When the Great Depression hit in the early 1930s, people who had forgotten what hunger felt like were suddenly and forcefully reminded. Around Newcastle and the Hunter, desperate people without jobs or income walked away from homes when they couldn’t afford rent or rates. They sold their bank accounts (many of them frozen) for pennies in the pound. Hundreds of families set up makeshift homes wherever they could find undisputed space. Camps of huts built of whitewashed hessian and tin sheets flattened from kerosene cans sprang up on the outskirts of the towns. Some people “went back to mother” – Mother Earth, that is – setting up makeshift homes in places where they could grow or catch food to survive.
In 2012 I interviewed Ted Bartlett, then 91, who reminisced about how his family and and several others moved into a straggling line of about 28 “boatsheds” built over the mud flats alongside Platts Channel, on the Hunter River below Mayfield. The narrow strip of intertidal territory between the high and low water marks was a kind of property title no-man’s land. The huts at Platts were built in this limbo land and Ted said his family paid a peppercorn rental of 10 shillings a year to the Australian Agricultural Company. Other pieces of riverfront were nominally controlled by the Lands Department. Occupiers of boatsheds in these areas had to travel once a year to East Maitland to pay for their right to remain.
Recently a set of photographs has emerged from the State Library of NSW, beautifully recapturing for me the sensations evoked by Ted’s stories of river life. The photos were taken at Hexham by R. (Bob) Donaldson for Pix magazine on March 27, 1941. I’m using some of these photos to accompany this blog post. I only wish I could have shown them to Ted, who I am sure would have had plenty to say about them. They were not, I think, the sheds his family lived in, but they were not far upstream and would have been very similar, I’m sure.
Ted’s family moved to the boatsheds when he was just a boy, aged less than 10 years, and the experience of living there defined his life. He grew to love the river, its moods and rhythms. The intricate estuary of channels, wetlands and islands wove its way into his heart, triggering a love affair that has lasted the rest of his life. Since his family made its enforced river change in the hungry 1930s, Ted never lived more than a kilometre from the Hunter’s banks. When I met him he still lived close to the river at Sandgate in a house he built himself – partly from material salvaged from shipwrecks in the estuary.
His wife Margaret – whom he laughingly introduced to me as “the Leader of the Opposition” – also spent some of her early years in one of the boatsheds, where her family shifted from Georgetown when work dried up for her transport contractor father. “My father’s horse and dray pulled some of the stones that built St Andrew’s church,” she told me. Margaret was a schoolgirl when her family moved to the boatshed, and she didn’t really appreciate the change; unlike her mother, who loved the river and would sit on the jetty catching fish – lure bream – and crabs in a wire trap with bits of broken pottery, or net lost clothes pegs from the water with a scoop.
Margaret’s family, the McKinnons, had one of the best boatsheds. It was big, with double doors that could open to the river, and it had a good wooden floor that made it ideal for community dance evenings, when a phonograph borrowed from Newcastle dance teacher Bert Caldwell used to grind out tunes while the mullet jumped outside. The McKinnon residence was also renowned for its running water. A savvy tradesman had plumbed the building from a water main that crossed the river nearby, freeing the family from the long walks for water that other river families endured when their tanks ran dry.
Living on the river may have been an ordeal for some, with the mosquitoes in summer and the cold chill in winter, but a boy bred in the Depression could shrug these things off. Ted recalled his father used to keep the mosquitoes at bay by burning lumps of dried cow manure in the boatshed. “It didn’t smell too good, but it did get rid of the mozzies,” Ted said. Ted used to share the back room – an enclosed verandah – with his brother, Cliff, while his parents used the main room inside. On cold nights, Ted said, his parents got the combustion stove fired up.
“Dad used to sit on a chair with his socked feet on the grate and Mum stood with her back to the stove and her skirt hitched up. We boys made do the best we could,” he said. Making do was the order of the day, for most people. Ted’s father got work wherever he could, supplementing the family income in a variety of ways. He tanned skins and sold them, the whole family helping to clean the hides on the table at night. If somebody in the family caught an especially good fish, he might raffle it at Amos’s hotel in Mayfield. And he’d do soldering repairs on the watering cans used by the Chinese market gardeners who grew lush produce on a bend in the river, just upstream. “I used to go up the gardens with a sixpence from Mum to buy a soup-bunch. You never saw vegetables like the ones they grew there. The cook, who spoke the best English, used to see me coming and get a bunch for me,” Ted said. “He’d take my coin, then say he was going to get my change. He’d go to the hut in the middle and come back a minute later and just give my coin back.”
Fishing was a constant pastime for many people, and in the days before the river was too polluted it yielded huge quantities of delicious food. Ted knew where to row his boat for the best bites, netting mullet in the mouths of the narrow creeks, catching big green crabs, filling tins with prawns and hooking fat bream at the turn of the tide. Ted knew “Rotten Row”, where hulks of old ships lay, decaying, and a place called “the Dead End” where he climbed around old wrecks and prised off oysters “as big as saucers”.
Ted’s memory was full of anecdotes of his riverine neighbourhood. Like the time one neighbour grew tired of owning a dog that had turned vicious and started biting children. “My father agreed to shoot the dog and all the people from the boat sheds came out to watch,” he said. “The dog’s owner threw a stick into the river and when the dog went to fetch it, my father shot it. He’d only just fired when a huge fin appeared and the dog disappeared completely. All that was left was a red stain on the water that just drifted downstream and dispersed.”
The Hunter estuary has changed greatly since Ted Bartlett punted his boat around its shallows, hunting fish and salvage in the salty swamps.
The boatsheds in which the Bartletts and other river families lived stood on stilts above the mud flats on Platts Channel, opposite Spit Island. Both these major features of the old river have disappeared. Creeping industrialisation and massive land reclamation projects – culminating in the creation of Kooragang Island – led to the filling in of Platts Channel. What used to be Spit Island became just another piece of dreary industrial foreshore and the exiting point for the Tourle Street bridge. Vast tonnages of industrial waste and dredging spoils were used to fill in the web-like creeks and channels that once separated the islands.
One of Ted Bartlett’s final fond memories of Platts is when the channel was closed at both ends, with just enough tidal exchange to feed the fish and other creatures trapped inside. “The prawns grew huge, and I filled tin after tin with them and sold them at work, and the mullet were massive too,” he said. But the secret got out and a trawlerman cleaned up the trapped harvest. Not long after, the island and the channel vanished forever.
All across the estuary, the same thing was happening as old islands with old names disappeared from maps and memory. Walsh Island, which was mainly mud flats and often mostly under water. Dempsey Island. Spectacle Island. Goat Island. Upper and Lower Moscheto Islands. And glorious Ash Island, a densely-forested wonderland that had left early European settlers in breathless awe of its sylvan beauty. Well into the 1930s and 1940s, farming families flourished on the rich soil of the islands, punting their produce across the river to Newcastle. But as heavy industry steadily took over the estuary, nature, fishing and farming had to make way.
Industrialisation of the Hunter River islands started relatively early after white settlement. Walsh Island was built up out of the mud with stone quarried from beside the river upstream of Port Waratah, and with mud and silt dredged from the harbour bed. It supported the lost and often forgotten industrial giant that was the Walsh Island dockyard. This extraordinary behemoth of government enterprise built and repaired ships, made bridges and railway carriages, and manufactured munitions used in World War I. Like most government enterprises, Walsh Island was subject to fierce ideological argument between capitalists and socialists and it was, eventually, shut and dismantled just before the outbreak of World War II.
But the BHP steelworks, established in 1915, grew massively, bringing jobs and prosperity to Newcastle, but leaving a legacy of pollution and a dramatically altered river. BHP and its satellites spread along the river’s edge, using the Hunter as a drain and using their waste products as fill to reclaim more land for their growth. Ted wound up working for BHP, testing the water, and he knew many secrets. “The industries used to release their pollution on the incoming tide,” he said, and he noted that the advent of the Courtaulds rayon factory at Tomago had a drastic effect on fish in the river.
The government project to join the Hunter River islands and turn them into one big industrial estate was a natural extension of the view that Newcastle’s future lay in heavy manufacturing. Kooragang was the name chosen by the government for its new creation of mud and fill. The name was supposed to be an Aboriginal word meaning “place where birds gather”. As they do, and as they once did in much greater numbers than now. But Kooragang Island is a name without romance for Hunter people. It connotes a polluted wasteland – a piece of abused ground permeated by the toxic legacy of generations of heavy industry.
Like a faithful spouse who still sees the wedding-day smile on the face of their partner, Ted Bartlett could see the damage men had done to his river, but he saw beyond it, and he still felt in tune with the mysterious tidal heartbeat of the ancient waterway.
As an aside, in the yard around the house he built in Mangrove Road, Ted planted gardens that gladdened the eyes of visitors and more than once won the Newcastle grand champion title. There were times when bus loads of visitors would converge on the Bartlett gardens in their springtime splendour, and hard-nosed garden judges weighed the merits of blooms, shrubs and lawns against competitors across the city.
Ted and Margaret passed away not long after I spoke to them. I’m sorry to say they took many more stories with them than the few I was lucky enough to hear.
