Harbour At Full Steam
Newcastle Herald
Saturday June 17, 2000
I MAGINE Newcastle Harbour with a sandbank close to where Queen's Wharf is today, a sandbank where boatmen would moor to clean their boats.
In the 1870s and early 1880s that's what happened. At the same time the area of the harbour today known as The Basin was nothing but mud and sand flats at low water with a narrow channel running through them from the old Bullock Island bridge that connected Carrington (Bullock Island) to Hunter St West, near Union St.
Ships could not get further up the harbour than beyond the Australian Agricultural Company's coal loading area near Merewether St.
Even well into this century youngsters ? all boys ? would swim nude on the western, or Wickham, side of the Bullock Island bridge. The water was so shallow at low tide in some parts of this area that the boys would have to bend down, for propriety's sake, when a passenger train passed nearby.
The late Mr C.B. Greaves, who retired more than 60 years ago as manager of the Newcastle office of the shipping firm Huddert-Parker, recalled in the late 1930s what the harbour was like in his younger days ? the time before he left school and the years he spent working in the shipping industry.
When Mr Greaves left school in Newcastle in 1887 he went to work for Mr George Bewick, shipping manager for both the Waratah Coal Company and the Greta Coal Company and also the Newcastle representative for the North Coast Steam Navigation Company.
Mr Greaves looked after the Greta Coal Company's interests. The company then had a very good trade with the west coast of America.
`The Greta company had as many as 40 sailing ships in port at the one time, all waiting their turn for loading. The Government coal loading appliances at that time were the steam cranes on the Queen's Wharf (this was close to Customs House and not where it is today), the straiths (or coal loader) between the old (Market St) boat harbour and the A.A. Company's premises (near Merewether St) and the hydraulic cranes at the Dyke.'
In 1883 local coalmines were idle for 13 weeks due to a miners' strike and seven years later, in 1890, came a 10-week maritime strike that also led to stoppages at the mines. This meant that many ships spent months rather than weeks waiting for cargoes.
The Waratah Coal Company shipped most of its coal from its own jetty at Port Waratah, from a site later taken over by BHP. Nearby were the copper smelting works that were served by sailing vessels bringing copper ore from South Australia and returning to that State with coal.
Mr Greaves also recalled the port's wool exports.
`Some of the most noted sailing vessels in the world loaded wool cargoes at the eastern end of Queen's Wharf (now part of the foreshore park) from the wool stores of Dalgety and Co. and Gibbs, Bright and Co.
`The most noted of the clippers, Cutty Sark, 921 tons, Captain Woodgett, loaded here frequently, and made very fast passages home in 72, 73 and 76 days.'
During Mr Greaves' period working for Mr Bewick the Greta Coal Company not only exported its coal but also had a large market in `town sales'.
Novocastrians preferred the Greta coal for household purposes and Newcastle's best-known coal merchant, Harry Porter, who had his premises in Bolton St, purchased mostly Greta coal for his customers.
Mr Porter would arrive at Mr Bewick's offices regularly with his dogs every Monday morning to pay for the week's supply of coal.
© 2000 Newcastle Herald