Newcastle in the 1870s, from The Town and Country Journal
Newcastle’s glorious municipal leaders
Honestly, I had to laugh out loud. What started out as a more-or-less po-faced description in an 1872 newspaper of the fledgling town of Newcastle, NSW, turned into a hilarious slag at the apparent incompetence of the settlement's council - its municipal "corporation". The paper is The Town and Country Journal, dated February 10, 1872. The article features a lovely woodcut of Newcastle, overlooking the harbour and Nobbys, and most of its column-length is occupied by an account of the history of the Australian Agricultural Company, which ran the city's coal monopoly for the benefit of…