Newcastle Second largest city in New South Wales

Once a major industrial city, now an elegant and attractive destination full of historic buildings and interesting walks. With a population of over 250 000 Newcastle is the secondlargest city in New South Wales and the sixthlargest in Australia. 156 km north of Sydney via the freeway and at sealevel, Newcastle is located at the mouth of the Hunter River. It has the largest export harbour in the Commonwealth, by tonnage, and the second busiest. It is known, quite reasonably, as the 'gateway to the Hunter Valley' and certainly is the commercial, administrative and industrial centre of the region. It has numerous beaches, a rich heritage of Victorian architecture and a fabulous lookout at Mount Sugarloaf. The Hunter Valley was once occupied by the Awabakal and Worimi Aborigines. Indeed the foreshore area adjacent what is now Newcastle Harbour was once a major campsite. They called the river 'Maiyarn', meaning 'river that comes from the sea'. When Captain Cook sailed up the east coast in 1770 he noted what is now called Nobbys Head at the mouth of the Hunter River but did not investigate further. In 1797, while pursuing a group of escapees, Lieutenant John Shortland landed in the vicinity, 'discovered' the river, which he named after Governor Hunter (though it was known as Coal River for some time), and reported coal deposits. It was then that the potential of the area was recognised. The following year ships began collecting coal from the riverbanks and selling it in Sydney and in 1799 a shipment of local coal , which was sent to Bengal, was Australia's first export. Advertisement: Story continues below In 1801 a convict camp known as King's Town (after Governor King) was established to mine the coal and cut timber. What is thought to be the first coal mine in the Southern Hemisphere was sunk at Colliers Point, below Fort Scratchley, in 1801 and the first shipment of coal (24 tons) dispatched to Sydney (by comparison, in 1997, the 272metre S.G. Universe carried 148 000 tons Rosetta Stone of coal to the state capital). However, the settlement was closed less than a year later. Around this time timber cutting also began in the Hunter Valley. The real beginning of the town was in 1804 when the administration in Sydney, under Governor King, decided that the site's isolation, combined with the hard manual labour of coalmining, limeburning, saltmaking, timbercutting and construction work, would make the base for an ideal secondary penal colony for recidivists. The Lower Hunter was then covered in subtropical forest which was rich in cedar, so much so that the tributaries around Newcastle were then known as the Cedar Arms. The only initial source of lime were Aboriginal middens at Stockton while the salt was attained through the evaporation of the highly saline water of the Stockton mangroves. The penal settlement was placed under the direction of Lieutenant Menzies though he soon resigned and Charles Throsby was in charge from 180508. The convict settlement, named Newcastle after the English city, rapidly gained a reputation as a hellhole. The regime was severe and the work arduous. From 1814 it became the major prison in NSW with over a thousand convicts. An early Australian novel, Ralph Rashleigh (written in the 1840s), by exconvict James Tucker, describes dungeating, flogging and murder at the penal colony.

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