Not really a city, just a big "Our Town"

Dry history of Newcastle’s second century would be a dull affair considering those times still play in the memories of many Novocastrians alive today.

This is a potted history of Newcastle’s second
half-life, , and is more enjoyably shared as reminiscence.

Not entirely accurate, perhaps true, but in the wrong places; extrapolation here and, where knowledge is thin, fancy verbal footwork there.

Overall, the portrait of Our Town below is … painted graffiti-like on History’s wall?

End of 19th

No community escapes the men with big cigars who always seem to get their way. Newcastle had its good share of them. And by close of business Saturday, December 30th, 1899, they had already made this town.

1900 – This was no mere frontier coal town
 

A mere ten decades from wilderness** found Newcastle a thriving export centre with a self-sufficient commercial, industrial, and social base.

By the turn of its first century, fine Victorian buildings adorned this pragmatic big town, an architectural backbone for the modern, world-class city of theatres, schools, colleges, libraries and churches visualised by city leadership.

Local industry, too, had already seeded iconic names of Australian manufacturing that would dominate the decades preceding the new millennium.

And as the century rolled anew, coal and wood still fuelled steam-powered ships, trains, and industrial machinery ubiquitously driving Newcastle’s economy.

Powered flight and motorised vehicles were about to burst forth to euphorically enhance the lives of working people, even if most would merely dream of flying, or ever owning a car. Not so their children.

Start of 20th

When the first Great War ended [1918] Newcastle possessed heavy industry – in particular a steelworks – that leveraged further its cheap coal and superb port.

The city became a national powerhouse of smelting, forging, and mixing of metals – then bending, rolling, honing, casting, shaving, fitting and turning the product into a staggering array of universally-demanded widgets.

During the next three decades most inner suburbs, those confined by a ring of low hills surrounding the flat central basin south of the Hunter’s mouth, were rapidly populated with workers? housing.

By world standards, enforced by local planning, this was high-quality generous housing with a quarter acre of land.

The paddocks, foundries, coal pits, smelters, and dirt roads rapidly disappeared, while the myriad matrix of rail and tram lines were tediously extracted, like steel teeth, bequeathing to the immediate future a neat and tidy suburbia.

Daily life, though Spartan, was an endless lark for the kids, for whom their parents’ daily hardship and deprivations were adventure and treasure. Like a kerosene-powered refrigerator, the hot copper for scalding clothes, an amazing electric spin dryer clamped on old wash tubs where a mangle once wrought the family clothes – and big sister’s braided pigtails should she lapse to day dreaming.

Red-bellied black snakes guard the woodpile next to the outside loo, while redbacks patrol it’s seat; a log stretched across the lounge room floor because with Dad away it couldn’t be chopped; the fresh-baked, warm, crusty, steaming soft, un-sliced bread delivered by a horse-drawn cart from The Store’s Hamilton bakery; fresh jams cooking on the coal-fired stove – fig, marmalade, mulberry, plum.

Mischievous adventures in the paddocks, whose irascible squire reputedly wields a saltpetre shotgun … that only adds to the adventure. A raft of logs on the Throsby – don’t fall in, the water’s bubbling and .. black?

Cecil Wright was a child of this era. Born Novocastrian, his life spans much of Newcastle’s second century, a childhood privileged to savour the overflow from Newcastle’s first prosperous one hundred years.

Cecil’s story is like that of every kid native to this fair city. His tale is so much clearer, naturally, on those fading relics we latter generations dimly sensed in childhood:

If we ran out of anything it was tram one way for a penny and a 3 mile walk home. .. before electric lights came in we had gas lights, kerosene lamps and candles. The bedrooms all had wash basins in them on a stand called a wash stand.

Running to the butchers each day as there were no fridges in those days. Ice chests came later. We used to get the meat each day and put it in a meat safe which hung under the tank stand (no water laid on) or under a tree – anywhere it was cool.

We used to put the blankets etc. in the wooden tubs or bath. Us kids used to walk up and down on them – just like a washing machine .. and chop wood for the stove or fire – no gas or electric stoves; every Monday the Arnotts’ Biscuits factory in Newcastle used to sell broken biscuits … for 6 pence (5 cents) a pillow slip full.

Mid 20th

By 1950 Newcastle City peaked as a pivot of industry and commerce.

Surrounded by stagnating isolated villages owing their existence to increasingly uneconomic local coal pits – except at Lake Macquarie, whose settlements seemed to exist for the water alone – whatever they claimed, and the Shire implied, these various townships felt and behaved as part of Newcastle.

As the city basked in this sea of productivity and prosperity, kids frolicked barefoot in the streets, fathers blackened their lungs at coal pit or steel hearth, and mums sweated – first in the mills, then, married, in the kitchens, creating meals from raw materials, of necessity, keeping house without mechanised assistance.

No shopping complexes and trendy malls yet tempted the frugal populace. Local co-op stores, though expansive, stocked mostly essentials, while life’s little pleasures sat available for a penny or two in small shop windows.

Most families could only dream of a day in the wonderland of Hunter Street’s ‘top end’ shopping.

More ‘remote’ Newcastle suburbs [around the hills] and outlying settlements [beyond the hills!] enjoyed a  theatre [the luckier ones], green grocer, butcher, ‘milk bar,’ dentist, doctor, chemist, hairdresser, cake shop, and invariably a primary school. High schools, however, all resided in Newcastle’s inner Broadmeadow, Waratah and Hamilton.

If the local Co-op store seemed a little passé, or you had won the lottery [or your Dad ran BHP], it was time to find that international flavour at the top end of Hunter Street. Though merely one street, Hunter St. was a miles-long centre of high-commerce attracting shoulder to shoulder pedestrians, endless processions of green and brown double-decker buses, and hordes of rattly little under-powered English cars, with the occasional Yank tank.

Awash with jewellers, tobacconists, newsagents, arcades, specialty shops, and the huge multi-level Winns and Scotts department stores with the world’s latest and finest on display [or so it seemed to we of the unworldly-wise], Hunter Street shopping left little reason to take the four hour trip on a winding goat track to Sydney.

For those not well-heeled, Newcastle’s Co-op Store was a blessing to the people of the lower Hunter.

A cooperative of fabulous departments residing in each spacious suburban branch, The Store brought a big-town feel to villages, where worker’s families felt trapped, the closer ones over an hour’s bus trip to the big smoke. And city workers relished the main store in Hunter Street at Newcastle West (Wickham), a super-sized version of the branches.

The Store was a marvellous democratic application of communal commerce. One shopped on credit with tokens, paid a periodic account, and received a "divvy" [dividend] each year of interest/commission earned on one’s own purchases!

Why The Store failed is not only one of life’s mysteries, but testament to how easily public common sense whithers before corporate marketing savvy.

Its stakeholders, the humble workers, deserted it for foreign-owned novelty of giant shopping complexes, just as they relinquished ownership – with nary a whimper of public disquiet – of public utilities and infrastructure over the following half-decade.

Peak hour found Hunter Street bearing the entire workforce packing footpaths, awaiting Newcastle’s entire government bus fleet crawling bumper to bumper from Pacific Street terminal to the Milk Board, where they began to divide their efforts – except of course the Merewether, Junction, and Cooks Hill crowd who escaped early along Darby Street.

At seven and four in the day a different migration swarmed across town: cars, buses, and enough bicycles to sustain Beijing, conveyed thousands of heavy industry workers on a twice-daily tour, to and from their daily toil.

Age of Cinema

Early films – soundless, colourless, spotty, soundless, flickering with live orchestra in the pit – were far greater magic to their audience than the slick garish (rarely sensitive or beautiful) Hollywood dodderal flooding movie houses in the fifties and sixties, and hard on the heels of an obligatory post World War Two hand-wringing.

Still the crowds came, and Newcastle nights were hardly quiet affairs, despite kids not having discovered graffiti, or roaming night-time streets to escape the horror of drunken or drug-dazed parents.

New Lambton, Lambton, Charlestown, Birmingham Gardens, Wallsend, and Mayfield, had cinemas of their own, but were Saturday arvo Jaffa-rolling faire for the kids. One simply had to be seen at the two-level light-chasing extravaganzas of Hunter Street.

City central was a gold mine of cinema.

In the Royal I first experienced wide-screen Cinemascope and nearly tumbled off the top balcony from vertigo induced by a San Francisco tram-mounted camera, relaxing afterwards with that new foreign ?espresso? coffee in the nearby not-so-trendy Brown Derby cafe, and the blonde waitress who seemed straight out of the film I just saw.

The coffee did, I concede, taste somewhat better than the odd bottled "instant" liquid stuff ‘with chicory’ from our kitchen cupboard at home.

The Civic had me spellbound by opulence, a deco exterior garbed inside by ornate gold statuesque and pomp that entranced my magic-starved childhood.

The Strand sat right in the busy part of town, at the ‘top end’ of Hunter Street, and always seemed to have the big hits and best atmosphere on the street at opening.

The Lyrique, up a side street, furtively offered ‘foreign’ faire, as you might buy grass today. The Tatler ran a non-stop round of featurettes and news all day; enter and leave anytime, a great place to sleep.

And our grand old lady, The Victoria Theatre, predating crass celluloid, yielded to modernity.

The film-going crowds were simply ginormous on Friday nights, and all day Saturday, in those wondrous times. Full house at afternoon matinee had them [rolling or not] literally sitting in the aisles – and standing five deep at the back.

Child in 50s Newcastle

Newcastle’s wealthy lived not in mansions, nor owned factories. The truly wealthy were the children, whether or not their father was industrialist, coal miner, steelworker or tram driver. Children of 20th century Newcastle lived high on the spoils of productivity, knowing little and caring even less of the wheels of industry.

As all childhoods are golden, Newcastle kids had an extra layer gilding theirs.

Arriving in 1954 at night, a seven year old from Sydney whose family followed the bread-winner’s work, found Newcastle blanketed in velvety blue darkness punctured by thousands of twinkling street lights and illuminated home windows.

Climbing the hills from Belmont, then Gateshead, after passing through Charlestown’s insignificance, Newcastle suddenly revealed itself from a height of 350 feet as the road wound across the hills that walled the flat central precincts. Seaward in the darkening distance, rail, cars, ships and neon generated a montage of coloured light.

Most vividly I recall the magic of the Lustre factory, a hosiery manufacturer, its huge (perhaps neon) sign writing this enchanting word across a sublimely pastel-lit building. My first taste of commercial graffiti?

We lived in Hamilton, amongst the forward scouts for an invasion of wogs and dagos soon to follow [their main army being de-liced and hosed down in the Mayfield West immigration centre] in a little flat above a long-gone service (gas) station in the heart of Beaumont Street.

Then, for some odd reason, we moved to Boolaroo, a small-minded smelter town and miners’ dorm, where I lived out my primary school years.

and great-hearted community was a fine mix of characters, from the legendary tough local cop, the empathic ambulance and fire chiefs, the stoic Stockton Borehole miners, Sulphide smelter workers, shopkeepers – all a mere generation or two from another side of the world, yet all seamlessly Australian.

Our street, imaginatively named "4th Street," was where old Australia met new. One side comprised turn of century houses with Boolaroo’s natives – coal miners and smelter workers; the other, a strip of shiny new brick 3-bedroom  and the occupants predictably "new to town."  It was fun. My parents (from Sydney, with ‘airs’) were confused, the locals wryly amused, and us kids just took it in our stride.

Though an hour by bus from Newcastle – winding through iconic British mining-town names like Teralba, Argenton, Cardiff, New Lambton, Broadmeadow, Hamilton in a slow English Albion diesel double-decker "hold very tight please, ding ding, 97 horse-power omnibus" – it undeniably saw itself part of Newcastle (and the Empire!).

Boolaroo was a child’s dream. Swamps and paddocks galore. A tidal creek, islands, the lake, the railway, Munibung hill and its caves. Leaping off the creek bridge into God-knows-what in those murky green smelter-fed depths.

Catching generations of crawchie [crayfish] and tadpole from the deep-drain ecosystems, the trench gutters of our street, that would one day be sadly piped and filled.

And what was that stuff in Jimmy’s backyard his dad bought home from the smelter? We’d spit in it watch if effervesce, gagging on odd pungent fumes.

To adults a place of resignation; teens, escape at all costs; to we barefoot Davy Crockett-capped brigade this was the magic timeless land of childhood.

History?

In a sense, Newcastle has no history in the twentieth century.

Its duration has been generic, exactly the same as anywhere in Europe, America, Africa, and Asia. Industrialisation and technology made lives much the same anywhere on Earth. Technology now drives development through uniformity of purpose and method.

What distinguished Newcastle and makes its story worth telling?

The locale? A unique confluence of resources and people of diverse background? The tides of fortune, and their ties to world affairs?

Perhaps nothing more than its opinion of itself.

By mid century the establishment of a miniature but very self-important university at Tighes Hill birthed an intelligentsia and seeded an art community.

Where a century earlier business barons paraded their success, now it was the turn of "the brainy" to be legends in their own lunchtime, and despite some genuinely humble intellectual giants and formidable artists, the city attracted its share of those with more attitude than smarts, in a love-hate relationship with what they perceived a dull working-class town, lucky to have them.

The outcome, for a brief decade or two, was an almost suffocating social whirlpool, an intermix of small-town parochialism and small city dynamism. Were Newcastle a sage country town these tossers might be ridiculed, but that’s not how it plays in a provincial city striving for importance.

By 1950 Newcastle’s homes were spacious, clean, comfortable, cheap, and represented to this working city, in a working nation, one of the world’s highest living standards. For by now the agricultural wealth of the valley and the nation had kicked in. As a self-contained, self-sufficient region within a country of the same fortune, Newcastle and the Hunter revelled in surplus which went seaward to the world.

As was Australia, so too Newcastle: "Home on the sheep’s back." And assisted by a dearth of coal, Newcastle was a double winner in those halcyon days.

60s – We are redefined

The sixties found Newcastle like a startled bush creature at whom the world suddenly gazed, determined to put on its best face and play sophistication, its perceived role.

The communication explosion effectively ends Newcastle’s unique character, there and then.

The world had shrunk, suddenly, amazingly. Fashion and fad swept through insatiable, bored, affluent Newcastle teens like shockwaves from London and New York epicentre.

Business, always acute, quickly read the new direction and geared marketing to sustain demand by recycling, feeding back upon itself – much easier, it wryly noted, extracting coinage from the young, who never suffered and slaved for it like their parents.

Newcastle was no longer Newcastle, but part of the world, and hanging off that world’s every nuance.

Our social, workplace, and neighbourly chatter was increasingly consumed by world affairs, however trivial … indeed, preferably trivial! Novocastrians felt themselves citizens of a modern world, and behaved accordingly.

We call it consensus.

80s – Last generation

It is true of any era that a childhood is not dissimilar to that of parents or grandparents. But in the early years of this new millennium Newcastle’s new adults, young people who were kids in the nineteen-eighties, seem more sombre, serious, maybe more – maybe too – adult. Even a little weary.

Their short lives have been saturated by television, games consoles, and in the past ten years that so-called information Infobahn has almost stunned them into worldly sophistication.

Media, especially film, wears the blame for affecting the behaviour of the last five generations, who believed corny, childish play-acting on the silver screen was how real adults behaved in sophisticated places.

Even these pre-teen kids of the eighties saw and copied the sad nonsense on television, which seemed ever-so-modern at the time, even to adults, yet was so easily parodied in Hollywood remakes of those atrociously, unintentionally comical "action" shows.

The Internet brushes falsity aside. It is raw life, not just a make-believe escape world as television tried to be, but a shadow world of the human psyche dressed in text and image, but taunting, daunting, and threateningly real, should one stray too far from the light.

That paradigm shift has set real change into play. The kids are truly and uniquely different, their magic dreamworld crushed at a much earlier age. Unlike their forefathers who discovered and created Newcastle – without schooling, notoriously banished to foundry or coal mine before teenage – modern kids are confronted by formless shifting social sands.

Their physical world looks, sounds, and feels like that their parents knew, but the unreality projecting this ‘physical’ life takes less pains to evade their glance. They see life increasingly Matrix-like, a-la the film. Some unravel, some recoil.

Kids changed with each previous industrial or technological revolution, and in a way this modern stage in our lives is no different.

Yet today’s city kids increasingly live independent lives of young adults, and in their leisure time interact tightly with virtual worlds created and controlled by real people – many you would not wish to know. The kids are far more astute and savvy for their cyber-travels.

A paradigm shift is afoot, as always.

Many kids still experience the wild physical adventure of our grandfathers, but an increasing number will never understand as the play space shrinks to a bedroom and the fields of dreams succumb to "tar and cement."

Over the past 100 years? Yes, we can see the change.

Who can tell where the next century, or its kids, will take Newcastle?

** "A mere ten decades from wilderness .." More accurately, and to be entirely truthful with history, that ‘wilderness’ was home to an ancient spiritual civilization, perhaps the oldest stable society on earth.

Port Hunter’s environs would seem wild, pristine, and free to ravage, in the consensus acquisitive frontier mindset Europeans were exporting at the time, blind to ownership of tribal cultures perfectly in equilibrium with their undocumented keep.