Newcastle NSW Archives - Photo Time Tunnel

A Newcastle girl’s letters from the WW 1 home front

Post author:Greg Ray
Post published:April 20, 2023
Post category:History Militaria Newcastle, NSW, Australia
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Doris Schuck was 16 years old and living in Newcastle East when "The Great War" broke out. Like most youngsters in the community at the time she was intensely patriotic and she paid particular attention to the fortunes of "Newcastle's Own" 35th Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force, so often in the thick of fierce fighting on the Western Front in Europe. Living very close to Newcastle's Fort Scratchley - a relic of the Russian scare of the early 20th Century - she got to know quite a few young soldiers and she wrote to some…

A trip to “Town”: Newcastle as I remember it

Post author:Greg Ray
Post published:June 1, 2022
Post category:- Personal writing History Newcastle, NSW, Australia
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A trip to “Town” in the 1960s and 1970s was a big deal. Town was where everything happened and where all the important shops were. If it was a week day and my Dad was at work, Mum and I would walk to the bus stop and ride in, usually getting off down near The Store. We might walk up the street and go to the movies, if I was lucky, and if I was very lucky indeed we would go to one of the department store cafeterias – maybe Winns – where I would get…

A BHP loco in 1927, John Jobson and Ellaroo, the first ship in Newcastle's "new" floating dock, 1929

John Jobson’s BHP and other photographs

Post author:Greg Ray
Post published:January 10, 2022
Post category:History Newcastle, NSW, Australia Vintage Photographs and Photography
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A bundle of photographic prints, handed to me recently, jogged my memory somehow. The matt black envelopes in which the photos had been stored - evidently for a long time - were familiar to me for a start. Then there was the compact writing on the back, and the reference to the photos having been taken in the late 1920s and early 1930s by a metallurgist at Newcastle's BHP steelworks. I went scurrying to my filing cabinets and, sure enough, I had two photos by the same photographer, given to me by a woman who had…