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Newcastle

Read more about the article Newcastle aviation history and the Walsh Island aerodrome
The Codock in Newcastle in 1934. From a glass negative.

Newcastle aviation history and the Walsh Island aerodrome

Early efforts to bring commercial aviation to Newcastle, NSW, were many, but largely unsuccessful. A push by Charles Kingsford Smith and some of his supporters to create Australia's biggest aerodrome at Walsh Island were almost successful, but fell victim to politics and - most likely - the onset of the Great Depression. The first reference I've found to a commercial air service being offered to Newcastle residents is this article in The Sydney Morning Herald on January 29, 1920, in which "Mr H. E. Broadsmith, engineer-in-chief to the Australian Engineering and Aircraft Company, who accompanied Mr…

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Read more about the article John Jobson’s BHP and other photographs
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

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…

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Read more about the article Newcastle’s Obelisk and “the social evil”

Newcastle’s Obelisk and “the social evil”

Was Newcastle's famous Obelisk once a site for illicit sexual assignations? It may have been, if I have understood the transcript of an 1866 public meeting correctly. The transcript, created as part of an elaborate joke apparently designed to reflect discredit on Newcastle's young municipal council, is a record of a meeting at which a reluctant candidate for office, Mr C. W. Williams, was quizzed over many aspects of civic life. Mr Williams was not a highly educated man. At the time the law allowed unwilling candidates to be elected to Newcastle's municipal council against their…

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