Julie Keating’s publishing career began with a question. She wanted to know the original location of Lambton Colliery, when it was operating many decades ago in her home suburb of Lambton. Julie was a little surprised to realise just how effectively traces of the once-big mining operation had been erased. The former librarian – who already loved historical research – threw herself into this question. Of course she found answers to many more questions about Lambton that she hadn’t yet thought to ask and soon she found herself sitting on a stockpile of information about the suburb. The result was her first book: Lambton, a Nineteenth Century Mining Town, which she dedicated to her parents. That book appeared in 2015.
She had so much fun with that project that she decided to follow up with similar books about the suburbs where her grandparents had lived. Books covering Merewether and the Junction and Waratah and Mayfield appeared in 2016. Bitten by the bug, Julie kept going, with books on Newcastle’s Hunter Street, the city’s harbour shore, New Lambton, Wickham, Islington and Tighes Hill, Adamstown and Broadmeadow and – most recently – a volume on Newcastle in the 1800s. Fellow researcher Lachlan Wetherall co-authored the books on New Lambton and Adamstown and Broadmeadow as well as a second edition of the Lambton book.
The books are enticing grab-bags of information, largely illustrated with photographs by the remarkable Ralph Snowball. They’ve sold very well; well enough to keep Julie nose-down in her research. Her long career in libraries holds her in good stead in that regard. Over more than 40 years she worked at Newcastle University, then the TAFE, then various high schools in the Hunter.
Julie’s mother, Thelma Cochrane, was a regular and popular contributor to The Newcastle Herald, as well as popular magazines like New Idea and New Woman. A couple of years ago Julie published a tribute volume of her mother’s collected works. These snippets deal mostly with the “smaller” aspects of life in Newcastle as it was, not all that long ago. It’s a pleasant trip down memory lane, with lots of quirky insights into life in general.
Julie teaches courses at Newcastle’s University of the Third Age (U3A), focusing on Newcastle and the Hunter Region in the 1800s. “It’s such a unique and fascinating history,” she said. “From the penal colony days through to the coalmining that put the city on the world stage.” She certainly appreciates the difference in the attention and respect she receives as a teacher from her U3A classes compared to some of the unruly school groups she used to tangle with. Newcastle has an active little speaking circuit of Probus and similar clubs, and Julie is a very popular presenter in this arena.
She has also created a series of six (so far) historical walk maps for Newcastle suburbs which can be downloaded from the website of Newcastle City Council. These have all been produced at her own expense as a service to the community. “I just want to help add to the available information about the history of Newcastle’s suburbs,” she said.
Julie is also deeply involved in Newcastle’s Family History Society, which is proving a more-than-worthy successor to the sadly defunct Newcastle and District Historical Society, which folded a year or two ago due to lack of membership. The society has a wonderful library at Lambton and a small team of dedicated volunteers who do remarkable research into a wide variety of subjects.
Asked if she planned to publish any more books – given the sharp recent increases in printing costs and the difficulty of recovering those costs through sales when retail outlets are vanishing – she was non-committal. “I say I won’t, but really I can’t rule it out,” she said. The problem with historical research was the endless “rabbit-holes” that keep appearing and demanding attention. So an author can never say “never again” because they don’t know what might inspire them next . . .
Only Julie’s most recent book, Newcastle in the 1800s, is still in print. The others can sometimes be found in second-hand shops. Fortunately, she has provided PDF versions of her books to the University of Newcastle’s Living Histories website and you can find them here:
