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NSW

Read more about the article Dinny O’Brien’s legendary Newcastle pawnshop
Dinny O'Brien's pawnshop in Hunter Street, Newcastle.

Dinny O’Brien’s legendary Newcastle pawnshop

DINNY O'Brien was a Newcastle legend in his lifetime, and even today his name conjures memories for many who recall his landmark pawnshop on Hunter Street. He and his wife Margaret had five sons and a daughter. I interviewed Tom O'Brien some years ago, when he was aged 94 and the last survivor of Dinny's children. Tom was deeply proud of the business his father built, and which sustained generations of the extended family in good years and bad. One of very few photos of Dinny O'Brien. Dinny lived originally at Largs, and his first business…

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Read more about the article Trauma and tragedy in the life of a Hunter Valley preacher in the 19th Century
Missionary John S Austin, at 70, from his book

Trauma and tragedy in the life of a Hunter Valley preacher in the 19th Century

As a young circuit preacher at Murrurundi, in the Upper Hunter Valley of NSW in the 1860s - then later at Maitland, Singleton and Newcastle - the Reverend John S. Austin had his fair share of near-death experiences, witnessed a fatal traffic accident in High Street, Maitland and lost his daughter in a drowning tragedy in the Hunter River. The Methodist minister John S. Austin lived into his 80s and wrote an autobiography with the unpromising title Missionary Enterprise and Home Service, a Story of Mission Life in Samoa and Circuit Work in New South Wales.…

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Read more about the article August 15, 1945: the war is over!
Celebrations in Newcastle, NSW, for the end of World War 2, August 15, 1945.

August 15, 1945: the war is over!

Never in Newcastle’s history has there been a day of such celebration as VP Day. August 15, 1945, was the day the long-awaited news came that Japan had surrendered and the war was finally all over. In May the news that Hitler was finished was received with pleasure, but the direct threat to Australia had been from Japan and it wasn’t until the atomic bomb was dropped and Japan capitulated that the pent-up emotion was able to be released. The darkest days of the war, for most Novocastrians, had been three years earlier when a Japanese…

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