Newcastle or bust



This was published 12 years ago

Newcastle or bust

Michael Duffy joined the poet Les Murray for a stroll down a Hunter memory lane, and a peek into the future.

The day the BHP gates shut in 1999, Newcastle's Mayor, John Tate, was invited inside the site for a radio interview. "It was eerie. I was in the grounds of the steelworks and it was silent," Tate says. "We were all wondering, 'What do we do now?' People were saying, 'This is the end of Newcastle. The sky's going to fall in. It's all over."'

For more than 80 years Newcastle was a one-company town, dominated by the gigantic steelworks in its heart. So when BHP announced it was pulling out people feared for the future. But when the smoke and fumes cleared they discovered something rather marvellous. They lived in a city that was not only generously provided with natural attractions but had also escaped the architectural ravages of the '60s and '70s and was full of attractive old buildings. Newcastle was potentially a good place to be: all it needed was a new economy.

Outsiders know little about Australia's second-oldest city. They rarely go there; Sydneysiders travelling north usually bypass it. Despite its age and size and importance, Newcastle has produced one big band in Silverchair but almost no significant literature or painting or film to present itself to the world. So, for most of us, the city is a secret.

The man who has written about it best is the poet Les Murray, whose fine verse novel Fredy Neptune (his "secret autobiography") is partly set there. He has a long association with the place, having first visited in 1942, a few days after the Japanese shelled Newcastle. Les kindly agreed to be my guide to Newcastle, and we met on the foreshore a few weeks ago.

"It's the only big city we've got that isn't the capital of something," he said as we wandered around. "There's a whole level of chicanery and ambition and pretence that hasn't been here. It kept the place much more like a community than other cities in Australia."

The next day I heard a story that illustrated this. The teller was Ross Kerridge, a senior anaesthetist at John Hunter Hospital. He explained how in the 1930s the board of the Royal Newcastle Hospital instigated a scheme whereby workers could pay sixpence a week to the hospital and receive in return all the medical services they and their families needed. In effect the hospital became their local health fund, and expanded and flourished as a result. The community-owned institution was, he says proudly, "possibly the most progressive hospital in the world".

For much of the 20th century Newcastle was distinguished by the dirt in the air and on its buildings. Says the valuer Bob Dupont: "After two or three days of still weather the smog would settle. If you went away you'd smell it when you came back."

Les Murray recalls that "the big tourist thing to see in Newcastle wasn't anything like the cathedral; it was the steelworks, the coking ovens dropping their huge loads of red-hot coke, the mills running it out. BHP ran conducted tours; I went through three times."

Lots of Sydney children went through the place, too, taken there by bus in the days when industry was a more important part of Australia. Apart from that, the city saw few tourists. Its reputation was the same as many a northern town in England: tough, a bit hard, working class, and very Labor.

One sign of how things have changed is that the mayor is an independent. John Tate says that in 1999 many locals envied the fact that Port Kembla had kept its steelworks. "But we decided it was an opportunity, a challenge," he says. "And, as it turned out, that was a real turning point."


Today he feels, along with many other people I spoke with, that Wollongong got the worse deal. The end of the steelworks turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to Newcastle.

There were several reasons for this. One is that BHP handled its departure decently. Despite the natural concern on the day the steelworks closed, the closure had actually been a gradual affair over many years. BHP and government had spent a lot of money helping those who lost their jobs retrain. This is not to say there were no losers; some middle-aged men made redundant in the 1980s never worked again. But, Tate says: "It's been said you wouldn't find another company in the world to do what BHP did at the end. They probably did more than they had to."

Another factor in the city's favour was that the closure occurred when Australia was generally experiencing prolonged economic good times. In the decade to 2006 the Hunter region experienced a decline in manufacturing jobs but increases in retail and health care and social assistance (the region's biggest employers), as well as construction, education and accommodation and food services (the next biggest after manufacturing). In terms of individual organisations or businesses, the region's biggest employer is now the Hunter New England Area Health Service. Many people are surprised to learn that John Hunter Hospital (which took over after the Royal was closed following the earthquake of 1989) is one of the state's biggest.

Les Murray has a connection with John Hunter: he once spent 21 days there in a coma. "I was within 20 minutes of dying when they got me here," he recalls. "They whipped me open and fixed up my liver but I didn't improve a great deal so they had to do it again. When I came out of the coma I wondered what world it was, and gradually worked out it must be earth. It took a whole day to work that out. "

After the hospital, the next largest employer is the University of Newcastle, with 2500 employees and 30,000 students. Says the vice-chancellor, Nick Saunders: "The major growth in the economy has been the service industries. At the university we've grown significantly, and see ourselves as very good at providing professional education, in areas such as health, science and technology and teaching. Thirty per cent of our students come from outside the region and the Central Coast. We have students from over 60 countries, which adds colour and diversity to the Newcastle population."

As it turned out, BHP's departure was, in the words of Robin Mcdonald, joint research director of the Hunter Valley Research Foundation, no more than an economic "hiccup". Much diversification had occurred by the time the steelworks closed. The manufacturing industry was still robust, making things as varied as diving compression chambers and specialist clothing. The coal industry was expanding; exports rose from 56 million tonnes in 1997 to 89 million tonnes last year.

Coal, of course, has always been an important part of the Hunter. It was the seams in its cliffs, visible from the water, that encouraged white settlement in the late 1790s. These days miners are the aristocrats of the working class, with most earning well over $100,000 a year, but it was not always so.

"Coal got one of my grandfathers," says Les Murray, as we stand on shore watching a big coal ship head out to sea.

"He was a miner and got a bad dusting of coal in the lungs. It took him by the age of 50. He's buried at Muswellbrook but I don't know exactly where. When he died his wage died with him, and they couldn't afford a gravestone."

Coalmining is done mainly at vast open-cut mines in the upper Hunter Valley, beyond Singleton. Business might slow a bit in the current economic climate but the world's biggest coal export port appears to have a solid future: the State Government is allocating more exploration licences out west, and another enormous coal loader is being built on the harbour.

Other changes to Newcastle have involved its buildings. Some trace this back to 1989. "The earthquake was pivotal," Bob Dupont says. "Before then there wasn't a lot of pride in the city and its buildings. But that made people look again at what we we had."

One of those things was a city centre full of old buildings. Although the older southern end of this is very attractive (a bit reminiscent of Hobart), the shopping strip extends in an unusual pattern for kilometres along just one street, Hunter Street, parallel with the foreshore, from which it is cut off by the railway line. Parts of the northern end of Hunter Street, which is the main approach to the city, are boarded up and tacky. It is not a good look. So far no one has worked out how to resolve the twin problems of the decrepit buildings in Hunter Street and the rail barrier between the CBD and the harbour. (A proposal to remove the end of the railway line attracted considerable controversy.)

As if these problems are just too hard, there is now a huge development called Honeysuckle across the rail line and along the foreshore. This contains dozens of high-rise buildings, which are now largely occupied by businesses and professionals.

Eighteen thousand people worked in this dispersed CBD, as of the 2006 census - this compared with 24,000 in the Parramatta CBD.

One reason parts of the old centre are run-down is that locals abandoned it. "After the earthquake," Dupont says, "the CBD was closed for six weeks. People stopped coming in to shop, and a lot never went back." Unlike most cities, Newcastle did not develop from the centre outwards, but as a grouping of villages around a dozen or so coal mines. The city came into being when the mines closed down and the villages joined up. Because of this, most housing in Newcastle is still working class, although there is much gentrification around beachside suburbs such as Merewether.

Housing Department blocks of flats, interspersed with private houses, mean the social classes see much more of each other than in Sydney.

The common interests that arose from the dominance of the steelworks gave old Newcastle a certain power.

Professor Phillip O'Neill, the director of the Urban Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney, moved there in the mid-1980s and was struck by the unity of the place. "In political terms, it was probably stronger than the sum of its parts," he says.

"The Hunter Valley Development Corporation, for example, included the chiefs of big businesses such as the steelworks and the aluminium smelter, and the head of the local Labor Council. These people all brought their power and influence to bear when it came to dealing with the state and federal governments. Even the leading public servants, who ran the health and education departments, were public figures here and had power in Macquarie Street in Sydney.

"That's all changed now. Politically, Newcastle is weaker because of the business diversification we've seen since BHP shut down."

Asked to nominate an area where the city and its region has been short-changed, O'Neill nominates transport infrastructure. The major problems are not within the region but with its connections to Sydney. The rail line, a wandering 19th-century creation, is one of the more picturesque in Australia, and one of the slowest. The trip takes longer now than it did 40 years ago. This has pushed even more traffic onto the F3 freeway, which is clogged several times a day.

Says O'Neill: "A lot of the back-office work that moved out of Sydney's CBD to places such as Macquarie Park should have come to Newcastle. But because of the poor transport links, and that includes inferior broadband, we're considered too far away." He points out that the State Government has predicted Sydney-Brisbane freight traffic on the F3 will almost triple in the next 20 years.

Tate puts more emphasis on road and rail within the region. "We've got a diversified economy; we've got a terrific sporting base," he says. "The airport's got a million passengers a year going through it. The health system is pretty good, so are our educational institutions. But we need to improve transport."

Newcastle is attractive enough for Les Murray to have thought about moving down from Bunyah, with his wife Valerie. "It's always had a strong atmosphere," he says. "Still does, even though it's been gentrifying like crazy these past 10 years." So far they've resisted, although their son Peter lives in the city. If he did move down, Les would like to live facing the sea under Fort Scratchley, which is where he housed his hero Fredy Neptune for a while. At the end of the novel Fredy and his wife go to King Edward Park, the highest point in Newcastle, and tell each other stories.

I went there as an act of literary pilgrimage, on the last day of my stay in Newcastle, but found stories of a different kind. It turns out that the park, which has superb views of the ocean and the city, is Newcastle's equivalent of The Gap in Sydney. Some families have nailed small engraved plaques to the wood fence in memory of lost loved ones. One accompanying verse begins: "You came up here and spread your wings/And flew to the place that happiness brings."

Nowhere is perfect, of course. But Newcastle has much more going for it than most outsiders know. The locals are optimistic. Says Ross Kerridge: "There's a good future here as an academic centre. Compared with Sydney, the cost of living, the quality of life, and access to places such as the coast and the Hunter Valley are all attractions. I think more bright people will stay here, and more will come. In 50 years this could be Australia's Boston."

Reflecting on the past decade, he concludes: "BHP did two great things for Newcastle. It came and it went."

Most Viewed in National