The 2007 Newcastle storms and floods caused over $1.6 billion in damage, thousands of homes were damaged and around 5000 cars were destroyed. Tragically, 10 people across the wider region lost their lives.
Watch the ABC Newcastle film here.
Newcastle has its very own castle turret on top of The Hill in the form of the Leading Light Tower or Beacon Tower. It was one of two built to assist captains in bringing their ships safely into the port. The coast around Newcastle is littered with hundreds of shipwrecks and the pair of towers built in 1865/1866 helped to increase the safety of vessels entering the Hunter River.
Opened on 23 June 1977, Newcastle’s City Administration Centre – known as The Roundhouse – is a significant piece of brutalist architecture.
Newcastle’s Victoria Theatre is the oldest remaining theatre in NSW. Now heritage-listed, plans are in place for the next life of this grand dame.
In 2020, Vera was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to community history and to conservation, and was additionally made a Freeman of the City of Newcastle. In typical Vera fashion, she insisted, “I can think of 100 other people who should have been ahead of me!”
“I think the importance of artwork like Lycett’s in regards to a city like Newcastle is that you don’t have to go to Arnhem Land or the Kimberley to be …
In 2012, a previously unknown album of drawings from 1818, including landscapes and portraits of Aboriginal people from the Newcastle region, returned to Newcastle for a brief exhibition by the State Library of NSW. The ‘Wallis Album’ was compiled by Captain James Wallis, the Commandant of Newcastle from 1816 to 1818, in collaboration with one of the best know early colonial artists, the convicted forger Joseph Lycett.
Hamilton’s Palo Alto is a piece of Art Deco bliss built for Mr William Herbert of Silsoe Street, Hamilton, in 1935. On the market for the first time since 1961, the building is a pure Art Deco time capsule.
Newcastle East Public School is the oldest continually operating school in Austalia having started in 1816. The school’s first master was a convict on a conditional pardon, Henry Wrensford, and was originally located in a slab hut at the bottom of the hill where Bolton Street is now.
Newcastle may once have been concerned that the Russians were coming … but this news article from 1888 details the visit of HIRMS Rynda – a Russian warship that came …