Too Much Pasha Bulker ..
Ξ July 15th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Events, Pasha Bulker, social |
.. is never enough!
The city lit up for a week or two, buzzing with visitors and excitement.
A grand lady of the sea defied humiliation to sit boldly prominent on our favourite beach as though it was her choice, if not duty.
Delightfully without injury (except maybe to the Captain’s pride) and no more than a sharp abrasion and crumpled skin, the Pasha Bulker lurched ashore one weekday morning in a stinging fresh June gale.
Scraping the rocks off Newcastle City she lit up thousands of cell phones around town as the buzz exploded.
Workers privy to the news, and flexibly able, deserted their posts in a dash to the wind-torn, sand-blasted headlands at Newcastle East to witness a once in a lifetime drama: shipwreck on the very doorstep of this pocket seaport.
In the howling cyclonic gale-force winds fascinated onlookers stood, or tried to stand, as blasting plumes of spray, salt, and sand, literally sent the unwary sprawling along the ground. And in sheer disbelief that such a spectacular and unlikely drama could play out on such an otherwise mundane cityscape.
Pictured above, as the ship washed over rocks towards the beach in what witnesses describe as "awesome, spectacular and dramatic" experience. Thereafter, ocean drives were jammed with crowds and traffic for weeks.
Below, the WestPac rescue chopper in the most audacious and heroic airlift of the crew off the wind and wave-swept decks of the stricken (love that word) ship. Of course, in hindsight they were far safer in crew quarters, and the chopper better off back at base, but an overriding concern in the long history of rescuing crews from foundering ships in Newcastle, one never knew what the ailing vessel might do (capsize, break up) and so rescuers’ lives must be risked.
And there for a month the great Panamax carrier sat.
Dominating the cityline and dwarfing Nobbys Beach 
pavilion, Pasha Bulker posed for endless photographers, artists, spectators, rounds of visitors from dignitary to emergency worker, salvagers, police, environmental .. well, just all of them!
And as if the swarms of choppers, tugs, launches and
television ENG vans weren’t enough, with a simple tilt of her bridge (so it seemed) she brought the entire city of Newcastle to a crazed traffic-jamming halt. For weeks.
This was a magical shipwreck.
That 76,000 tonnes of streamlined floating steel should 
deposit itself so cleanly - though not without a little dramatic flurry - on our most iconic shoreline literally shocked Novocastrians from their daily-drudgery and work stupor.
You see, almost only from the sea does the world truly visit Newcastle.
No-one famous has been here since 1955 when the Queen of England rattled on through waving diffidently from a royally-blue diesel-powered train.
Fabulous media performers might appear briefly on local theatre stages, then vanish so completely it’s not entirely certain they were actually in town, as no fanfare was noted, no screaming fans, press conferences, nor paparazzi - only a tiny over-lit figure purporting to be said celeb. several hundred meters away beyond a vast crowd.
And despite frequent flyer points, Prime Ministers and State Premiers count for little (or less than).
I think you’ll find consensus around town - only the seaways draw amazing foreign visitors. And like Sydney Harbour, the waters off Port Hunter are Newcastle’s communal stage, our public meeting place.
The harbour claims our attention - though most Novocastrians have forgotten why. Few alive recall the great days when this self-sufficient region exported superfluous wealth to the overseas needy.
Unlike Sydney, that has a bridge to light crackers on, our bridge, the Stockton Bridge, is not at Stockton or even the harbour, so it’s not much good for anything except getting to Stockton.
Despite this shortcoming we love Newcastle Harbour, basking in the smartly-dressed foreshore restaurants or refreshing our lives along the watery walkways, and throng delightedly to each great man-made mammoth that floats in to share life with us for a while.
And boy, what fun, what an event, when one such visitor 
should get it so wrong.
It became somewhat of a city festival, with attendant free drama and entertainment at otherwise the dullest time of year.
I propose the Mattara Festival include a mock surf boat race at Nobbys Beach, with local boats painted Lauritzen fleet colours, similar to the Todd River regatta.
Pasha Bulker will never move, declared old-timers, based on the farcical attempts to likewise shift the Sygna 34 years earlier from Stockton Beach just north of the city.
Salvagers knew better and confidently laid their plans that astonishingly - to most of us, and to our equally-great relief - saw this shiny new incongruity dragged sideways (of all things!) into the deep during king tide one quiet night - with a fortunate assist from the weather.
She’ll be the talk of the town for the next thirty years.
Novocastrian Rant ~ "Pasha’d-out"
Cruising the promenade is a habit beloved of Novocastrians.
By 1900 Newcastle Beach - posing infrastructure fully developed - was the place to be seen, in top hats and refinery, walking the walk and seen to do so by one’s peers.
Since the Second World War, when cars became affordable to youth, Hunter Street was "the drag" and beach esplanades the cruising scene.
Newcastle’s east-enders reluctantly tolerate rice boys jamming the foreshore and beach drives on Friday nights, or scenic King Edward Park on sunny weekends - as their grandparents similarly scowled at hot rods of the fifties, or lowered EH Holdens of the sixties, and so on.
Ever thankful too, our east-enders, that barbarians from the outer burbs - south of Charlestown, west of New Lambton Heights, or Maitland and the Terrace way - keep generally clear of our quite little city’s beach precincts, except perhaps for urgent business.
It couldn’t last. The peace and quiet, that is.
In fifty years only the second spectacular sea drama to invite itself on our shores, the Pasha Bulker gave the city, and region, a stir of novelty and excitement stranding itself cetacean-like on Newcastle’s most picturesque beach front.
Well, novelty one day, a curse the next.
As if the crowds weren’t intolerable, or the weekend traffic gridlock extending to Hunter Street West.
Even worse, the insane lockdown of Newcastle East by authorities - as if restricting the beach wasn’t already too much. The community of Parnell Place call it "Gaza Strip" - their homes on the wrong side of police checkpoints.
One resident - waiting to get a smashed headlight repaired - is directed curbside for a defect notice every time he leaves or returns home, and must endure the painful confrontation with each shift’s new cop.
But the total exclusion zone encompassing the beach and breakwater past Nobbys Lighthouse is anal authoritarianism.
Newcastle is a city of barricades.
Fort Scratchley has been a DMZ for years - our prize tourist attraction and delightful viewpoint of the coastline, the hill to the right in our banner image - prohibited to all Novocastrians and visitors due to no more than chronic inaction.
One of the city’s finest architectural works, years vacant ex-Newcastle Post Office, stands barricaded in the picturesque heart of commerce, rendering what ought be a tourist showcase little more than a symbol of decay.
These damn rent-a-fences are everywhere. One imagines fence lobbyists jamming the corridors of city hall.
When Sygna came ashore, in those recently-modern times , the sightseers mingled with salvage workers without incident, or great interest from authorities - unlike the draconian intolerant nonsense imposing itself at Nobbys around the Pushy Balker.
Newcastle has, in fact, gone a little hysterical - and not from any press beat up.
The boys with badges brandish their toys with adrenaline and gusto, delighted in an emergency not drawing them to an ugly domestic or some such no-win crime scene. Aroused too are the weekend cowboys, with choppers and trucks with sirens.
Meanwhile the (stoic, frequently heroic) guys and gals in them love-hate orange overalls get to block of some streets and wield chainsaws, with half the city’s trees minus a branch and general pandemonium in suburbs built in creek beds.
Ma and Pa are fascinated by a break in the tedium; mum and dad apprehensively recall the ‘89 quake; the young have never imagined such drama.
Happy to see an end to the Polka Dotta? Not really, just the hullabaloo I guess.