Sealand
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Creed O'Hanlon
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Creed O'Hanlon's biography and other articles by this writer
The first foreign yachts turn up in the Pittwater, north of Sydney, around the end of September, just as the warm nor'easterly breezes set in and coastal dwellers are reassured that the winter has ended. Most have made the long passage non-stop south from Queensland harbours, standing well off the rock-strewn New South Wales coast to take advantage of the fast, south-flowing East Australian Current. Some have sailed further – from the Solomon Islands or Vanuatu or Fiji – and have had to beat a couple of thousand nautical miles to windward against brisk south-easterly trade winds to get out of tropical latitudes before the cyclone season begins.
It's easy to recognise the long-distance cruisers. They have a rugged, purposeful aspect, with short, sturdy, over-rigged masts and wide decks to which are lashed anchors, boat hooks, small dinghies, surfboards, gas bottles and rows of plastic jerry cans. Their cockpits are shaded by wide sun-awnings, their hatches by weather-worn, folding canvas dodgers that look like old-fashioned pram hoods. Above their transoms, makeshift stainless steel structures support angled arrays of solar cells and propeller-driven wind generators, as well as radar reflectors, and radar, radio and GPS antennae. Faded ensigns flutter from backstays or short flagstaves to signal the vessels', if not always the crews', nationalities.
Foreign yachts tend to congregate, three or four at a time, on the western side of the wide, sheltered bay, where there are a few anchorages and moorings designated by the state's Maritime Services as suitable for ‘live-aboard' visitors – as long as they don't over-stay their welcome. Even if the authorities turn a blind eye – and they do, sometimes – the welcome is unlikely to last long. Crews are allowed to live aboard for just two weeks consecutively in the same anchorage. The half dozen suburbs that surround the Pittwater are some of Sydney's wealthiest, and their ratepayers – especially those with high-value waterfront properties – are loathe to share their water views (or anything else) for too long with scruffy interlopers who don't pay utility bills, let alone local rates and taxes. It's a sentiment – and, increasingly, a set of by-laws – they share with shore-dwellers around Sydney Harbour, Port Hacking, Port Melbourne and along the Swan and Brisbane Rivers.
The petty squabble between urban shore dweller and visiting seafarer is really just a recasting of the bitter, millennia-old conflict between settler and nomad, a social, economic and spiritual rift that in other parts of the world seesaws between bloody skirmish and nervous stand-off.
The nomad isn't an indiscriminate traveller. Although the name is derived from the Greek word nomos (pasture) and the Latin nomas (those who wander in search of pasture), the nomad doesn't wander, but rather follows a well-established, cyclical route to a series of temporary campsites next to pastures or water sources that can support a small tribe and its animals for all or part of a season. As the late Bruce Chatwin observed in an untidy essay, ‘Nomad invasions', in his collection What am I doing here? (Penguin, 1990), ‘Nomadism is born of wide expanses, ground too barren for the farmer to cultivate economically – savannah, steppe, desert and tundra, all of which will support an animal population providing it moves.'
Later he notes, ‘a nomad's territory is the path linking his seasonal pastures.' But the very notion of territory is born of settlement. It is necessarily somewhere defined not just by boundaries but by a claim of ownership. When nomads' traditional routes intersect anywhere claimed (by settlers) as territory – whether it's the fenced perimeters of private property or an invisible state or national border – it is interpreted as trespass or, worse, invasion. The nomad's innate disregard for territory is almost incomprehensible to the settler, whose first instinct is to restrict or refuse access. It is almost as if the nomad's lack of containment – his stubborn insistence on wide-ranging movement with few encumbrances and little desire for prolonged occupation, let alone possession, of any one place – is spiritually troubling to the settler for whom the acquisition, development and protection of land and goods are intrinsic to his sense of self, security and belonging.
Long-distance seafarers are, and always were, nomads too. The safety of their voyages – especially under sail – is dependent on seasonal shifts in monsoonal wind directions or the strength of trade winds, the intensity of temperate latitude depressions, the locations of permanent anti-cyclones with their persistent calms and fog, and the risk of cyclones, typhoons or hurricanes. Except for large, engine-powered, commercial ships – their movements are determined only by economics and the availability of cargo, regardless of season – the ideal timing and routes for ocean passages, have been the same for more than two thousand years.
Hundreds of generations of seafarers have recorded their observations of the sea surface, wind and sky, as well as the arc of stars and planets along these routes. They've passed them on in narratives – Polynesian mele, Icelandic sagas, Arabic instructional rahmanis – or as notations in log books and on charts, even as diagrams constructed from intricately bound sticks and shells. For example, in a passage from a rahmani known as Fa'ida of the Kitab al-Fawa'id, near the end of a section titled ‘Seasons for leaving the Arabian coast', the renowned fifteenth century Arab mu'allim (navigator) and poet Ahmad Bin Majid warned of the intensity of the South-West Monsoon during summer in the Arabian Gulf: ‘Intelligent men never make this journey during the three months when the Dahur is at full strength for then it is a gamble ... For these ninety days the sea is closed and he who would cross it deserves to be unhappy. From the agony of loneliness and remorse, so much anxiety and suffering.'
Today, the routing charts, tidal atlases and sailing directions published by various governments' hydrographic offices are simply the ongoing refinement of knowledge gathered and shared over several centuries by navigators around the world. This sharing is probably the oldest, maybe the only, ongoing tradition upheld by every nation with maritime interests. Part of the reason it endures is that the seafarer's ‘territory', the vast, refuge-less oceans beyond national territorial waters (and other, more arbitrary demarcations), doesn't really belong to anyone.