Painting the Svitzer tug Wonga in Sydney Harbour

The 'Wonga' was built in 1983 and was one of the Svitzer 'pusher' tugs.

Their names started with 'W' - Wilga, Wonga, Woona, Walan, Watagan. I've no idea why they picked that particular letter to christen their tugs. As a 'wonga' is a type of pigeon, not a marine bird, I'm not sure why this name was chosen for a marine vessel.

To me, the trio of names 'Wilga', 'Wonga', 'Woona', had a sort of alliterative poetry, and whenever I painted one of the three, I would be asked if I also had paintings of the other two, to make up the set.

DH236 'The tug 'Wonga' with 'Victorian Reliance''
2007 oil on board 20 x 25cm
SOLD
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This shows the 'Wonga' in action with a cargo ship.

They were once a very common sight in Sydney Harbour, when Sydney Harbour was still a fully working port. As 'Artist in Residence' on the East Darling Harbour Wharves during the first decade of this century, I would see at least one of these tugs everyday. If they weren't accompanying one of the container ships or Ro-ros (roll-on roll-off car vessels) to the East Darling Harbour Wharves, Glebe Island or White Bay, they would be escorting a cruise ship to the Cruise ship terminal at Darling Harbour Wharf 8, or an oil tanker to Gore bay.

DH241 'The 'Wonga' 2011
oil on board 28 x 35cm
Available

This painting shows the 'Wonga' passing Goat Island. It was on its way to a new task, from its then home in East Balmain next to the ferries.

The number of tugs in Sydney Harbour declined with the closure of East Darling Harbour Wharves and its replacement with the controversial Barangaroo development project.

DH194 The 'Wonga' 2008
oil on canvas 20 x 25cm
SOLD
Enquiries about other paintings of tugs

This earlier painting shows the 'Wonga' passing Balmain.

Now, the 'Wonga' is one of the 2 tugs (the other being the 'Walan') based at Port Pirie which is located 223 kilometres north of Adelaide at the top of Upper Spencer Gulf,

Port Pirie, a small town of 16,000, is still home to the type of heavy industry now removed from Sydney Harbour. The Nyrstar concentrate smelter in Port Pirie is one of the largest smelters in the world.

Related Posts

Painting the tugboats of Sydney Harbour

Marine Art exhibition at Australian Maritime Museum

In the pink -the former Pyrmont Arms Hotel, Harris Street Pyrmont

The former pub 'The Pyrmont Arms' was at 42-44 Harris Street, Pyrmont on the corner of Harris and Bowman Streets.
Built in the 1870s,it closed in the early 1990s when the CSR refinery and distillery were progressively shut down and demolished to make way for the Jackson's landing development. Since then, it has been renovated as retail outlets, restaurants and home units.

P248 The 'Pyrmont Arms' from the CSR 1

1990 oil on canvas 31 x 31cm

Available

I first painted the Pyrmont Arms Hotel as a bird's eye view from the roof of the CSR refinery.I had been the 'Artist in Residence' at the CSR Refinery from the late 1980s to the start of its demolition in the mid 1990s. I had previously been painting at the top of the Panhouse, but one day in a fit of bravery I decided to paint from the top of the Boilerhouse next to the chimneys.
The CSR boilerhouse is now the site of the 'Elizabeth' apartment block of the Jackson's Landing LendLease development.
The Pyrmont Arms Hotel was then still an operating pub and was painted a grubby faded pale pinkish beige. On the back of the pub's western side facing the Scott Street squats, there was a huge ad for 'Have a cold gold KB', unfortunately not visible from my rooftop studio. Across the road was the brick facade of the CSR chem labs.
It didn't stand out from the rest of the rather dingy terraces at the 'Land's End' of Harris street, but what caught my eye was the contrast between the terraces and the overgrown area around the squats that was rapidly turning into a wilderness. I painted a small square canvas focussing on just the Pyrmont Arms, and resolved one day to paint a panorama of the northern end of Harris Street from this vantage point.

P249 'Pyrmont panorama- from the CSR '

1991 oil on canvas 46 x 92cm

Available

A few months later, I climbed the many levels of revolting, sugar syrup encrusted stairs to the top of the CSR boilerhouse again, to paint this panorama, and was startled to find that the formerly almost unnoticeable pub had succumbed to a brash attempt at 'renovation'.
Weirdly, it shared the same revolting shade of pink with another dying pub at the other end of Pyrmont, the 'New York Hotel' in Edward Street, opposite the Pyrmont Power Station.
This fluoro paint job was such a product of its time that it defined the late 1980s to 1990s, a period without style or taste. I remember leggings and jumpers in that same fabulously horrid "glow in the dark" colour, possibly an over-reaction against the ochres and browns of the 1970s. In architecture, it was known not very fondly as "Paddington Pink" or "Paddo pink" for short, although the examples in Paddington itself were much more muted.

P248B 'The 'Pyrmont Arms' from the CSR 2'

1991 oil on canvas 31 x 31cm

Available

It made the Pyrmont Arms stick out like a sore thumb from the dingy red brick warehouses and bond stores, and not in a good way.
I don't know if it was still an operating pub then or whether the new paint job was a desperate last ditch attempt to attract customers or preparation for its sale and possible redevelopment.
For the truth was that the pubs of Pyrmont were hanging by a thread. Their customers were gone with the destruction or relocation of the local industries that had employed them, and the industries of Pyrmont's future were yet to replace them.
The CSR Refinery and Distillery, which had replaced the sandstone quarrymen of northern Pyrmont a century before, was almost deserted and would be demolished and replaced with Jackson's Landing by the middle of the decade. But there was a strange interregnum before the new apartments were built and filled with inhabitants, and the northern end of Harris Street was a ghost town.
The iconic Terminus Hotel, only 2 blocks further up Harris Street, had already ceased trading a decade before, and stood abandoned, neglected and a constant source of speculation for the next 30 years, before its very recent renovation. How the 'Royal Pacific', later to be rechristened the 'Pyrmont Point'/ 'Point Hotel', ever kept on trading is a much bigger mystery that any of the urban myths swirling around the 30 year vacancy of the Terminus.
What is it with the lurid colour schemes inflicted on moribund pubs?
Far from Pyrmont, another doomed hotel, the 'Jolly Frog' also got the pink treatment not long before it suffered one of those mysterious fires that afflict abandoned buildings.
They must have used the same colourblind painter and decorator. And he must have got the paint at a huge discount, or it might have 'fallen off the back of a truck'.
Either way, it didn't work. All closed as pubs not long after.

P248C '42 Harris st -ex Pyrmont Arms'

2012 oil on canvas 31 x 31cm

Available

The 'New York Hotel' has been painted a tasteful off-white, and is now a medical centre, of all things!
'The Pyrmont Arms' has now been painted a dull blue on the ground floor and a muted yellow for the upper floors. It is no longer a hotel, but has been reasonably sympathetically renovated and is now a combination of apartments above and a bottle-o below.

And the Jolly Frog, 6 years after its devastating fire, is still awaiting redevelopment.

Related Posts

Paintings of Pink Pubs

The Boiling Frog

My page of Pyrmont Paintings

A Tale of 2 Pyrmont Hotels - The Terminus and the Point

To the Point

Pretty Vacant

Terminus Redux

A last look around the Harbour Control Tower

Today's painting on the deck gallery is a view of the much maligned and now demolished Harbour Control Tower.

BAR54 'Tower of Power' 2010
oil on canvas 61 x 61cm

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It had many sarcastic nicknames : the "Pill" (controlling the berths in the Harbour, the "concrete mushroom", and even "the hypodermic in God's bum"!

But I think that the viewer of my canvas can find the same stern monumental dignity  that attracted me to it as a subject.

BAR54 'Tower of Power' 2010
oil on canvas 61 x 61cm

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The Sydney Harbour Control Tower, which lingered for a while at the northern end of Barangaroo, was demolished over a period of eight months starting in March 2016.
Consisting of an 87m high concrete column topped by an observation room with utterly breath-taking views, it gave the Harbour Master and Port Operations officers an ideal position from which to oversee shipping movements around Sydney Harbour.
The tower was designed in 1972 after two ships collided in the shipping channel off the knuckle of the wharf at Millers Point.
It stood sentinel over Sydney Harbour from 1974-2011 giving continual supervision of shipping movements.
Sydney Ports relocated its harbour control operations to Port Botany in April 2011, leaving the tower to gather dust for 5 years.

DH159 The empty wharf
2007 oil on canvas 61 x 91cm

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I am naturally biased - I had the run of the Harbour Control Tower as a studio for nearly a decade.
As well as painting spectacular views of Sydney from the top floor and the amenities level, I used it as a sort of exclamation point in many landscapes of the wharf and Millers point. This canvas of the empty wharf has the strange melancholy of a de Chirico and the light poles marching steadily toward the Tower echo rows of classical columns.
As a pictorial device, the Tower would give an otherwise mundane streetscape an extra frisson. The feeling of someone potentially observing the scene from above from those green angled windows gave an almost sinister dimension.

MP5 Harbour Tower & Dalgety Terrace 2

2014 acrylic on canvas 18 x 13cm

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The decision to remove the tower was controversial.
The developers of Barangaroo had considered it an eyesore as the surrounding development transformed the former port into a millionaire’s playground.
Former Prime Minister Paul Keating, self-appointed Baron Haussman of Sydney, and never one to shy away from an argument, stated with his customary belligerence that the tower did not have a "shred of heritage about it" and that calls to keep it were "rancid reactionism".
But he would, wouldn't he.

With his nearly pathological hatred of industrial heritage, that sits oddly with his working class background, he was grimly determined to get rid of it and pitched relentlessly into anyone with a good word to say about the former wharf.

This article written in November 2014 in the Sydney Morning Herald has a photo of me 'en plein air', painting the Harbour Tower Paul Keating so despised.

The Office of Environment and Heritage had previously described the tower as being of state significance “for its pre-eminent role in the history and maritime operation of the Port of Sydney.The Tower demonstrates 35 years of 24/7 operation in the Port of Sydney from 1974-2009 as the Port Operations and Communications Centre providing supervisory control over the many thousands of shipping movements in Sydney Harbour every year,” the Office said in its previous listing of the tower as a heritage site.
After the Heritage Minister decided not to list the tower on the State Heritage Register, the NSW Government approved a development application from the Barangaroo Delivery Authority to remove the former Harbour Control Tower . In their words : 'in order to achieve a naturalistic form and character for the reserve that is consistent with the site’s concept plan'.
I can't think of anything less naturalistic than Barangaroo. For some reason it brings to mind a poem called aptly "Poetry" by Marianne Moore about an imaginary garden that had real toads in it.
But as in the poem, the developers and their cheerleaders have little time for anything that doesn't fit their very narrow definition of what is "useful". Certainly nothing as useless as heritage.

'same thing may be said for all of us—that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand.'

Excerpt from
"Poetry" by Marianne Moore

The National Trust  rejected a proposal by the Barangaroo Delivery Authority to demolish the tower while the City of Sydney council wanted it retained as an artwork or public lookout.

Some people suggested alternate uses for the empty tower: bungee jumping, abseiling, a viewing tower over Sydney Harbour, or a “pop-out” café.
However the Barangaroo Reserve project director Peter Funder said “We looked at a number of re-use options and it just wasn’t viable. It completes the vision we’re trying to deliver here of recreating the headland of Barangaroo.”
As for arguments about usefulness, you could also question what practical use does the Barangaroo Headland Park serve. It has allegedly been returned to the 1836 footprint, yet it is far from natural bushland, and the public certainly isn't permitted to hunt or fish there. So it is a construct - just as artificial as the concrete wharf it replaced.

This canvas painted in 2015 from the Stamford on Kent shows rows of lollipop like palm trees perched tier upon tier, as though on a giant wedding cake. The stairway to the top cuts through the cake like a knife cutting a slice out of the cake. Symmetrical and hierarchical, and as unlike real bushland as the horses on a carousel are from the living animals.

MP45 Barangaroo Headland Park from the
Stamford on Kent 2015 oil on canvas 122 x 153cm
COLLECTION: MITCHELL LIBRARY, STATE LIBRARY OF NSW
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Its main function seems to be as a distraction from the scale of the southern end.
A spoonful of sugar to make the development go down.
A sort of 'Trojan park' under which is smuggled the true purpose of Barangaroo; to separate punters from their money.
It's a pity that almost all evidence of Sydney as an industrial port has been wiped away. I certainly found poetry in it.
I can't get used to the lack of Tower in the streetscapes of Millers Point - they look strangely empty now.

Related Posts

Article in the Sydney Morning Herald about my Barangaroo painting on display in the new galleries of the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW

Barangaroo paintings in Frances Keevil Gallery

Paintings from the top of the Harbour Control Tower in Frances Keevil Gallery