There is a narrow channel in Middle Harbour that disappears from the main waterway and enters an enclosed world of mangroves, native trees and shallow water. Few paddlers seem to know it. Bull sharks are known to move through Sydney Harbour and its estuarine reaches, adding another, largely unseen dimension to the environment. Each time I enter, the noise and urgency of Sydney recede until the place feels less like part of a city than a natural temple of meditation.
When the weather is still and the sunlight reaches into the channel, the transformation is magnificent. The vegetation descends into the water in long vertical movements. Greens become turquoise, jade and deep blue-green. Dark branches stretch across the reflected landscape like gestural lines drawn over a luminous field.
This was the beginning of Treecolour.
The title is a play on words, but it also describes what happens within the artwork. The trees cease to be representations of trees. Their reflected forms are broken apart and remade as colour. The gentle movement of the water turns the Australian landscape into abstraction while retaining something unmistakably connected to place.
The tranquillity of this environment, however, exists in tension with its history.
Willoughby once supported a substantial tanning industry. Tanneries clustered around local creeks, using the waterways that ultimately fed the harbour. Industrial runoff and decades of urban development left an environmental legacy within parts of the catchment. My own ancestors were involved in that history, making my relationship with this landscape both intimate and uncomfortable.
That knowledge changes the experience of its beauty. The channel remains extraordinarily peaceful, yet its silence does not mean that its past has disappeared. Beneath the reflections lies a story of industry, contamination, resilience and gradual regeneration.
Perhaps this is why I find the place so compelling. Nature has not returned it to some imagined state of innocence. Instead, mangroves, trees, light and water continue creating beauty within a landscape that carries human consequences.
Treecolour holds those opposing forces together. It is both celebration and acknowledgement: an Australian landscape of mesmerising colour, and a reminder that tranquillity and environmental tension can occupy the same water.
