Sydney Harbour Wooden Boats by Bruce Stannard / Chowder Bay Boatshed built 1892 and the historic Chowder Bay precinct.


There are probably more chic, up-market boutiques, high-priced real estate agencies and expensive outdoor eateries in Mosman than there are in any other part of Sydney. But forget all that frippery and come with me; I’ve got something much more interesting to show you.
We’re going back in time for a peep at a little piece of Sydney’s past that’s hanging on for dear life, a relic of a time-honoured tradition that has somehow managed to survive in a turbulent sea of change.
Wooden boat building, once one of the busiest of all Sydney’s waterfront activities, is now very nearly extinct, a fond but distant memory for those of us who cherish hand craftsmanship and the lovely look of boats, not cooked in mass-production moulds, but made the way real boats have always been made: with skill, by hand and eye.
Modern Mosman, with its emphasis on the ephemeral trappings of conspicuous consumption, might seem an unlikely place to encounter a bunch of down-to-earth wooden boat builders, but this is indeed one of the last redoubts of that proud tradition.      
We are going to bypass the shops and the galleries and the glamorous, lycra-tight women power-walking their poodles, and steer a course south by east until at last we glimpse the glittering waters of the Harbour. Down there, at the foot of the fragrant Eucalypt-covered slopes, lies Chowder Bay, surely one of the most delightful little snug coves in all the world.
From a buff-coloured weatherboard shed, hard by the water’s edge, comes the unmistakeable music of wooden boat building, the staccato tap-tap-tapping of hammers and dollies driving home the silicon bronze nails and roves that fasten the curving planks of a lovely little clinker dinghy.
This is Sydney Harbour Wooden Boats, the place where Simon Sadubin and his team of craftsmen routinely take a pile of lumber and turn it into a work of art. There are two identical bluff-bowed 8-foot dinghies on the slips. One is appropriately called Cooee. The other, as yet un-named, is still under construction. Both were designed by Simon and built with the help of his talented offsider, Bob McLeod and his Kiwi apprentice, Hywel Turner.
Cooee – 8-foot clinker yacht tender in front of workboat Brit inside Chowder Bay Boatshed. / Gem – 22-foot 1930s Snapper Boat during sea trials after full restoration. / As yet un-named 8-foot kauri dinghy ready for launching December 2010.
Cooee was built for Simon’s son, Archie, a lad not yet three, who was named in honour of the great New Zealand yacht designer and builder, Arch Logan. The second dinghy is a very special little vessel indeed. She is planked entirely in wonderful honey-coloured New Caledonian Kauri – timber which was milled from a giant tree that was planted in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens in 1854.
When the predations of flying foxes eventually stripped the tree bare and killed it, the noble Kauri had to be felled. It was about to be turned into woodchips when Simon’s father, Leon, who is one of Australia’s leading furniture designers and makers, successfully proposed that the timber should be distributed to people who could transform it into objects of everlasting beauty.
Simon was lucky enough to be granted sufficient material for the 8-foot dinghy. He and his team took a total of 230 hours to build her, patiently steam bending her planks and her Spotted Gum gunwales and meticulously fitting Kauri thwarts supported by naturally bent Ti-tree knees.
These are the kind of jewel-like vessels that invariably put a smile of pleasure on our faces. Simon Sadubin with the Ben Lexcen-designed Taipan which he restored at Chowder Bay for the National Maritime Museum. / Taipan - Bob Miller’s (Ben Lexcen) radical 1959 18-foot skiff during hull conservation and deck restoration work.They could be found all over the Harbour when I was a child. Now we have to go to museums to see them. In Victorian waters it’s a different story. There, one finds lovely wooden boats on every other mooring. I asked Simon why he thought Sydney had turned its back on wooden boats.
“I don’t know that Sydneysiders have entirely turned their backs on wooden boats,” he said. “There’s still a fair few people who treasure their wooden boats, hang on to them and are intensely proud of them. It’s more a matter of wooden boat builders having to abandon Sydney. They’ve literally been squeezed out of business.
“Waterfront property prices are so exorbitant now that the cost of trying to run a boat building business anywhere on the Harbour these days is just prohibitive.
“All the traditional harbour-front sites in suburbs like Balmain, Birchgrove, Woolwich and Greenwich, have now become enclaves of the super-rich. Traditional boatbuilders can’t pay the rent so they’ve had to move to the Central Coast, or the South Coast. Some even went west to the Blue Mountains.”
Simon also points to what he correctly identifies as the crisis in Sydney zoning laws.
“No waterfront land has been set aside as waterfront-industrial,” he said. “There have been plenty of places that could have had that zoning, but the state government has always baulked at it. So there’s no way traditional wooden boat building is going to be sustainable in Sydney into the future.”
Simon is however in the fortunate position in having a toehold at Chowder Bay.
“It’s just a one-off,” he said, “but thanks to the vision of the Harbour Trust, we are able to go on working in this wonderful heritage-listed boatshed. There are some serious limitations on operating out of this site. We cannot water-blast or wet-rub boats and it is not possible to put boats alongside for any length of time, but the shed is ideal for serious one-off restorations and traditional new boat builds. We need to do fairly major work to make the shed pay its way.
“However, once we get a boat into the shed, it can rain for three months and every day is productive. I think the Trust is acutely aware of what has happened elsewhere. They recognise that they’ve got one of the last remaining heritage boatsheds here at Chowder Bay and as their Mission Statement says, they want to keep this place alive.”
Larool – Australian Red Cedar 30 square metre racing yacht being relaunched at Chowder Bay.The boatshed was built at Chowder Bay in 1892 as part of a new anti-submarine base. In the immediate aftermath of the Crimean War, a high tide of public paranoia led to much of the Harbour’s most important strategic headlands being seized by the government for defensive purposes. Chowder Bay was one of them.
The boatshed built the boats that laid the mines that protected Sydney Harbour. Although the base never fired a shot in anger, it survived and today the charming village-like cluster of buildings, all beautifully restored in their heritage colours, represents one of the most impressive sites administered by the federal government’s Sydney Harbour Federation Trust.
Simon has worked on the restoration of more than 20 boats at Chowder Bay since he came here in 2003. He spent the first three years sharing the space with his boatbuilding mate, Ian Smith and his company, Woodcraft Boats.
When Ian moved out to Canterbury, Simon stayed on to tackle major restoration jobs like the rebuilding of the 40ft gaff cutter Windward built in 1925; Gem, a North Harbour snapper boat built in the 1920s, Bob Miller’s 1959 18-footer Taipan, restored for the National Maritime Museum; the 1905 gaff cutter, Sao and the 43 ft Mallana, a 43ft ketch built in 1907.
The impressive list goes on and on. The most recent restoration involved Larool, a Knud Reimers designed 30 square metre racing yacht built out of Australian Red Cedar by Cedric Williams in Bayview in 1954.
Windward taking the water after restoration in October 2006.“We would love to build some new Australian-designed boats,” he said. “I’m thinking of the Rangers, the Sydney Harbour Coach-house Cruisers such as Hoana and Waitangi and the North Harbour Snapper Boats in particular. But this is where Sydney needs to step up.
“In Victoria, boat builders like Tim Phillips have saved regional types like the Couta Boats, whereas Sydney hasn’t really got behind its local boats. It breaks my heart to see lovely old boats lying unused and neglected on so many moorings all over the Harbour.
Windward E1 sailing on Sydney Harbour c. 1926 with her original Gaff Cutter rig.“I’ve tried several times to get syndicates together to save a couple of beautiful 1930 vintage Fife six metres. These are little masterpieces, which anywhere else in the world would already have been saved. They desperately need work or they’re going to die.”
Simon points to the remarkable wave of wooden boat restoration in New Zealand, which  has been so comprehensive that the Kiwis are now running out of early Logan and Bailey built boats to restore.
“The New Zealanders have done their share,” he said, “but we’ve hardly done anything. Yes, the 1896 Robert Logan masterpiece Waitangi was restored in Australia, again by a Melbourne syndicate.
“If we can’t hold the really important boats like Sayonara, one of the historic cornerstone racing yachts of Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron, what hope have we got of restoring the lesser vessels. No one in the Squadron was interested and again, it took a Melbourne syndicate to step in and save her.”
Windward complete with her new rig.8-foot Kauri dinghy catches the first light of the morning in the Chowder Bay Boatshed.Simon Sadubin raises an important point, one Sydney people need to consider carefully.
“Every time I see a boat, weed-fringed and half full of rainwater, chaffing at a fouled mooring, I’m tempted to write a rude note to the owners urging them to ‘use it or lose it.’ It may sound trite, but that’s the message that has to be understood by those who have the privilege of owning a lovely old boat.
“I don’t think people realise just how valuable these boats are,” Simon says. “To replace classic boats like Morna, or the schooner Mistral II, would cost the earth today. Once you appreciate that, the cost of restoration begins to look pretty attractive.”

• Correction – Ross Barnett, Manager of The Shipwrights Village at the Australian Wooden Boat Festival (Afloat Mar’10) has pointed out that the Village was sponsored by Marine and Safety Tasmania (MAST).