© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Author: Greg Ray

This author has written 481 articles
Read more about the article Vickers-Comsteel, Newcastle, NSW, in 1929
Photos from the Bank Notes article about Comsteel.

Vickers-Comsteel, Newcastle, NSW, in 1929

Industrial and commercial newsletters and in-house publications are a rich source of fascinating historical material, often of a type that can't be found anywhere else. One of my favourite Australian business journals is Bank Notes, the Journal of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. I pick up copies and bound volumes from time to time, mostly from the 1920s and 1930s, and love to comb through them for great old photos and articles about many aspects of Australian life. Mostly the articles are written by bank staff members, and the photos come from many sources. A copy…

Continue ReadingVickers-Comsteel, Newcastle, NSW, in 1929
Read more about the article Newcastle’s great days of sail
Nobbys Headland, Newcastle, NSW, c1900

Newcastle’s great days of sail

WHEN steamships were perfected, they inevitably put an end to the long era of sail as a means of trading commodities across the globe. But sailing ships lingered for decades, and circumstances made Newcastle, NSW, one of the last of the great sailing ship ports. In the early years of the 20th century, the city often hosted as many as 80 sailing ships at once, almost all of them taking Australian coal to the west coast ports of the Americas. Prevailing winds across the Pacific Ocean meant the sailing ships could catch the trades to Australia…

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Read more about the article Coal pile to the moon

Coal pile to the moon

To the moon, with plenty left over. That’s how far the coal mined from the Hunter Valley in NSW during the decade up to 2010 would have reached, if it had been stacked into a two-square-metre pillar. I did that calculation when I was working as a reporter at The Newcastle Herald, the newspaper serving the city of Newcastle. Newcastle is the second city of NSW and lies at the mouth of the Hunter Valley. It is often reputed to be the world’s largest coal port, in terms of volume. My figures didn’t count the coal…

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