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Australian Agricultural Company

Read more about the article James Fletcher, behind the legend, by Dulcie Hartley
The statue of James Fletcher at the Lower Reserve, Newcastle, in 1976

James Fletcher, behind the legend, by Dulcie Hartley

My late friend and amateur historian Dulcie Hartley published several books during her lifetime, but one book she was very proud of never made it into print. This was her book about James Fletcher, Newcastle's famous "miners' advocate" - the only man in the city to be commemorated with a statue. Miner, politician and newspaper proprietor, Fletcher was immensely popular and influential, and Dulcie was fascinated by him. After Dulcie's death, her daughter Venessa entrusted me with the manuscript, and I have slowly transcribed it. What follows are the preface and first chapter of Dulcie's six-chapter…

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Read more about the article Notes from the frontier wars, NSW, 1848
Unrelated illustration from The Town and Country Journal, December 14, 1872. Indicates how white people viewed the frontier wars.

Notes from the frontier wars, NSW, 1848

Ten years ago I was loaned two fascinating letters, which I was told had been written from the NSW settlement of Stroud in 1848. The letters are of great interest since they bear very strongly on the conflict between indigenous people who had been living in the area near Gloucester and the white settlers who were moving into their territory to claim the land as their own private property. For a long time I had no idea who wrote the letters, having been told they may have been written by somebody named "Robert Scott". Since the…

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Read more about the article Some of the oldest photos of Newcastle, NSW

Some of the oldest photos of Newcastle, NSW

Tracing advances in the technology of recorded images is fascinating, particularly in relation to specific places. Not only does the place change over time, but the nature of the images changes too. In the period since European settlement of Newcastle, NSW - originally a prison-labour camp for political and intransigent convicts - one can trace the evolution of images from freehand sketches, to engravings and then to photography. Early photographs are predictably rare. Newcastle was not a prosperous or appealing place at the time that photography was being born. Nevertheless, some quite old photographs (or images…

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