Joan Dawson is losing count of the people who’ve made a point of telling her they now believe she was right after all. She says it’s nice to hear them say it, but it’s small consolation to the woman who was, for years, the face of local resistance to the State-sponsored juggernaut intent on removing Newcastle’s heavy rail line.
Now, faced with the new reality of public transport in the second city of NSW, many Newcastle people are inwardly revisiting the furious debates over the railway line in the 1990s and 2000s, comparing the promises and warnings from both sides, and re-evaluating their own views.
For those unaware of the story, Newcastle’s rail issue goes back a long way. Twice since the 1850s the rail line has been the focus of battles between commercial and community interests. It’s fair to say that each time, commercial interests – backed by the weight of the Sydney-based state government – won comprehensively. In the 1850s coal interests wanted to extend the railway line along the narrow neck of land between the growing city and the harbour. Residents fought the plan, which cut the city’s streets off from the waterfront, but the coal interests prevailed and the rail was extended from Honeysuckle in Newcastle’s west end to “The Sandhills” in the east and a new station was built beyond the coal loading facilities.
Over the years people became accustomed to the city being separated from the harbour by the rail line and came to appreciate the new station. But fast-forward to the late 20th century, when big suburban shopping centres had undermined the prosperity of the old CBD. Everybody was asking how to revitalise the city. The only answer that really seemed to have a chance of success was to switch focus to residential development, but a lot of public investment had to come first. Federal Labor governments stepped up with funding to convert the old industrial waterfront and East End to parkland and housing. The state government established the Honeysuckle Development Corporation as a largely self-funding outfit with a charter to sell government land to developers and use the proceeds to enhance the waterfront area in ways that would attract more developers.
The railway became contentious at this point for a couple of reasons. First, the fact that it cut off the city from the harbour was highlighted as an obstacle to good town planning. Second, and perhaps more decisive, was the fact that the railway corridor was the only significant piece of land in that part of the city not undermined by coal tunnels. Most other areas have very old mine workings under them and need expensive “grouting” before they are safe for high-rise buildings. This means that the former rail corridor is premium development property.
Premium development property
The Government, Honeysuckle and developer organisations argued that the intention of cutting the line was purely to reunite the city with the harbour and promised to replace the lost rail line with something better. The rail corridor, they promised, would not be covered in buildings. Opponents – most notably the Save Our Rail group – accused its opponents of being mostly intent on a land-grab, irrespective of protestations to the contrary.
What happened was that the rail was cut. A new “transport interchange” was built at Wickham, where the heavy rail terminus meets a new light rail service that moves off the old heavy rail corridor and runs up the middle of the city’s main street. Newcastle’s formerly public transport system was handed over to a partly-French-owned company, Keolis Downer, which now operates the city’s ferries, buses and light rail. The light rail was officially opened in 2019 by then Liberal Transport Minister Andrew Constance, who caused much comment by attending the event wearing a tie decorated with a motif of a white elephant.
It is probably worth mentioning that the money for the light rail represented a portion of the proceeds of the sale of the Port of Newcastle to Chinese interests. To keep digressing, this sale itself became controversial when it emerged (after years of bald denials and determined concealment) that the sale conditions of the Port of Newcastle explicitly prevented the buyers from competing effectively in the container trade with the Port of Sydney, which obviously helped inflate the sale price for Sydney, at Newcastle’s expense.
The rail issue is still an intensely polarising one in Newcastle. When I posted the image seen above on a Facebook page devoted to historical topics the fun began almost immediately in the comments. Some people are passionately persuaded that the city is a better place now that the heavy rail has gone. They point to various new buildings to highlight their view, and promise that as the city becomes more and more populated by well-heeled apartment-dwellers the improvements will accelerate.
Others argue much has been lost – particularly opportunities. Newcastle’s privatised buses are now notoriously unreliable – to the extent that many Novocastrians are urging the Government to cancel the contract and return the service to public ownership. Critics – such as myself – say the city is now cut off from the harbour by a wall of buildings instead of a rail line. They point to the lost parking in Hunter Street, eliminated by the light rail line down the middle. They argue that the short piece of light rail is – as Andrew Constance appeared to intimate at the opening – a bit of a white elephant, and not incredibly reliable either, with many breakdowns. Here’s a reader’s letter from a recent copy of The Newcastle Herald:
I had to go in for Jury duty this week and got excused. I waited at the Civic tram stop at 9:15 knowing my train to Cardiff went at 9:26 and 9:31. I looked to the Beach end and could see the tram, it didn’t move for like 10 mins. Hunter street is a boarded up mess. Arrived at Wickham at 9:33 had missed both trains and had to wait 50 mins for next. The girl next to me on the tram of Indian background was travelling to Central burst into tears. Seriously Newcastle what have we done?
Which brings us back to Joan Dawson and the people who now tell her they’ve decided she was right after all.
Actually, we might go back to the years of the Greiner Coalition Government in the 1990s when, after some public consultation, it was proposed to cut the rail line at Civic Station, opposite Newcastle City Hall and Civic Theatre. Civic would have been the new terminus and the area east of that would have been “opened to the harbour”. If I may speak personally here, I would have been happy with that. It seemed to me a decent compromise. But the Save Our Rail group, with Labor backing, fought against it and the idea was shelved.
Joan Dawson was living in Sydney then, although she had lived in Newcastle in previous years. She came back from Sydney in the 2000s and found the rail issue was back in a big way. “I thought that battle was over and done with, but when I came back it was centre stage again and the Save Our Rail group was in disarray,” she said.
Joan – an experienced organiser with the Teachers Federation – took over the reins and proceeded to go head-to-head with the NSW Government, pro-development Newcastle Council figures and the property industry. It proved a bruising battle. Both Liberal and right-wing Labor were determined to cut the rail. Former NSW Labor Treasurer Michael Costa wanted to cut it at Broadmeadow, since that option would free up the most “surplus” land for the government to sell. Eventually Wickham was settled on (not the old Wickham Station, but a new site on the western side of Stewart Avenue – a money-saving option that bypassed the long-recognised need for an overpass at Stewart Avenue.
“Left-wing Newcastle parliamentarians, including Sonia Hornery, Bryce Gaudry and John Mills, were with us, but the rest of the Government was against us,” Joan said. Save Our Rail sent detailed submissions to Parliament over the issue, but they fell on deaf ears and soon the group was warned that Liberal Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian had begun ordering the removal of signalling gear and points from the rail line. Save Our Rail immediately challenged the Minister in court, pointing out that these actions were illegal without a special act of parliament.
“We won the case, but the Minister appealed and the matter went before the acting head of the Supreme Court’s three-member appeals committee, Justice Margaret Beasley,” Joan recalled. Justice Beasley – now Governor of NSW – found in favour of the Government. “It was all over in a very short time. We never saw the other judges, only Justice Beasley, and I certainly don’t feel as though we had a chance to make our case. At any rate we lost, and then we were refused leave to appeal to the High Court, which finished it off for good,” she said. “The developers had their way and I think some fortunate people who had bought properties around the site of the new Wickham interchange were probably very pleased.”
During all this long-running and bitter dispute, Joan found herself targeted personally and repeatedly in the media, portrayed as an anti-progress luddite trying to hold the city back and prevent investment. After the court loss much was made of the court’s decision to award costs against Save Our Rail. “Letters appeared in the paper demanding to know when we were going to pay,” Joan said. “The fact is the other side never chased us for the money and Save Our Rail was an incorporated group anyway. There was no money for them to take.”
Joan had by this time moved to Dungog, taking advantage of the housing price differential between the little rural town and the Newcastle seaside suburb of Stockton where she had lived to fund some long-wished-for world travel. But even at Dungog the pro-developer forces pursued her. “I got nasty letters but I just ignored them”, she said. People posted fake comments in online forums, purporting to be Joan admitting she had been wrong to stand in the way of the Government and developers. One particularly virulent hater made frightening phone calls to her, threatening her with death. Fortunately the police caught the man and successfully charged him.
Even after the rail service was cut, Joan and Save Our Rail fought hard to have the rail corridor preserved and to have the authorities honour their promises about open space. “Newcastle Council could have protected the corridor but the Labor councillors chose not to. They agreed to allow the land to be rezoned and that was the end of it all. We stopped fighting after that,” she said.
Not long ago Joan was contacted by a media representative and asked if she would be willing to be in a photo to mark the anniversary of the cutting of the rail line. She agreed but was saddened by the sight of the former railway station, now in her opinion “a concrete jungle”. She was also aghast when the photo appeared under a heading that read “No Regrets”.
“I have a lot of regrets,” she said. “And so do an awful lot of other people who seek me out to tell me so. Newcastle made a big mistake and lots of people can see that now.”
