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The North Sydney I was born and grew up in was not what people generally refer to as the affluent 'North Shore'. It was the lower end (both physically and economically) of that 'Shore', the part dominated by the Harbour Bridge and its approaches. In the 1950s and 1960s, before the Warringah Expressway was built and the corporations and developers moved in, it was primarily what you might call old residential with a small-scale retail infrastructure and scattered low-level industry. Our own street, soon to be cruelly truncated, was not completely residential. In the morning and afternoon streams of men with their Gladstone bags would tramp past our home to and from the 'torpedo factory' (Royal Australian Navy Torpedo Maintenance Establishment, Neutral Bay). But generally High Street was quiet. It ran down to a sleepy little wharf where old men and boys fished and talked and the Neutral Bay ferry called by every so often. In the green water beneath the wharf I used to watch the slow moving leather jackets sucking at the piers and, occasionally, if I was lucky, catch a glimpse of a tiny, delicate seahorse. |