Julie Smee

We were in the Bedding Barn on the corner of Denison St, Hamilton. It was incredibly terrifying with a huge rumble under our feet. The shaking started, and the masonry facade was falling away. Our teenage son managed to step back inside as the bricks were falling.

The metal roof was moving, and the noise was incredible. When the shaking stopped, we climbed over piles of bricks.

We could see the Hamilton Ambulance Station’s side wall had fallen away. As we made our way back to Medowie, the BHP was venting stacks; it looked like the works was on fire. As we drove onto Stockton Bridge, there was a step where the approaches had moved at both exits. We heard the bridge was closed soon after.

My late father was fishing on Hawks Nest beach. He did not feel the quake, though he recalled a larger wave washed over his fishing bag, and the home in Hawks Nest, being double brick, was damaged with minor cracking.

Col Jackson

I was working in an office building in Bolton St, Newcastle (next to the Family Law Court). I witnessed a concrete support column for the building swaying from side to side, with the attached clock flung off.

Ceiling panels were falling, and everyone was in an utter state of shock as to what was happening. Around the same time, there were reports of attacks on Family Law Court Judges, and some people initially thought the Law Court building had been bombed. But we quickly realised this was not just in Bolton St—it was citywide.

Returning to the building in the first few days following the earthquake required special permission. Seeing Newcastle CBD as basically a ghost town, with Armed Forces patrolling intersections and checking bona fides of people in the CBD, was unforgettable.

Trudy Chisholm

I was working at Commonwealth Bank Travel in Newcastle Mall. Our building started cracking—very scary, as we had no idea at the time.

I left the phone (call I was on) halfway across the office, racing out! Then at least a week after, there was a city lockdown—like a ghost town!

I did get in trouble (kind of) later for not going to the emergency evacuation point. I was young and wandered off, escaping whatever. Mobile phones (bricks) were very new back then, so I had no idea at the time what had happened. Never forget it, though.

Diane Rotumah

I was working at Hunter Water. We thought there was a gas explosion. We saw the Workers Club collapse; our building had so many cracks in it, it was terrifying.

Greg Searles

I worked at Carrington Slipways. We were erecting the bow of the Newcastle Dredge, the David Allen. When the quake hit, I had my head within the bow and the ship.

The bow began to swing and hit the ship. Dennis Hadley, our electrician, pulled me out just in time—I would have been decapitated.

Vikki Hewston McGowan

I was at work at the ATO. I was on the 4th floor of the building and had just been elected as a fire warden but hadn’t had my training.

I just told everyone to get out via the fire stairs, and no one argued. Lots of my colleagues thought we’d been hit by a bomb.

We had quite a few heroes that day, including four guys who climbed up the stairs to the 8th floor to carry a lady and her motorised wheelchair safely out of the building.

Our evacuation meeting area was in Civic Park. I held it together until they told us we could go home, and then I went to pieces a little bit, as I lived in Swan Street (near where NBN Channel 3 had their studios).

Keith Roberts

I was attending a lecture upstairs in the BHP Apprentice Training Centre, as a Diesel Mechanic involved in restructuring the workplace. We thought the overhead crane had hit the end of the building. Dirt, dust, and years of pigeon poo rained down. I lived in Hamilton then and rode my pushbike home through the chaos.

Michael Wilson

The wife and I, along with our kids and niece, were walking up Hunter Street when it hit. We watched the wave roll down Hunter, cars going all over the place.

Took wife and kids home to Carrington, got into uniform, and volunteered as a firefighter. Spent a lot of time at the Workers Club.

Not the best of times for anyone. We did what we could, worried about what was happening at home, got our heads down, and did our best. It wasn’t enough. Never experienced anything like it in my life, and don’t wish to again.

Alison Clinton

My father was walking under the awning of the Century when it collapsed during the earthquake and was badly injured.

He survived, but never recovered fully from his injuries.

Rob Baker

I was working in the booking office at Newcastle Railway Station. I had just made my morning mug of coffee and had drunk about half of it then suddenly I lost the rest of it on the lunchroom table. Our first thought was that a train had gone through the buffers at the end of the platform. Then rushed out onto Scott Street thinking there may have been a bad accident at the intersection of Scott & Watt Streets. We were advised by the station master that it had been an earthquake.

David Connell

Everyone who is old enough has a memory of that day, I’m sure. I wasn’t in town that day thank goodness, I was walking out of the portal of Moonee Colliery at Cathrine Hill Bay with a couple of colleagues. We felt and heard the rumble and thought there had been an explosion underground in the mine. We ran the last few meters to get out of the tunnel. Alarms were sounding on the surface to indicate the power had dropped off, and the mine ventilation system was off. When we weren’t chased out by smoke and debris, we thought it must have been Wallarah Colliery across the road that had blown up. Trying to match what we were seeing to what we expected was confusing for a while. When reports came through from town of a damaging earthquake, we dismissed it out of hand. Earthquakes like that don’t happen in Newcastle. Ordinary and uneventful as my memory is, it’s as if it were yesterday, like so many others I suspect. We will remember those who didn’t survive.

Fay Schulz

My dad was a patient at Royal Newcastle Hospital at the time. Him and a lot of other patients were loaded onto buses and taken down to Newcastle Beach.

Their photos were on the front page of the Newcastle Herald. My dad was front and center.

Martin Howells

I was at Gateshead and thought a truck had hit the building! Spent that night doing security at the old flour mills in Hamilton. I remember the truck still parked with the cab crushed by falling bricks, the sound of water running from a broken water pipe.

A house over the road looked like a can opener had peeled away the side wall. The sound of army trucks driving around made the whole scene seem like a war zone.

Newcastle Obelisk

Gavan Peterson

I was at work that day at Shortland Pharmacy. When the earthquake hit us, I thought that a truck had run off the road and into our shop.

I was cleaning all the old bottles in our display area, standing on a ladder, and quickly made it down and stood in shock with the rest of our small staff.

Amazingly, there was hardly any damage to the shop and not a single bottle broke. The interesting thing is the phone started running hot to see if we were open, but I don’t recall any of the callers asking if we were ok.

Another strange thing is that before I left for work, our cattle dog was making weird noises and hiding under the house as if he knew something was going to happen.

Abbie Jessup

I was 5 and I lived in Cleary street Hamilton , I was at work with my dad at French Brothers tyres cnr of Donald and Swan st Hamilton.

Across where Aldi is was the old BBC hardware and I remember feeling the quake and getting dragged out but watch the stack at the bbc hardware fall like it was in an explosion , damage to the business to .

Our house lost the side and back walls on Cleary street and we had to build a shed to live in while that got rebuilt .

Trish Lavis Brown

The silence! Immediately following the earthquake, all the animals disappeared, including the birds. There was utter silence for nearly an hour following the quake.

My sister was in Maitland riding her horse at the time. While she didn’t register the earthquake, the horse did! He stood on his hindlegs and shot off to the farthest end of the paddock to stop, quivering, at the gate, sweating copiously and whinnying loudly to no one in particular. My sister noticed other horses racing around their paddocks as well and wondered what on earth had sent them off.

I was seated at my computer with a friend. As the quake began, we were forcibly shaken sideways and stood up simultaneously, knowing immediately it was an earthquake. The monitor nearly shook off the PC, but my friend grabbed it in time. Meanwhile, the entire contents of the kitchen pantry spilled out on the floor and ditto the contents of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.

Mum was thankful her china cabinet was oriented the other way and nothing was damaged. LOL! Mum’s initial reaction was that I’d done ‘something unholy’ to her washing machine, which was loud at the best of times. She thought it was in the process of exploding, but in fact we were having an earthquake.

Our house suffered some slight damage to its foundations (one pier collapsed and another cracked) as well as minor damage to the chimney (cracks). The worst was that our long concrete driveway was cracked in several places and could no longer be skateboarded on safely.

I remember going to work on the following Monday. The devastation in Town was awful and I recall that the first floor of the Store (Pink Ellie) building had shattered and fallen into the ground floor level.

There were timber bearers poking through the street-level windows and all sorts of clothing and swim-wear displays had been thrown out into the street. It was like a war-zone!

Farther up Hunter Street, so many of the facades of older buildings had crumbled and fallen into the street, hampering access by vehicle. Our own building in Parry Street suffered cracks to its brickwork in the warehouse, but the ancient stout timber rafters held and prevented any further damage.

Next-door was not so lucky! Their brick facade simply pitched forward into the street, smashing windows and blocking the doorway. Inside, the infrastructure had skewed sideways and the building had a weird lean to the left. It was deemed unsafe and later demolished.

At the time, I worked for an Apple computer outlet. Within minutes of arriving at work, we began receiving good will messages from Apple staff in Cupertino, California. They sent us an earthquake awareness pack and many sent personal messages to staff members, assuring us they understood our feelings as they knew well the effects of earthquakes. We were blown away by the kindness of these people we’d never met.

There’s something about enduring an earthquake that brings people together.

Gary Robins

Working underground miner at teralba colliery 1.8 kms up a single entry longwall maingate .

scared the fuck out of us .thought mine explosion elsewhere in mine .

we were rats in a dead end tunnel.

We regatherd all of us together no vision white and black dust filled the heading .no communication. All dead .had to walk out 5kms approximately to pit bottom following locomotive track .

pit bottom no body had communication with pit top half men left 2 walk out through double doors Stockton borehole colliery half stayed to go up shaft .

back up generator failed on surface .

long wait to see loved ones.

Gary Maughan

As a 25 yr old bricklayer working on a concrete slab of a house in Silverstream, bent over to get some mud off the board and the slab started going back and forth under my feet, then a massive bang, we had bush across the road and every bird, cicada etc went dead silent. Driving home through the main drag of Charlestown was eerie to, shops closed, nobody in sight, traffic lights not working. Stopped at the service station on Dudley road to get some ice and was lucky to score the last 2 bags, I commented to the owner about how the next bloke turning up for ice will be p$#@d off, he pointed to the raised hoist in the workshop and said,  not as p%$#@d off the guy that owns that car up there, we’ve got no power so we can’t get it down .

Kate Douchkov

That’s me on the front step of my house (what was left of it, much of it was that pile of bricks in the laneway) in Laman Street.

Jenny Jones

My husband was a member of the SES and was sent to the Worker’s Club where the carpark ceiling had collapsed onto the cars.

He remembers helping to cut some of the car roofs away and assisting the sad recovery of bodies.

He does not talk about it much.

Janet Morgan

I was having coffee in the basement of the nurses building of RNH . There was an enormous bang and every thing shook. The road outside was waving up and down and people were getting out of their cars trying to see what was wrong. The stairwell of the nurses building had big cracks in it.

As I worked in Blood Bank at the time I went to work every day and had to be vetted every dayto go in as it was all strictly controlled.

Very eerie no cars no people.

Kate O’Brien

I was working at David Jones in the city that morning. I remember everything shaking and hearing glass shattering. The whole building was swaying, and we evacuated the store quickly.

The thing that stands out for me is seeing people running down the street covered in dust, some of them injured. It was chaotic.

It felt like time slowed down. After we evacuated, we were told to stay outside, but no one really knew what was going on. It felt like an overwhelming sense of uncertainty for the rest of the day.

Raymond McDonald

I was a bus driver at the time, stationed at Hamilton Depot. The earthquake hit just as I was approaching the intersection of Hunter and Watt Streets. My bus lurched violently, and I thought something was wrong with the engine.

I could see debris falling from buildings ahead, and I knew something was terribly wrong.

I quickly pulled over, turned off the engine, and got out to assess the situation. I remember seeing the Workers Club collapse in real time, a moment I’ll never forget.