Tipping Point -MV Baragoola

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

From the 1926 novel “The Sun Also Rises”   by Ernest Hemingway

Another version of "Hemingway's Law of Motion " is  by the  economist Rudiger Dornbusch:

"The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought."

It's a common human failing that we rarely act until a crisis happens.

The initial effects happen gradually.

Drip by drip.

It's not a problem...

Until it is.

One day 'Gradually' will always  become 'suddenly'. 

This is the tipping point.

I will leave it to others to recount the long, troubled history of the MV Baragoola.

The best  account I've found is in an article in the Manly Daily.

Half finished panorama of Sydney Harbour from the Baragoola 20th February 2016 oil on canvas 31 x 153cm Against the staircase of MV Baragoola

About 6 or 7 years ago I was invited to paint on board by one of the members of the Baragoola Preservation Society. He talked about the possibility of holding an exhibition with the proceeds being used to help fund repairs. The ship was in obvious need of  massive amounts of work, but at the time, the volunteers seemed to have enthusiasm and a sense of purpose.

Half finished panorama of Sydney Harbour from the Baragoola 20th February 2016 oil on canvas 31 x 153cm

This is the last painting I started on board the Baragoola, before her change of ownership.

The artist painting a half finished panorama of Sydney Harbour from the Baragoola 20th February 2016 oil on canvas 31 x 153cm

A couple of years later I finally returned after dealing with a serious illness in the family, to find a change of regime. Instead of the previous volunteers there was someone described variously as either the new  "shipkeeper" or "owner".

The ship was in a far more dilapidated condition and the gangplank was frankly dangerous with loose and missing railings. 

I was welcomed at first, then gradually the behaviour of those on board became strange and then alarming. I desperately wanted to remove my paintings and easel, but I would have needed help across the ricketty gangplank- and I knew I wouldn't get any.

The terrible condition of the vessel and gangplank as well as my reservations about the attitude and behaviour of the recent occupants made it impossible for me to ever return to the vessel to retrieve my belongings. I wondered at first if I was over-reacting- until I asked several people if they could escort me back on the vessel, and they all refused, saying they wouldn't be game to set foot on board.

I kept hoping that people with expertise and unlimited funding would one day take control, but knew that this wasn't going to happen.

The half-finished canvas above, as well as my easels, paint and many other canvases went down with the ship. 

The mooring lines still hold parts of it in place, while the weight of water, tide and debris pulls the rest away. 

As I paint the wreck from the Coal Loader and the Cape Don, I watch  my old canvases lap against the boom with the other flotsam.

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

The last line from the 1925 novel "The Great Gatsby" F. Scott Fitzgerald

Vale Baragoola

Part of Australia's maritime history has been lost forever when the MV Baragoola, the last Sydney built Manly ferry, finally sank at her mooring at the Coal Loader Wharf, Waverton.

Sadly the ferry was only a couple of weeks short of her centenary.

She was built in Balmain and launched at Morts Dock on 14 February, 1922 for the Circular Quay to Manly service. Originally a steamer, she was converted to diesel-electric in 1961 and was retired in 1983.

For nearly 20 years she was at various moorings around Pyrmont and Blackwattle Bay.

This is a canvas I painted in 1991 from the top floor of the tablet House of the CSR Refinery (now Jackson's Landing). The MV Baragoola is on the left hand side next to Wharf 22-23, which was demolished shortly after I finished this painting.

 

 

 

 

P243A 'Baragoola and the Water Police painted from the Tablet House of the CSR' 1991 oil on canvas 75 x 100cm

Since 2003, she has been laid up at Balls Head Bay on the north side of Sydney Harbour as attempts to restore the vessel continued.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

S122 'Cape Don + Baragoola' 2019 oil on canvas 91 x 183cm

This is a large panorama I painted from the Coal Loader in 2019 showing the Cape Don in the foreground.

What a contrast with the wreckage I painted recently!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The artist painting the wreck of MV Baragoola 

(Photo taken by Catherine Atherton)

Over the last few decades of her life, many people volunteered to attempt to save Baragoola.

Painting wreck of MV Baragoola from the Coal Loader 31 x 61cm

 

Painting wreck of MV Baragoola from the Coal Loader 31 x 61cm and 45 x 92cm

For a while restoration attempts seemed to make some headway, but a few years ago the ownership changed and the ship deteriorated noticeably.

Unfortunately it became increasingly obvious that her fate was inevitable.

Painting wreck of MV Baragoola from the Coal Loader 31 x 61cm

 

 

Painting wreck of MV Baragoola from the Coal Loader 45 x 92cm

 

 

Half Nuts

 I'm sure this title will resonate with most people's feelings at the moment!

"Half nuts" certainly isn't too far from my current state of mind, so I thought this would be an appropriate painting to resume my Covid lockdown gallery on the deck.

E132B Half nuts 2017 oil on canvas 20 x 25cm

 

 

 

 

However the title should really be "Half-inch nuts"!

This small canvas of rusty old oil cans, was from a series of still life studies painted in the Large Erecting Shop of the Eveleigh Railway Workshops. 

The inscriptions in the background of half, three quarter, five eighths and seven eighth inch nuts, were on a tool box in front of a work cabinet. Needless to say, none of the sections contained any nuts at all, so it was a brave but doomed attempt to impose some sort of order into an assortment of motley widgets. People had obviously been putting tools back into whatever came to hand for quite some time.

During lockdown, I've been making a half-hearted attempt to organize my own shed and sort the useful items from the potentially useful, and the downright rubbish that mysteriously accumulates. I hopefully attach labels as I go, then cross them out if I have too many widgets or not enough. If there's anything that doesn't fit in an obvious category, but isn't quite rusty or broken enough to toss out, I put it in a large wooden box labelled "half nuts" in honour of my time at Eveleigh.

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Castle on a hill

Today's painting on the deck gallery was a panorama of Ways Terrace painted in 1994, when Pyrmont was a work in progress.
Ways Terrace is located at 12-20 Point Street, and is now known more prosaically as the Point Street flats.

P98 Ways Terrace 1994 oil on board 41 x 122cm

Available for sale

 

 

 

 

For nearly two decades, Ways Terrace was the sole occupant of the Point Street hilltop.

A castle on a hill, with a commanding position, precariously positioned on a rocky outcrop towering over the surrounding land.

 

 

P36 'Ways terrace from Lower Jones Bay Road'

1993 ink on paper 31 x 41cm 

Available for sale

However it is neither the rumoured birthplace of King Arthur, a crusader castle nor a Walt Disney fairytale castle, but Housing Commission flats. Many battles have been fought there, but they have involved residents and squatters against developers, residents against various government and semi-government departments, and old residents against new residents. These battles more often featured guerrilla tactics and ferocious political manoeuvering so they have remained uncelebrated in myth and legend.

The "moat" was the railway cutting. Then a second line of defence was excavated when CRI demolished the pretty flower garden planted by Karen and other residents, leaving a gaping wound of bare sandstone. After the 1987 stock market crash, CRI went bankrupt but their legacy of a hole in the ground remained for 15 years.
Two skeletons of dead trees atop a mound stood like an accusing two fingered salute pointing skyward in defiance.
The hole filled with water, becoming a moat to the Ways Terrace “castle” & attracted ducks & pelicans.

P86 Night,Ways Terrace   1994 

oil on canvas  91 x 61 cm

Available for sale 

Ways Terrace was designed by notable architect Professor Leslie Wilkinson in association with architect Joseph Fowell and submitted for the Sydney City Council's Housing Project Competition in 1923, which it won. 

The land had become available after the completion of the construction of the Jones Bay finger wharves and their associated waterfront roadway, Jones Bay Road. The housing formerly on the land in the vicinity had been resumed by the government for wharf purposes and demolished except for a few individual buildings. Ways Terrace marked when the original working class housing was displaced by industrial and commercial development, followed by a concerted government endeavour to resettle residents in better quality accommodation.
It dramatically contrasts how the government attitude to low cost housing in Sydney has changed from the early twentieth century to a century later.

P98 Ways Terrace 1994 oil on board 41 x 122cm

Available for sale

Ways Terrace is a four storey rendered brick apartment block, located prominently on the skyline, in a series of five cubic blocks which step down the hillside. 

Leslie Wilkinson was a leading exponent of inter-war Mediterranean design, & this building is a key element of the Pyrmont cityscape. 

I always tried to pin down what it reminded me of. Finally when I visited Florence, I realized how similar in style it was to the structures built on the bridge over the Arno.

The Florentine character of Ways Terrace is established by the protruding balconies in the form of loggias & the trellised uppermost level of balconies. Plain rendered surfaces cast strong shadows. Windows are rectangular and multiple paned. Round arched openings define the entrance doors & there is a dramatic arched bridge over a laneway to the rear (the Ways Terrace street). The building has shallow pitched, terracotta tiled gable roofs with wide eaves. 

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Heavy Lifting

DH143 Preparing for a boat lift
2007 oil on canvas 92 x 122cm
Available for sale

 

 

 

 

 

Today's painting on my easel on the deck gallery was a large canvas painted during my stint as "Artist in Residence" at the East Darling Harbour Wharves. Very few container ships were docked at the East Darling Harbour Wharves - in its last 5 years of operations most went to Botany, which handled container or "boxes" only. 

The East Darling Harbour Wharves specialized in break bulk cargo - items that can’t be transported by container, sometimes resulting in a diverse & rather incongruous payload. Sand, salt, gypsum was bagged or piled in gleaming unstable mounds on the wharf. Rolls of steel, pipes & timber lengths for construction were stacked in piles inside the sheds. Cars, vans, trucks, forklifts, excavators  & agricultural machinery were driven down the ramps of the Ro-ros at breakneck speed as though the wharfies were auditioning for yet another remake of ‘the Italian Job’ or the ‘Fast & the Furious”, & then parked in neat rows until they were lifted or driven onto B-doubles. 

A selection of excavators, mining or agricultural machinery and the ubiquitous rolls of steel coils would lie for weeks inside the sheds.  Luxurious 'hot-water' boats, most of which were larger than my house and definitely cost more, were nonchalantly lifted off the ships & dangled from the cranes like giant earrings. Some of these boats were so enormous that they looked almost capable of carrying the ship that brought them. There were even more oddball items such as helicopters, train carriages, yachts & caravans. And one unforgettable afternoon  a couple of horses broke free while being unloaded from their box and had to be caught and restabled, turning the wharf into a wild west show.

DH143 Preparing for a boat lift
2007 oil on canvas 92 x 122cm
Available for sale

 

 

 

 

This canvas was painted from the centre of the area between the Patrick offices in Shed 5, looking north towards Shed 4, with the western end of Balmain in the background. The huge white shed of White Bay can be seen in the background in the gap between the crane & the boat that has just been unloaded.

The giant vermilion crane, “L3” is bathed in clear morning light, poised with its pink spreader aloft in mid air. It had just placed the boats on wooden structures known as “Nafis” so they could be hooked up to one of the 2 rather elderly forklifts to be positioned on the wharf until they were transferred onto a B-double truck & delivered to a marina. I asked whether the term ‘Nafi’ was an abbreviation or a brand name, or anything to do with the naval term 'Naafi" but nobody on the wharf seemed to know the origin of the word. Like many other items on the wharf, the Nafis were brightly painted, mostly in primary colours, but here there is an orange one on the left hand side & a green one on the left.  There were random clusters of them stacked neatly one on top of the other all over the wharf. 

The unnaturalistic colours of the machinery added to the pervasive feeling of living inside a Jeffrey Smart painting. The maintenance workers, who serviced the cranes & forklifts, always wore bright orange overalls, of exactly the same hue as the witches hats. I know that none of it was arranged deliberately to help me compose my painting, but there was a pleasing compositional triangle of the orange –clothed workman striding purposefully away from the orange sled, with the orange witches hat in the foreground. The spreader directly above his head also has a matching orange “A” shaped crane attachment, although to strike a discordant note, its framework is a teeth-jarring shade of pink. The reds, pinks & oranges of the machinery stand out strongly against the large expanse of clear pale blue sky & matching strip of sea are interrupted by the sap green of the trees of Balmain in the background. Oddly, the completed painting has the poise and compositional balance of Jeffrey Smart and Edward Hopper, although painted under infinitely more trying circumstances than a neat white studio. Although large & complex, this was a pure plein air painting- totally painted outdoors, no photography, no tricks. Just the culmination of a lifetime of observation.

It was an eye-opening experience to be able to see first-hand, how much work & how many people have to be involved in providing goods that we take for granted.

This was painted in September 2007, in the last few weeks of East Darling Harbour Wharves activity as an operational wharf. The following week, all three shore cranes were repainted in the yellow & white colours of AT & T livery, prior to being moved onto a barge & towed to their new homes in Webb Dock, Melbourne & Port Kembla.

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Triumph of the machines

Norfolk Guardian

Today's painting on my deck gallery is a diptych of an unusual visitor to the East Darling Harbour Wharves.

I spent most of the early 2000s as ‘Artist in Residence’ on the East Darling Harbour Wharves before its redevelopment into Barangaroo. 

One day in 2005 I arrived very early on a calm clear morning & a couple of wharfies grabbed me as I signed in.They were very excited & yelled “Quick, get your easel, you must paint the Norfolk Guardian- you don’t see ships like this every day!” 

A smallish vessel was docking at Wharf 5. It had an oddly shaped crane in its centre, which I later found out was known as a ‘derrick’ crane as it looked similar to the old fashioned oil rigs. A Derrick ship’s crane is a relic of the past, harking back to the days before containerization forced uniformity of ship design & changed their lines from sleek to squat & boxy.
The luminous peach tones of the horizon meeting the skyline of Goat Island & the northern suburbs in the background harmonized with the butter yellow ship's crane & sky blue hull, making an odd contrast with the heavy industrial subject matter. 

I watched the complex interplay of the ship's crane with the shore crane with a mixture of fascination & trepidation as rows of pipes were unloaded with consummate skill.
I didn't know how long I'd have to paint it before it left, so I added an extra canvas to the original one, making the total image a square.

DH34A-B'The Norfolk Guardian Diptych' 2005

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

each panel oil on canvas 91 x 46 cm
Available for sale
The M.V. Norfolk Guardian (IMO: 8600856) is a General Cargo that was built in 1987, sailing under the flag of Tonga, & freighting break bulk cargo to Norfolk Island, New Zealand & the South Pacific. Ports of call include Norfolk Island, Auckland, Lyttleton & Marsden Point, Tasmania. Transhipments can be arranged to various destinations in the South Pacific, including Samoa, Fiji, etc.
Cargo handled by the Norfolk Guardian includes: general cargo, hazardous goods, freezer/cooler, hardwood poles, sawn timber, processed timber products.
They also ship Personal Effects from Norfolk Island & New Zealand to Yamba, Australia.

"Break bulk" is a term used for products which can't be transported in containers. It includes a wide mix of articles- from salt, gypsum, cement to timber, steel coils and heavy machinery as well as cars, trucks and boats.

About 50 years ago, the containerization of shipping modified the wharves dramatically & transformed port cities beyond recognition.

The humble shipping container isn't just a metal box - it created the world as we know it today.

Once goods were loaded and transported around the world as "break bulk" cargo. Container standardization revolutionized global trade, making it easier, quicker and cheaper. However,with the advent of the container, some of the mystery & magic of the shipping industry was lost forever.

John Crowley, the Port Operations Manager, used to describe the East Darling Harbour Wharves (aka Port Jackson) as a ‘boutique’ wharf. 

Port Botany is built on a superhuman scale and only deals with containers, so is huge, homogeneous and increasingly run by robots. Port Jackson, on the other hand, had a mix of break-bulk & containers & therefore was more dependent on the personal skills and judgement of the individual wharf workers. 

Islander ships are dwarfed by the container ships & totally unsuitable for the huge computerized straddle cranes of Port Botany. 

Now that the East Darling Harbour Wharves are closed, most "break bulk" is unloaded at Port Kembla, although Blackwattle Bay and to an increasingly lesser extent Glebe Island and White Bay still handle salt, cement and gypsum. 

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