they charted the legendary Pacific Ocean.

The short-lived 19th century German presence in the South Pacific made Nuguria plantation an attractive prize after Germany's defeat in the First World War. The victorious Australians seized it with alacrity, unceremoniously ejected the former owners with little or no compensation, and sold it, along with hundreds of other similar assets, to their own returned veterans. One of these was Lewis Carson, father of Graeme.

Nuguria was Graeme Carson's fiefdom. He ran the atoll as a benign but absolute ruler, and totally dominated its inhabitants, as did his similarly placed counterpart, John Clunies-Ross, on Cocos in the Indian Ocean. Force of character and an absolute belief in their right to rule was a characteristic of both men, and this was accepted by the islanders until influences from outside sewed the seeds of discontent. The Winds of Change have now made anything remotely resembling this state of affairs unthinkable and much ink has been spilt reviling the discriminatory attitude and the paternal mindset of those early times, but whether the absence of aid, assistance or basic governance for Nuguria which now prevails is in an improvement is a legitimate question.

Like many of his contemporaries, Graeme Carson accepted responsibility for the health and welfare of every individual on his property, in his case, all 58 islands on the twin atolls which made up Nuguria. He was administrator, doctor, nurse, mechanical engineer, book-keeper, unofficial arbitrator in disputes over land, unofficial matchmaker between partners from different families, and occasional pugilist when disputes demanded strong action. His small ship was used to transport patients to Rabaul for hospital treatment free of charge and he arranged and paid for places in the prestigious King's School in Sydney for several young Nugurians. In short; his word was law, and government regulations and decrees from distant Rabaul ran a bad second to on-the-spot decisions by the freehold owner of Nuguria.

Boat Harbour, Tekani Island

Carson's family lived on Tekani Island about 3 miles from the airstrip in a house built by his father, and the Nugurians occupied the adjoining island of Busureia. As well as providing money in return for labour or locally harvested copra and trocas shell, Carson was the only source of medical treatment on the atoll and the only authority to turn to in disputes. The nearest government official was many days’ sail away.

Communication was by tenuous HF radio link to Rabaul on New Britain using the radio in the plantation office surrounded more often than not by a group of attentive bystanders. The artificial boat harbour lay immediately in front of his house, its retaining walls formed by stacked mushroom coral heads overlaid by clean white sand. This tiny harbor sheltered schools of small bait fish in addition to the dugout canoes used for transport in the lagoon. In the early 1960s, he used his own labour and materials to carve an airstrip out of the narrow island at the southeast end of the atoll: 2,500 feet long, with a thin grass cover over coral rubble, it allowed fast and easy access to outside medical aid together with much faster mail delivery. It also produced a stream of official visitors from government departments in Rabaul whose insistence on correctly completed paperwork was not always welcomed by the busy owner of the atoll!

Canoe, Nuguria Lagoon

Graeme Carson married his first wife, an Australian girl, who gave him a son, Timothy. His mother, who lived on Nuguria as an undisputed matriarch, clashed repeatedly with her, and the marriage ended in divorce. Carson remarried, this time to Tetau, daughter of an heriditary Nugurian clan leader. She bore him another six children. The redoubtable Eileen Carson co-existed in wary but resigned amity with Tetau, until the matriarch's death by drowning after a fall from the seawall during a violent northwest gale.

Political Independence for Papua New Guinea in 1975 marked the start of a revolt by young islanders against what they now regarded as the exploitation of their homeland. The easy relationship between Carson and the islanders began to deteriorate into open hostility, often fuelled by outsiders who now began to arrive on Nuguria as the invitees of islanders returning from school in New Britain and Bougainville.

He was granted citizenship of the newly independent nation of Papua New Guinea, renouncing his Australian citizenship in the process. While it was never officially spelled out, Australian passport holders who tried to continue in business in Papua New Guinea soon discovered that it was difficult to do so in the face of official harrasment by newly promoted government officials determined to exert their newfound authority. One of the unforseen consequences of this change in nationality left his family divided into those born before he became a Papua New Guinean citizen and those born later. The former were able to get Australian passports and move freely between New Guinea and Australia: the latter, as citizens of PNG, were only able to visit Australia for brief periods on tourist visas.

After 1975, the plantation industry throughout New Guinea went into a rapid decline. Labour became hard to get, and even harder to control. No plantation was immune and production of copra and trocas shell rapidly fell nationwide. A rise in nationalist sentiment as the new and inadequately prepared nation tried to continue the sophisticated administrative practices of its former colonial masters adversly affected Nuguria plantation and many other agricultural and commercial enterprises.

Life on isolated Nuguria Atoll was slow to change and the coconut groves which covered most of the 58 islands in the group still produced copra, while the reef continued to yield commercial quantities of trocas shell. Carson still owned and controlled the atoll, but his sway no longer held to the extent that he could decide who could and could not live there. Outsiders including missionaries from some fundamentalist Christian sects arrived. They succeeded in proselytising some of the more impressionable islanders, persuading them to discard traditional ancestor worship and replace it with their own aggressive brand of Christianity. Schisms developed, sometimes dividing families. One breakaway group moved to the southern end of the atoll and built a village restricted to the newly converted.

A few short years after Independence, most of the expatriate population of New Guinea was either selling up and moving out, or adapting to the new regime. Carson, now a citizen of Papua New Guinea, stayed on and adapted as best he could, but labour was unreliable; production of copra and trocas shell continued a downward spiral and his bank started to deliver threats of foreclosure.

Family group, Nuguria

Nuguria is no longer a working plantation. 'King' Carson is dead and the islanders are now left largely to their own devices with only sporadic official visits from the Papua New Guinea government. The airstrip, hacked out of the jungle by teams of villagers and plantation labourers is overgrown and no longer useable. A cargo ship which brought regular supplies and medical assistance to the atolls is broken down and unseaworthy and Nuguria can now only be reached by a hazardous dash across the miles of open water which separate it from New Ireland in small workboats or outboard-powered sampans which occasionally risk the crossing, or by PNG Defence Force patrol boats.

The atoll is notionally administered as part of the Bougainville Province, but Bougainville, wracked by internal divisions carried over from the civil war which led to the destruction of the huge open-pit mine at Panguna, cannot govern itself, let alone concern itself with distant Nuguria, which it has effectively abandoned.

In early 2002 Carson was voyaging from Nuguria to Nissan Island en route to Buka at the Northern end of Bougainville in the plantation workboat, when he collapsed with what was later diagnosed as a severe cranial occlusion. His crew continued on to Buka where the former hospital, now reduced to an aid post with limited medical equipment, still existed. After a long delay, he was evacuated by air as an emergency patient to the Catholic Mission Hospital at Vunapope on New Britain, where he was treated for the stroke which had left him partially blind and unable to speak distinctly. Months went by and his condition did not improve. He and his wife Tetau flew to Australia, the nearest source of skilled remedial therapy for a stroke victim, but the delay in obtaining specialist treatment had by then resulted in permanent damage.

Although still active, he spoke with difficulty, he could not write or type, and his vision was poor. As a Papua New Guinean citizen, he was granted a three-month visa by an unsympathetic Australian High Commission in Port Moresby, which endorsed the passport visa of this former Australian citizen and member of The Royal Australian Naval Reserve "Not to be renewed or extended." Medical treatment in Australia was cut short when his visa expired, and he returned to New Guinea and to Nuguria where he died in May 2004.

He is buried alongside his mother on Tekani Island near the deserted and abandoned house where he lived and worked for most of his adult life. The trade wind still stirs the palm fronds above the graves and frigate birds circle high overhead, as they did when he and his sister lived there as children on this lonely Pacific atoll on the edge of the world.

 

Source: the late Brian F. Darcey's blog

 

From "Una Voce" newsletter December 2009:

The lower Clyde River south of Nelligen

Click on map to enlarge

 

Port Hacking Tide Times
Delay at Batemans Bay Bridge 20 minutes
Delay at Nelligen Bridge 45 minutes
see Time Differences for Secondary Locations

 

 

A Speck in the ocean

 

Few have heard of the incredible voyage of this intrepid German, who spent seven years and four months paddling a collapsible kayak from his native town of Altona in Hamburg all the way to Thursday Island in the Torres Strait.

Oskar Speck was born in 1907, one of five siblings. Just after graduation, he started working as an electrical contractor in a factory that closed in 1932 during the Great Depression. With no prospect of work, the keen canoeist and outdoor enthusiast saw this as an opportunity to take his collapsible kayak Sunnschien (sunshine) and venture to Cyprus to try his luck in the copper mines.

Sunnschien was a double kayak produced by the German manufacturer Pionier Faltboots (which would become his biggest sponsor) which Speck modified for single use, leaving room for storage of equipment, clothing and provisions. The flexible wooden frame allowed it to be folded into a small bundle for carriage and storage.

With a small sum of money collected by the sale of his belongings and contributions from his family, Speck set off from Hamburg on 13 May 1932, when Hitler was almost unknown. Armed with a kayak, two paddles, a camera, film, clothing, a pistol, documents, sailing charts and a prismatic compass, he paddled down the Danube through central Europe towards the Mediterranean.

During his voyage he kept in touch with family and friends by letters. Through them he learnt about the changes of the political panorama in both Germany and the rest of Europe. He kept the letters with the hope of one day writing a book about his voyage.

Once in Cyprus, he quickly realised that this nautical adventure was more enticing than working in the mines, so he decided to continue to Syria and then to challenge himself by paddling down almost the whole length of the Euphrates. ‘I wanted much more to make a kayak voyage that would go down in history’ (The Australian Post, 1956).

While waiting for a replacement kayak after his broke in the Persian Gulf, he contracted malaria, a disease that would accompany him for the rest of his voyage. Pionier replaced Oskar’s kayak four times in total, and in return, used Oskar’s adventures and photographs to promote their products.

He then continued to India and paddled his way along the coast. It was 1935 and Oskar was already a well-known figure in Germany, as many magazines and newspapers were reporting on his voyage. Capitalising on this and his good English he gave talks and presentations to mostly English expats who were more than happy to donate to the cause and recommend him to other connections living in Asia.

‘In Germany, I was a recognised kayakist before 1932. As my voyage progressed and reports of it went home from Cyprus, Greece, from India, I became acknowledged as the most experienced sea-going kayak expert in the world.’

During 1936 Speck paddled his way along the Bay of Bengal, Malacca Strait and the Dutch East Indies. While in Singapore, he collected another kayak and paddled on to Indonesia. During this time, he was pressing friends and papers to get more coverage of his story but the political turmoil in Europe and the Olympic Games were getting all the attention.

Malaria and the monsoon slowed Oskar’s progress and he only managed to get to the coast of Dutch New Guinea in 1938. Here, the authorities were unsure if the German visitor should be arrested or permitted to continue his trip. After more delays, he finally continued towards Australia.

On his arrival to Daru Island, the officer in charge decided not to arrest Oskar but instead let him complete his dream and reach Australia. But it was his luck that in September 1939 two constables were waiting for him at Thursday Island. After congratulating him for his feat, the officers told him that he was now classified as an ‘enemy’ and had to be arrested and transferred to an internment camp.

After a month in Thursday Island, he was transferred to Brisbane and then Tattura Interment in Victoria. He escaped the camp but was quickly recaptured and sent to South Australia until his release at the end of the war.

Oskar had kept all the letters and newspapers clippings in preparation for the talks and conferences he was to give and the book he was going to write.

‘So ended one of the most fantastic and dangerous voyages ever accomplished by an individual … I have reached my goal, but not one of the numerous doubters would ever find out and my modest success in reaching Australia in my folding boat would be swallowed up in the imminent global catastrophe’.

Sadly for Oskar, by the time he was ready to tell his story and show the world images of his amazing voyage, the world had moved on, so he never got to be the hero he dreamed of being.

— Sabina Escobar, Registrar at the Australian National Maritime Museum (explore more of Oskar Speck’s artefacts and adventures in the museums's collection)

 

P.S. Did you know that Western Australian kayaker Sandy Robson re-enacted Speck’s journey? Follow the journey on her website.

We have new neighbours

 

We've just returned from Wollongong and found a new neighbour on our "doorstep": the luxury yacht ROBERT BRUCE. No amount of googleing could tell us who the owners are, except that the yacht had been for sale in 2012 in the United States - see here and here - and now flies the Australian ensign.

 

 

Should I row out, introduce myself as commodore, secretary, treasurer, and only member of the Nelligen Yacht Club, and ask them to double the membership? On second thoughts, perhaps not as they may not be able to afford the membership fees.

 

WARNING! Graphic boating incident

This is a picture of a man with just seconds left to live -

TRULY FRIGHTENING!

 

 

 

 

 

The Book Thief

 

Forget about Markus Zusak, here's the real book thief: Peter Johnson, skipper of SY EKAZA, who's since caught the outgoing tide and is on his way farther south, but not before I had fitted him out with a t-shirt emblazoned with a nautical motif and 'Nelligen Yacht Club' across the chest.

I also forced a book-bag onto him, containing several yachting books, three books by James Michener, "Lost Horizon" by James Hilton (whom he should know from 'Goodbye Mr Chips", being a retired schoolteacher himself) and "Longitude" by Dava Sobel. I thought of adding some Joseph Conrad titles but, other than "Lord Jim" which everyone knows or at least ought to, his books are an acquired taste and so I left them out.

 

 

It must've whetted his appetite because he wondered what I'd eventually do with all my yachting books. "Give them to Vinnies", I replied which prompted him to ask to be given first choice. Which I did and which resulted in two big armfuls of books going across to SY EKAZA.

 

 

As he did his final sail-by, I watched his Plimsoll line but all those extra books hadn't affected it at all. Perhaps he should've taken some more.

 

 

Anyway, I've probably made a friend for life which, given my age, won't commit him for long. "Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence." Good fellow, that Longfellow!

 

 

Fair winds, my friend, and safe passage!