A City Built On Steam

Newcastle Herald

Monday December 5, 2005

GREG RAY

Maitland is a city whose foundations were built on steam, Greg Ray discovers. And thanks to steam, the district was able to become one of the main drivers of economic growth in the young colony of NSW.

THE HUNTER RIVER was always the key to Maitland?s future. Not only did

the river produce the great wealth in the trees and soil of the fl oodplain,

it also provided the highway to move produce from farm to market.

Boats and canoes of various kinds regularly plied the river in the early

days of European settlement and it is clear that the Aboriginal tribes had

been navigating the waterways for many centuries.

A regular boat service between Maitland and Newcastle was established

in 1824 to service the settlers and farmers there and to bring

their produce to the convict town where it was traded.

Even then it was clear that Morpeth (then called the Green Hills) was

the best place for a river port. The windings of the river and its relative

shallowness between the Green Hills and the farms further west meant

it made sense to carry goods overland to the practical head of navigation.

By comparison to the easy river trip to the Green Hills, the overland

journey from Newcastle to Wallis? Plains was a relatively arduous trek

on a bridle track that wound through Hexham swamps. In winter the trip

meant getting wet feet.

The rich farm lands of Wallis? Plains grew in importance to the hungry

colony.

Newcastle became a free town but struggled to fi nd a post-convict

identity and purpose. During the early phase of development in the

Maitland district, Newcastle was no more than a decrepit staging post

on the important trade route between the productive farms of Maitland

and the Sydney marketplace.

Sailing ships made regular trips between Hunter?s River and Sydney,

(two early services were provided by the cutters Eclipse and Lord

Liverpool) but sailing ships between the two centres were generally

slow and uncomfortable. Rueful patrons nicknamed them ?the stomach

pumps?.

The voyage from Hunter?s River to Sydney could take an unpredictable

length of time and was hazardous, with an appreciable number of

lives lost on the coast each year. The overland trip, on the other hand,

involved a ride of at least three days over the mountains.

By 1829 it was plain to all that the colony of NSW could support

a commercial steamboat service between Sydney and the Hunter River.

Trouble is, such new-fangled vessels had not yet been seen in the

southern oceans. There were some clever and well-trained Scottish

shipwrights on the Williams River at Clarence Town though, and these

men (James Marshall and William Lowe) were commissioned by Sydney

merchant John Grose to build a steamer for the coastal trade. This was

to be the famous William the Fourth.

But before the William the Fourth was fi nished, a strange steampowered

ship arrived unannounced in Sydney Harbour. This was the

Sophia Jane, whose owner, a retired British naval offi cer named Edward

Biddulph, had bought the ship as a speculative investment and sailed

it to Australia.

The Sophia Jane arrived at Sydney on May 14, 1831, beating the

William the Fourth syndicate to the punch.

It made its fi rst voyage to the Hunter River on June 13, 1831, tying

up at Newcastle overnight and making the three-and-a-half hour journey

to the Green Hills next day.

A correspondent described a trip on the Sophia Jane in the Sydney

Gazette of October 1, 1831:

?On landing at Newcastle some painful emotions are excited to fi nd it

in a ruinous and nearly deserted condition. It is now almost wholly possessed

by the Australian Agricultural Co and may be estimated as their

most valued possession, coals being now extensively consumed as fuel

and rapidly increasing in demand.

?Departing from Newcastle, you glide rapidly into a spacious and

beautiful bay, studded with numerous little islands thickly wooded to the

water?s edge and abounding with pelicans, curlews, plovers, cormorants,

ducks, teal, widgeons, sandlords and other birds . . . From hence you

proceed swiftly and majestically along the verdant banks of Hunter?s

River, adorned with the most luxuriant vegetation and studded occasionally

with the primitive abodes of new settlers, and the temporary habitations

of parties of the Aborigines.

?You reach the Green Hills, where the steamer discharges her cargo

into the store ship St Michael, which affords a most commodious warehouse,

being roofed in and divided into compartments for the reception

of goods for the steamer, to and from Sydney.?

While the Sophia Jane was fi rst to take advantage of the trade opportunity

between Sydney and the Hunter River, the William the Fourth was

not far behind. It was launched at Clarencetown on October 22, 1831

and sailed to Sydney where its engines were fi tted. It made its fi rst trip

back to the Hunter River in February, 1832, immediately becoming a

>>

CONTINUED PAGE 15

great rival to the Sophia Jane. An immediate effect of the coming of

steam to the coastal trade was a dramatic increase in the value of

Hunter Valley property.

The steamships gave the Hunter a tremendous trade advantage over

other farming areas, which had to rely on bullock teams for their heavy

cartage, making freight much slower and more expensive than that from

the Green Hills.

More steamers followed: the Tamar, the Ceres, the Victoria, the Rose,

the Shamrock and the Cornubia, to name a few. Companies and entrepreneurs

rose and fell on the steam packet trade through the following

decades.

The stunning river scenery was hit hard by European pioneers, many

of whom left sensible farming practices at home, ringbarked the forests

and mined the soil for all it was worth.

In the 1850s the river trip was described in The Sydney Morning

Herald by English writer Richard Rowe:

?This then is the far-famed Hunter - muddy as the Thames, with

banks as fl at as Essex marshes! True, there are some pretty hills in the

distance just before you come to Hexham, but, as a whole, the lower part

of the Lower Hunter appears to be about as lovely as a plate of soup.

I can fi nd nothing to describe except the tall, white, leafl ess, barren

trees, looking in the dim morning light like bands

of spectres that ought to have been back in Hades

a good hour ago.?

For many years, Morpeth (as the Green Hills

became) was a shipping port with an international

reputation. Many settlers came to Australia

through the port and when the Duke of Edinburgh

visited Australia in 1868 he was carried to Morpeth

aboard a steamer of the same name.

The fi rst nail in the coffi n of Morpeth?s prosperity

came when Maitland and Newcastle were

linked by railway in the 1850s. This meant that

produce no longer had to come to Morpeth to be shipped, but could be

sent by rail to Newcastle. Even the construction of a spur line to Morpeth

did not stop the rot.

The heyday of the steamships ended in 1889 when the railway bridge

over the Hawkesbury River was completed.

Instantly the shipping traffi c declined, and road and rail continued to

make inroads into the Hunter River trade.

It was a long decline, however, and it was not until the 1950s when

shipping services between the Hunter River and Sydney fi nally ceased.

Even before then the inexorable and lamentable processes of riverbank

erosion and siltation had made their damaging marks.

In his 1943 book The Newcastle Packets and the Hunter Valley, JHM

Abbott wrote that the Archer and the Kindur were the last of the deepsea

ships to come to Morpeth.

?Formerly the passenger steamers plying between Sydney and the

Hunter invariably continued their voyage on from Newcastle to Morpeth,

but they never do so now. The gradual but inexorable shoaling of the

river accounts for this. The last of the larger vessels of the Newcastle

and Hunter River Company to make the complete voyage was the Namoi,

but when the Archer and Kindur used to make it, say, a dozen years

ago, it was only possible to get them up to the Morpeth wharf on the

fl ood tide.?

The last steamer to make the trip to Morpeth is

said to have been the Doepel, in 1946.

Terrible land-management by poorly educated

?farmers? had wrecked some of the once-glorious

river land. Writing in 1948 in his book Red Cedar,

P.J. Hurley deplored the already obvious damage:

?The Hunter looks like a poor meandering old

stream . . . so much of its water has gone underground,

owing to siltation?.

There was tragedy, he wrote, in ?stark staring

hilltops, denuded of tree cover.?

?

© 2005 Newcastle Herald

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