SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR Transport good talking point

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32604, 12 May 1971, Page 7

SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR Transport good talking point

It may sound surprising to the occasional harbour ferry passenger, but there are actually people who get tired of travelling on them.

A friend of ours went to live in Neutral Bay, after several years in London and New York where be travelled underground. His first day on the Neutral Bay ferry he took a deep breath and decided this was the life.

A year later he moved up ' to one of the northern l beaches about 20 miles out ' of town and faced over an ' hour's bus ride in, not to mention another hour’s bus ' ride out again. He explained that with « 1 baby on the way they needed more room and they ' couldn’t afford it in one of ' the mote scenic areas closer ' to town. But surely, we ask- ’ ed. wouldn’t he miss his ferry rides? He said that actually the ferry had become a bit of a 1 drag. There was always the , necessity to catch the thing . as it was a long wait to the ' next. Perhaps it was all just , something to do with him because now he commutes ) by car from home to office. 1 I know from experience that ; up there it can be a very ' long wait from one bus to the next.

But thousands of people do use the ferries every day and go on enjoying it, and therev almost a village at Circular Quay where they can do a day's shopping and transact a good bit of their out-of-office business, like getting their hair cut and buying a sandwich for lunch, or the newspapers or a bottle of aspirin. THEATRE There’s even at various times, lunch-time theatre in one of the big office blocks, the theatre doubling as a conference hall with well padded seats and a kind of church lectern arrangement in front ot each handy for papers but equally useful for the drinks and sandwiches you can buy to eat while the. entertainment's going on. Sydney's transport, water, road or rail, its lack of, cost of, facilities for—you name it and whatever the problem Sydney will probably have uneasily and often unknowingly acquired it in this twentieth century—is always a good conversational topic. The English have their weather. Sydney has its transport. We still haven't seen the end of the dispute over the introduction of the new blue double-decker buses

scheduled to run on one-man, limited stop, express operation from some of the North Shore suburbs.

ONE STRIKE Already there’s been one united strike with a certain imount of public sympathy ping to the striking drivers. Difficulties had dogged the Production of the new blue tingle-deckers earlier and the onion had given notice that they were against one-man operation of the two-deckers, mainly because it felt it was unsafe to expect one man to collect fares, be responsible for the orderly conduct of his passengers, keep an eye on those on the top deck by periscope, and drive his bus all at the same time. Some people pointed out that Scandinavian women (imagine that!) did all that md had good safety records too. But a good many others felt that the transport luthorities had steered a sollision course to a showtown after having been liven fair warning of the Mismen’s attitude. At the moment we have a Kunewhat uneasy peace but t’s doubtful if we’ve heard he last of it yet. From time to time there's i suggestion that Sydney ihould use its water for

transport a lot more than it does. The success of the Rose Bay-Circular Quay ferry now just over a year old seems to support the idea. The Rose Bay ferry opened up with champagne, in paper cups, pretty girls to kiss the early-morning commuters who were the firstday pioneers, and the personal attendance of the then Federal Treasurer (Mr Bury) who lives in the area and represents it in Federal Parliament.

Soon after the ferry got the name of the “kiss and ride" not because of the inaugural kissing girls but because a good many wives drive their husbands to the ferry in the mornings. QUICKER In contrast to our friend who got bored with the water another who moved to Rose Bay was delighted when she discovered the ferry as her total travelling time is less than half what it was when she travelled down by bus through the bottlenecks of Double Bay, Kings Cross and the city. I think my own favourite ferry service is the little one, small craft, short run, across to Klrribllli hugging the Bridge al! the way, but the most famous of them is, of course, the Manly service. Its tough, bigger craft plough backwards and forwards in all weathers and even on a fair day they roll crossing the open stretch of water, the Harbour gateway, between the Heads before coming into Manly Cove to tie up at the wharf. One of the early ferries on the Manly run was sailed out from the yards in Scotland

and indeed when a Manly ferry and a battleship collided in the Harbour a couple of years ago it was the battleship that came off worst.

Sydney people who go to Melbourne always want to ride on a tram. Melbourne people coming to Sydney for the first time usually want to ride on a double-decker

bus, as they don’t have those in the southern city, and on a Manly ferry. So, for some of my visitors, I devised a stock, it plebeian, day out that does both. We cross on the ferry —the hydrofoil’s quicker but it’s not really the same —take a quick look in the shop windows along the Corso and buy a calorific lunch, fish and chips 01 spring rolls. FAMOUS BEACH At the other end of the Corso, the Pacific Ocean end, you come out on to Manly’s other beach, the famous one, the one you see on the calendars and the desk diaries and the Austra-

lian Scenes yearbooks, all those assorted pieces of pictorial stationery that get posted off in large numbers overseas every Christmas. And there at the painted picnic tables under the famous Norfolk Island pines whose great curve fringes the pale gold sand we eat our lunch. At least we did. We shall no more for Manly’s famous pines are gone. Time and disease, salt water and sea wind have got at them and done what the Army couldn’t do. During the war the Army wanted to chop the pines down to allow for firing in case of Japanese invasion from the sea. Four, in fact, were axed. But now ail of them, some well over a century old and most around 90 feet tall, are just a row of stumps. No-one really seems to know why Manly’s pines were dying. Bondi has problems with its pines, too, and occasional bulletins are issued about the health of the ones remaining there. Even on Norfolk Island itself, according to one expert, they’ve got trouble. So I suppose I shall have to take my visitors to eat their fish and chips under the coconut palms it’s proposed to put up along the Manly beachfront as replacements for the pines. And perhaps if I need to buy a mousetrap or a rat trap—crossing fingers and touching wood as I write—l shall

have a piece of the old pines for myself for a firm of Mascot mouse and rat trap makers have bought some of the timber. SOUVENIRS In fact, it crosses my mind, and perhaps it has already crossed the minds of the Mascot trap makers, that here at last could be the Australian souvenir that everyone’s been looking for, something distinctive, something different from the kangaroo fur koalas and the mulga wood ashtrays complete with kangaroo sitting astride the continent. Mousetraps, not to mention rat traps, are universal and international. Who was it said that if a man could make a better moustrap the world would beat a path to his door? The Mascot (mascot?) Manly pine mousetrap might not be better but it would be different.

Next Christmas, failing the usual Post Office strike, could see them being parcelled up by the thousand for despatch to Belgrade and Milan and Pontefract and Prague. One pictures mousetraps sitting up there in the souvenir shops besides those little tins of sterile earth which exhort you to “dig your own opal.” And one of these days I’m going to try doing just that with the little gilt shovel they give you because at the price those little tins cost I’m sceptical.

So we’ve eaten our lunch and had a swim, and a stroll to Fairy Bower round by the rocks and they could do with some rat traps there for once I watched a whole pack of them scuttling in and out, I

brutes well fed on litter and food scraps. And we stroll back along the Corso and catch a bus over Spit Bridge and Middle Harbour, changing perhaps to another bus, a double decker for the last stage home, or. if there’s time, going all the way over to St Leonard’s station and catching a double-decker train. Either way we shall have the Harbour Bridge thrown in as a sort of bonus and a very pleasant one, too, with the evening sky darkening to deep blue and pink and orange and all the lights of the city coming out on the other side. TIME CONSUMING? All you need is time. If you haven't got it you have to think of something else. There’s a fish restaurant in Watson’s Bay up by South Head—not just any old fish cafe but a well known and respected old family business where you can eat well with an “in” crowd—whose

proprietor commutes regularly using his own water transport to an offshoot in Manly, the shortest distance between two points being still a straight line.

And if you’re ambitious, and if you can find somewhere to park it, and if you can afford it, and if you can get round all the red tape that must, I suppose, be associated with such an enterprise you could even have your own ferry. There are two going up for sale in Newcastle soon.