10
Wiseman’s Life

I knew I wanted to go on looking for my great-great-great grandfather, and most of all to go again to his house at Wiseman’s Ferry. What I’d learned in London about finding the past in the landscape of the present could be applied to that half-remembered place, too.

But daily life enclosed me like a glove when I returned from London and I couldn’t get out of the city for some months. It was frustrating until I realised that something else was happening. It began to dawn on me that the Sydney I was walking in now was a different city from the one I’d left only a few weeks before. It was still the city I’d grown up in, where I had lived for most of my life. But now I was seeing it as Wiseman’s place as well.

I knew a bit about its past. Third Class at North Sydney Demonstration School had been taken to various historical landmarks: Sydney Cove, where the First Fleet dropped anchor in 1788: eleven ships, around seven hundred convicts and a couple of hundred soldiers to guard them.

We’d seen the area called The Rocks, on the western side of Sydney Cove, where the convicts had lived in caves until there were huts for them. It was all souvenir shops now, but still steep, full of strange tilting dogleg alleys that ended in flights of stone steps.

We’d been taken along Pitt Street and George Street, streets of skyscrapers and brisk men in dark suits. Somewhere under the bitumen, we were told, the invisible Tank Stream still ran. That stream was the reason why Captain Phillip had ordered those eleven ships to come to rest in this cove. There was nothing to see, but we ticked the box on our Excursion Sheet: Tank Stream.

We drew pictures of Cadman’s Cottage, the oldest building in Sydney; of the anchor of the Sirius, flagship of the First Fleet, on its plinth beneath the office blocks; took turns in the seat-shaped stone where the governor’s wife had liked to sit in the evening on the headland beside the Botanical Gardens.

It was all a bit like Mum’s stories: too close to home to be interesting, too often told, too remote from anything to do with us.

One day in August 2000 I had a free afternoon. I decided to go back to the Mitchell Library and make a start in the archives for anything else about Wiseman. I went by ferry because it was convenient: by coincidence, it was called the Sirius. It chugged past Goat Island, past Lavender Bay and beneath the sinister shadowed underside of the Harbour Bridge, then turned a corner in the water and there I was, right in the middle of Sydney Cove: the Opera House on the left, The Rocks on the right, and Circular Quay ahead.

Nothing was as it had been in 1788. And yet nothing had changed. The narrow cove of green water chopped and sparkled under the sun. With a shock I saw how much like the Thames it was: the same width across the cove, the same wash and smack of water against the shore. And the gulls! Like the ones I’d heard at Three Cranes Wharf, that sad mewing again.