Once Were Miners
Newcastle Herald
Saturday March 22, 2008
CHARLESTOWN once had a railway line running through the township, but who would ever guess it today?
Built by the Waratah Coal Company, this coal railway cut right through the mining village to service three tunnels, two of them in present Charlestown Park.One tunnel was said to be about where the bowling club off Frederick Street now stands, while the third was reported to be just past the Warners Bay turn-off, going towards Gateshead. For many years, part of an old rail embankment even defied the march of progress just off the now popular Charlestown retail strip.A large dam, where the mining company steam engines took on water for their boilers, existed in this area around 1900.The Charlestown miners, however, said that while the dam was also a favourite swimming pool for the local lads, it had a grisly reputation.Folklore has it that people with a sense of the macabre used the dam to drown all the town's unwanted cats and dogs.The coal was taken by rail only a few blocks from the tunnels to Charlestown Road. Here, the coal in skips was then transferred by wire rope down into a nearby gully to an area below and to the west of the Mattara Hotel.A huge wheel seems to have been built on land adjacent to Hopetoun Street to convey the coal down. The practice was later discontinued, however, after the cable broke and a man was killed.The area below is today vastly changed and memories of it are fading fast as new houses have smothered most of the former mining site.Known as Raspberry Gully, the site now has enormous historical significance for Lake Macquarie.Here was Charlestown's first European settlement. The Waratah Coal Company's original mining shaft was sunk here and briefly called Charles' Pit, after director Charles Smith. Charlestown owes its name to either him or to a Mr Charles, the colliery surveyor. Maybe they're one and the same.Today's popular suburb has had several names over the years. Back in 1873, the thickly wooded gully was simply called Charles' Pit, then Raspberry Gully or the Gully Pit. Hacked out of a dense forest, the deep gully soon became a hive of industry. Officially, the region was called South Waratah. Then over the years, use of the name Charlestown came to mean all company land; both the Gully Pit site and the ridgeline above.The first subdivision of the New Township of Charlestown was probably in 1876 around Ida, Pearson, Frederick and Milson streets. By 1877, there were up to 40 houses.But beside the creation of Charlestown through coal mining at Raspberry Gully, the original mine site has another big claim to fame.Raspberry Gully spawned a now long-vanished 10-kilometre private coal railway from Charlestown to the Newcastle harbour wharves.The name Gully Line miraculously survives in common use representing a precise place: the busy intersection of Lambton Road and Turton Road, Broadmeadow. The newly rebuilt Master Builders Association (MBA) headquarters now towers over the traffic lights there.Try now to visualise the delays and motoring chaos caused at this same Lambton Road intersection if steam trains from the Raspberry Gully colliery still had right of way!This Gully Line snaked from Charlestown to Port Waratah but the rail corridor land was gradually sold off from 1977 and developed for residential or commercial use.Where coal trains once trundled, the land has now mostly been infilled with townhouses. Elsewhere, there is open space, like the section of the line behind St Pius X High School.At the actual Gully Line intersection, coal trains once ran on a bridge over the stormwater drain there. The line ran roughly north-south, and even the MBA complex has been built on the old rail corridor. Further up the road, going north, past the Goninan site, the final section of the Gully Line to be subdivided came probably 20 years ago when Newcastle City Council expanded its works depot. The Gully mine had closed on December 22, 1961, with the loss of 52 jobs. Most pit surface features, however, survived on site until 1969. The actual mining area is now parkland on the very northern boundary of Lake Macquarie and almost qualifies as Kotara South.Sandwiched in between Aberfeldy Close and the rear of homes in Powell Street, the old mining land is now unrecognisable. Only a 1988 Bicentenary plaque in Kirkdale Drive recalls the South Waratah Colliery workings directly opposite, where in 1902 some 520 men and boys were employed. The nearby Raspberry Gully Reserve is another faint echo of the site's industrial past and its once abundant raspberry and blackberry bushes.The Waratah Coal Company had actually begun from Waratah's Braye Park in 1863, then transferred to Raspberry Gully in 1873. Roughly six years later, the company ceased operations and moved back to Waratah, leaving many unoccupied cottages in the new ridgeline township of Charles' Town.According to local historians, the Gully Pit then reopened in the mid 1880s to exploit the richer, deeper Borehole coal seam.Much later, in 1940, a spur line railway even linked the Gully Line to the new Crofton No.2 mine in nearby Kotara South. This mine was abandoned in 1956. Former Lake Macquarie councillor Alf Pickering, back in 1976, said the usually accepted version of Charlestown's origin was that Mr Charles, a surveyor, had been "sent up the hill" from Raspberry Gully in the early 1870s to survey a town so miners would have somewhere to live.Pickering found it interesting though that a Mrs M.Clark, of Muswellbrook, had written to him in 1972 with the opinion Charlestown was named after her cousin Charles Oakley, who had been the first baby born in the mining village.The Oakley family had been early district settlers. Oakdale Road, Gateshead, was apparently named after the family. Pickering also recalled industrial trouble around 1900 when the Raspberry Gully owners employed "free labourers", including Spanish, Italian and Turk migrants desperate for work. To house some of them, the company built homes on Charlestown Road, which locals called "Blackleg Row" or "Scab Row". Because of the chatter of many tongues the area was soon nicknamed "Monkey Town", he said. After some threats from angry Hunter miners, however, the newcomers quickly left and the modest cottages became known as Pit Row. Diagonally down Charlestown Road was also the mine manager's hilltop residence overlooking the Gully mine. Today, the site is better known for the townhouse development of Moreton Bay Gardens.Very few traces remain of the Raspberry Gully pits. There are no old faded mine signs and few, if any, obvious rusted rail lines. However, some of the modest miners cottages of Pit Row still exist, albeit modernised, on Charlestown Road. They're located only a few doors west of the high-rise Alto Apartments. What's left of an old, decaying wooden rail bridge also survives at the Lambton Road/Turton Road intersection in the stormwater drain at Broadmeadow's Gully Line.But long gone are any of the dark, chugging, steam-powered locomotives which once dragged clanking coal hoppers in their wake.A faint clue to the era of the once famous coal line came in the early 1990s when a final section of the Gully Line rail corridor was developed off St James Road, Lambton. The name of the residential project was "The Caledonians", reflecting the Caledonian Company, the owner of the Gully Colliery in the mine's twilight years.Then there's the most obvious clue of all. It's located on a pocket handkerchief plot of land just south of Charlestown's retail shopping strip.Tucked away in tiny Rotary Park and clearly visible to motorists stopped at the traffic lights (the intersection of the Pacific Highway and Dudley Road turn-off) is a large mining wheel memento.Standing about three metres tall is an upcast shaft headframe wheel, once a familiar sight at the Raspberry Gully mine workings. It was erected here in early 1973.This now historic poppet wheel was one of the final items on the Raspberry Gully site to be pulled over. Most other demolished items were fed to furnaces for scrap but this relic has luckily been preserved for posterity.Below it is a sculpture of a helmeted miner, hunched over and toiling away at the coalface. A plaque beside it reads: "Dedicated to the coal mining pioneers who in the year 1873 started the first mining venture which led to the formation of Charlestown in 1876. The poppet head was salvaged from the last remains of the Waratah Colliery which was situated in Raspberry Gully from 1873 1961."Rather symbolically, the historic wheel is sited opposite Charles Street, Charlestown.
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