© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Newcastle Harbour

Read more about the article Panorama of Newcastle, circa 1902.

Panorama of Newcastle, circa 1902.

This delightful panoramic view of Newcastle Harbour, taken from Cathedral Hill, was created between 1899 and 1907 by Charleston Studios, a prominent photographic presence in the city at the time. It has been scanned from a folding copy in an old pamphlet and the digital copy has been carefully restored by Sylvia Ray. In the front right is a portion of the since-dismantled Cathedral graveyard. Stockton shows large in the background, with the masts of the sunken ship Regent Murray (lost in 1899) poking above the waterline at the end of the Oyster Bank. The old…

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Read more about the article Hartley Spurr, legendary bait man
Hartley Spurr in 1943, photo by Ivan Ive. State Library of NSW

Hartley Spurr, legendary bait man

Quite a number of years ago my elderly next-door neighbour asked me what I knew about a man named Hartley Spurr. I told him I had never heard the name, and he asked me to help him find out. All he knew, he told me, was that the name "Hartley Spurr" had made its way into a saying among some of his acquaintances. "If you wanted some obscure tool or object, somebody would pipe up and say: 'Hartley Spurr had one of those'," my neighbour said. I assured him I would try to find out, and…

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Read more about the article Allara, the ship that wouldn’t die

Allara, the ship that wouldn’t die

WHEN a torpedo-damaged freighter was towed into Newcastle Harbour in July 1942, at the height of Japan's deadly submarine campaign against Australian shipping, a Newcastle Herald photographer was on the spot to capture some extraordinary images of the crippled ship and its wounded crew members. But the superb dramatic photographs weren't published. Tight censorship by the government, preventing the publication of bad news that might harm public morale, saw to that. The negatives were filed and forgotten for decades, before passing out of the newspaper's ownership during a "downsizing" in the 1970s when collector Ken Magor…

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