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Monthly Archives: July 2019

Read more about the article Lost islands of the Hunter River
A view of the Hunter River, showing Platts Channel and Spit Island, from the site of the former Murray Dwyer orphanage, circa 1930s.

Lost islands of the Hunter River

Kooragang Island is a name with little romance for most people in Newcastle, NSW. The name connotes a polluted wasteland near the mouth of the Hunter River, permeated by the toxic legacy of generations of heavy industry. But things weren’t always like that. Before white settlement there were several islands in the Hunter River estuary, forming a jigsaw of shapes cut and criss-crossed by creeks and tidal channels. The wetlands and mudflats were a prolific breeding ground for marine life and a feeding ground for local and migratory birds. The Aboriginal people hunted there and found…

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Read more about the article Wartime fears of a seaman’s daughter
Wounded seaman being carried from the damaged freighter Allara in Newcastle, 1942

Wartime fears of a seaman’s daughter

FOR young Daphne Roper the most important thing about any ship entering Newcastle Harbour in the difficult years of World War II was its funnel. Daphne’s father Alexander McMorran was a chief engineer with the “iron ships” of BHP, and she knew the company’s ore-carrying vessels bore two blue bands on the top half of their funnels. Seeing a ship with the two blue bands make its way around Nobbys was an exciting sight for Daphne, her mother Anne and her little sister Annie. “During those years, with Japanese submarines haunting Australia’s east coast, each goodbye…

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Read more about the article Dog wallopers and woolly tigers on the streets of old Newcastle
View across Cooks Hill, with the Sea Pit in the background, circa 1912.

Dog wallopers and woolly tigers on the streets of old Newcastle

DOG wallopers and woolly tigers were commonplace in Doug Bowman’s Newcastle. Doug was 95 when I interviewed him in 2013, and it took him a while to get warmed up. But once he got started, the stories came thick and fast. Doug was one of those men who could talk his listeners back to the Newcastle of his youth, where they could see and hear with him strange sights and sounds of another city and another time. Doug Bowman, in 2013 Doug’s grandfather, Thomas Mather Bowman, was ‘‘factotum’’ for the mighty Australian Agricultural (AA) Company that…

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