Unlocking the Past 2018

Sometimes two worlds really do collide and it happened in 1953 at Cessnock Pool.

Local swimmer Janice Fogg was a champion in the pool. She won her first competition at aged 11 and for decades continued to rise through the ranks of competitive amateur swimming. Many claim she was the best swimmer Cessnock ever produced, winning State, Country and Northern District championships year after year.

In 1956 she even made it to the Olympics, training alongside legends Lorraine Crapp and Dawn Fraser as part of the Australian Olympic Swimming Squad. The following year she competed in the Country Championships where she blitzed the competition winning the 110 yards and 220 yards freestyle events and the 110 yards backstroke. 

Janice retired shortly afterward. Now known as Jan Williams, she made sure her considerable experience was not lost, becoming a teacher and coach for the Cessnock Amateur Swimming Club and nurturing the next generation of young swimmers.

But despite her extraordinary career, her strangest moment in the pool came in 1953 when she accidentally won the Miss Cessnock Pageant, a bathing beauty competition held at Cessnock Pool.

Her friend Lesley Pettigrew had urged her to enter, but Janice was unconvinced. She didn’t have the glamorous swimming costume, or high heels, necessary for a beauty queen entrant, so Lesley lent her both. To her astonishment she won, obviously impressing the judges in her borrowed red satin elastic costume and black suede heels. Her prizes were a cup, a sash and a 46-piece dinner set.

Straight after the competition she changed into a practical costume, as it was back to her normal life as a swimming champion.  Janice was booked to do a 100 yard demonstration swim as part of the swimming carnival. On the second lap of her swim she suffered agonising leg cramps, which she had never experienced and hasn’t ever experienced since. She put it down to her first time in high heels. The price of beauty indeed!

It is centuries since England’s most famous playwright, William Shakespeare, wrote ‘the course of true love never did run smooth’. Despite that, his idea - that true love frequently encounters difficulties - seems to be as universally applicable as ever.

And Cessnock’s lovers and would-be lovers have not been immune.

In February 1920 a curious love token was found in Vincent Street. It was a hand-written note adorned with blue and green ribbons and read:

          ‘If you love me as I love you

Return to me the ribbon blue

If you don’t love me, and think me mean,

Return to me the ribbon green’

Who was this true romantic leaving such a public love message? The note appeared to be written by a woman and with 1920 a leap year this might give us a clue. Leap Day, 29 February, occurs every four years and on this day custom has it that a woman can legitimately propose to a man.   

The young man who found the note was very excited. He headed to the local newspaper, the Cessnock Eagle, to tell them the story. According to the paper he believed that it was the ‘hand of Providence’ that had placed the proposal in his way and he was keen to make contact with the note’s author. Or, as the paper put it bluntly, this ‘young buck’ was ‘open for business.’ 

Two decades later love of a more raunchy kind was making waves in Cessnock. The Greta Army Camp opened in 1940 and Cessnock Municipal Council saw this as a wonderful business and civic opportunity. Soldiers were encouraged to patronise local businesses and to visit the town’s excellent facilities, such as the newly opened swimming pool.

Things might not have gone exactly as the eminent members of the Council anticipated. In their smart military uniforms the soldiers were a hit with Cessnock’s women (and maybe some men) and soon the pool became a great meeting place for young singles. Handily adjacent to the pool was the former Shakespeare Park, which provided the privacy necessary to take that new romance to the next level.

The park became known as a ‘lover’s lane’ of sorts. So much so that by 1941 residents were complaining, via letters to the local newspaper, about ‘extremely loose moral conduct taking place there’, especially at night, with lamentations that the formerly family-friendly local park had now become a ‘notorious’ place. 

When Kenneth Neate took to the stage to sing at the Cessnock Memorial Town Hall in 1960 it was a night to remember. Beginning with the national anthem, ‘God Save the Queen’, Kenneth showed his versatility across a wide selection of material: contemporary songs from the hit musical South Pacific, classics such as ‘Ave Maria’ and even ‘Flower Song’ from the opera Carmen.

Kenneth Neate was born in Cessnock in 1914. He went to Cessnock High School, where he was a school captain. Despite winning a scholarship to Teacher’s College Kenneth decided to become a police officer instead. It proved to be a good decision, as the NSW Police Force had an excellent choir which Kenneth joined. His wonderful tenor voice quickly recognised and he soon progressed to become one of their soloists, so renowned that he was nicknamed ‘the singing policeman’.

Kenneth continued his work as a police officer, but also studied with accomplished music teachers in his spare time. With his obvious talent and his passion for singing, especially opera, he was persuaded to pursue a career on the stage. Kenneth took a year’s leave from the police force to see if he could make it professionally and the rest is history.

He sang his first operatic role in ‘Madam Butterfly’ in 1937 where he took the lead role of American naval officer Pinkerton. He became a renowned Australian opera and concert singer, who then went on to international fame performing across Europe, the United Kingdom and the USA. As well as singing, he composed and produced operas.

The Cessnock Memorial Town Hall concert in 1960 was one of Kenneth’s last trips to Australia and Cessnock was abuzz with excitement at his homecoming. The concert quickly sold out and extra seating had to be provided to accommodate the crowds. The night didn’t disappoint, with Kenneth earning a standing ovation from the crowd. The Coalfields Music and Variety Club had engaged him to perform at a fee of £100, but Kenneth generously donated this entire amount back to the club.

His stage career lasted an astounding 38 years. After Kenneth retired he taught Voice and Opera Studies at a conservatorium in Munich, Germany for ten years. He lived in Munich for the rest of his life, dying there in 1997. In recognition of his global impact in the music world Kenneth was inducted into the Cessnock Hall of Fame in 2010.

One of the most loved parts of the Local Studies collection at Cessnock Library is our photograph collection.

It’s the type of record that people most ask about and it’s where we have the most requests - and rightly so. It’s an extraordinarily rich collection of images which record celebrations and festivals, tragedies and accidents, sporting and cultural events, big political moments and intimate family get togethers.

Physically our photos run the full gamut. Some are enormous, some are just tiny snapshots, some are well preserved and others have come to us in a very fragile condition. They are all a very precious history of the Cessnock Local Government Area. Currently there are 1,416 digitised photos on the Cessnock Library catalogue freely available for everyone to use and download.

Over the years many photographs have been donated to us with little or no information attached. Sometimes they come from a local deceased estate, or the person donating the photographs knows only a little, or nothing, about the image other than it records life in Cessnock.

Can you help us to identify these photographs? We’d love to pick the brains of long-time locals who may well recognise the people, places or events recorded in these photos.

Do you love history? If you do you’ll know how utterly absorbing and absolutely fascinating it is.

History gives us a powerful way to understand society. By giving us the tools to comprehend the past, history helps us to understand our world now. Progressive historians value cultural memory highly, believing that we are enriched as a society by understanding how we are all products of history. The questions we ask of the past, the topics we research and the interpretations we make are heavily influenced by the times in which we live.

Those who love local history know that history does not just happen ‘out there’, it begins at home – in your street and in your neighbourhood. And that’s where the Local Studies collection at Cessnock Library comes in. Local Studies is a specialised research collection of original material. We collect, arrange, describe and make available material related to the Cessnock Local Government area.

The Local Studies collection at Cessnock Library celebrates our local history. We do this through our changing local history exhibitions, special events and by making available to the public a great collection of records related to the Cessnock Local Government Area.

The Local Studies collection contains original records documenting the lives of local people, organisations, schools, businesses and community groups. It holds material in every format: paper documents, photographs, maps and plans, objects, images and graphics, art works, oral histories and audio-visual material. We are actively collecting material related to our local area.

The humble community hall was once one of the most important hubs in rural and regional Australia. Within its walls communities of all kinds found a space to meet, to organise, to mourn and to celebrate. The hall was a public space where all sectors of a community could come together and in doing so it was a place which helped build a sense of belonging to a region or a town.

One hall which no longer remains is Sharp’s Hall at Abermain. Located on the corner next to the Abermain Hotel, at Charles and William Street, it was a large wooden building which became a central meeting venue for Abermain’s citizens. Opening in 1909 its name seems to indicate that it was built by the then publican of the Abermain Hotel, Thomas Sharp.

The local miners quickly found it a perfect place for their meetings and they patronised it so regularly that it was sometimes referred to as ‘the miner’s hall’. It was the centre of social events for the whole community, some of which had a philanthropic purpose: to fund a library at the Abermain Public School and to raise money to fund the local fire brigade.

Sharp’s Hall was proudly non-denominational hosting social events for the Catholic, Methodist and Church of England churches. The women’s branch of the Political Labour League met there and at election time local and State government candidates addressed their constituents in meetings sometimes described as ‘fiery’. Blows were traded in the hall, but not in the political arena. Boxing matches were held in Sharp’s Hall their popularity drawing large crowds and packing it to capacity. 

In November 1910 the Church of England held a beautiful event in the hall. A Japanese Fair saw stalls selling Japanese-themed goods and attended by women dressed in traditional Japanese clothing. There was a Geisha Tea Room, maypole dances, a violin recital and performances of song and the pianoforte.

In this photo the stall holders pose at the side of Sharp’s Hall, looking lovely and rightfully pleased with themselves, the fair was a financial success raising the princely sum of more than £26 for the Church of England fund.

For another two decades the hall continued to be an important meeting place for the community. It changed names a number of times becoming known as Garrett’s Hall and also Buffalo Hall before finally being demolished in October, 1931.

The opening of Cessnock’s own radio station, 2CK, on 9 January 1939 was a grand affair held at the Regent Theatre. After the station was officially declared ‘on air’ it was followed by a dazzling concert with entertainment provided by singers, tap dancers, a comedian and even a performance from the not-to-be-missed Kurri Kurri Mouth Organ Band.

2CK was established by the Coalfields Broadcasting Company Pty Ltd. When it opened the station was located on the first floor of the building now occupied by Ray White Real Estate in Vincent Street. The station’s transmitter was on Neath Hill.

It was a well-designed modern station, housing three studios, one specifically dedicated to live broadcasts of in-house concerts complete with its own in-house grand piano. But despite being much loved by local residents the station had its challenges and a (literally) fiery history.

In the early hours of 8 December 1940 the entire broadcasting studio was destroyed by fire in a spectacular blaze. But 2CK was unbeaten and was back on air at 9.00am that day, operating from a temporary office in a Vincent Street shopfront. The cause of the fire was never established.

Disaster would strike again 12 years later. By this time the station was located on the corner of Vincent and Cooper Streets, occupying the first floor of the Cessnock Co-operative Store building. On 21 June 1952 the studios, offices and all of 2CK’s equipment went up in flames. Again it was in the early hours of the morning. A particularly poignant loss was the extensive record library of 12,000 LPs.

Unconfirmed stories later emerged that the fire started when the last announcer for the night left in a hurry, eager to catch the bus home to Maitland. In his haste an electric heater may have been left on, with disastrous results.

Once more 2CK was down, but not out. The station was broadcasting again later that morning playing music from records held in storage at 2CK’s transmitting station at Neath. Other radio stations came to their aid with 2KO at Newcastle and 2HR at Maitland sending cases of records to their sister station in its time of need.

After being on air for almost 15 years 2CK closed on 31 December 1953. A business decision had been made by the owners to amalgamate 2CK with 2HR and form two new stations from this amalgamation, 2NM Muswellbrook and 2NX Newcastle.

The station’s 50 metre mast, which had spent a decade and a half on Neath Hill, was last seen in a paddock outside Muswellbrook. 

One of the most beautiful stretches of bushland in the Cessnock Local Government Area is also one of the littlest known. Its tall trees echo with the crack of whipbirds, its narrow gully has moss-covered boulders and old stone steps and a dirt path lead down steeply to a stretch of the Hunter River boasting a yellow-sand beach perfect for swimming.  

It’s the Hunter River Reserve.

The Reserve started life as Greta Common, gazetted in 1889 and variously controlled by the NSW state government and the former Councils of Greta and Kearsley. By the time Kearsley Shire Council had inherited the Common the devastating effects of the Great Depression were biting deep and unemployment was widespread throughout the Hunter.

Each state in Australia introduced a system of unemployment relief and to receive this temporary work public work schemes were created. Many Council maintenance projects were completed during this time and much local public infrastructure was built.

Between 1934 and 1939 the Council put local unemployed men to work on Greta Common, creating a picnic ground, planting trees, building kiosks and undertaking general ‘beautification’ projects. A quarry gang was active laying stone steps through the Common which allowed picnickers to access the river and walk around the grounds more easily.

World War II bought an end to the Great Depression, albeit a dreadful one. The Hunter’s men went back to work in re-opened businesses or mines, many others enlisted in the military. All public works at Greta Common stopped.

Over the years the Common became a sleepy backwater, the kiosks were removed and it became a beloved bushland spot known mainly only to the locals. It was re-named the Hunter River Reserve and in 1994 restoration work was done on the walking trails and the original sandstone steps.

Today this eight-hectare stretch of bushland is so beautifully still and quiet it’s almost meditative. The lovely stone steps laid by the Great Depression relief workers remain, criss-crossing the bush through Lower Hunter Dry Rainforest vegetation just as they did when they were first put down.

The steps still lead walkers through the bush and down the steep slope to the Hunter River. The steps are a tangible reminder, 85 years on, of those long-gone gangs of desperate men working in the Reserve during a terrible time in their lives and our history, but who ironically left these enchanting steps as their legacy.

If you’ve been driving around our local area you can’t fail to have noticed that the wattle is out in all its golden glory. One of our most loved native plants its colours have given us our national colours of green and gold.

The wattle has long had a special, even sentimental, meaning for Australians, so there are lots of reasons to celebrate its arrival and that of Wattle Day which was just held on 1 September.  

One of the early stirrings of organised wattle love was in 1899 with the formation of the Victorian Wattle Club. For decades it organised bush walks to ‘view wattle’ every September. The club’s founder, Archibald James Campbell, was the first person to suggest that Wattle Day be celebrated across Australia on the same day.

Sydney’s Government Botanist agreed, in 1909 advocating:

‘…for the setting apart throughout the Commonwealth [of] a day on which the Australian national flower - the Wattle Blossom - might be worn, and its display encouraged.’

The following year, on 1 September 1910, the first National Wattle Day was celebrated in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. Three years later the Australian Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher, changed Australia’s Coat of Arms to include more relevant Australian symbols and made two sprays of wattle the background feature.

After World War I broke out wattle became a strongly patriotic symbol, with sprigs of wattle sold in the street to raise money for the Red Cross’s humanitarian war work. Wattle was also presented at docks and train stations to returning service men and women, a beautiful gesture for an undoubtedly emotional homecoming.

Cessnock didn’t slouch when it came to putting on its own local Wattle Day celebration. On 6 September 1955 more than 280 young people attended the first annual Wattle Ball at the Lyceum Hall.

Descriptions of the hall that night tell us that strings of coloured lights were looped across the ceiling, crepe paper in various hues decorated the supper tables and keeping true to the Wattle Ball’s theme, branches of wattle and other native trees were wound through lattice screens which had been placed throughout the venue.

It must have been a glorious night.

Wattles are perfectly evolved for our climate, they are drought tolerant and among the first plants to regenerate after fire. Wattle welcomes in the spring, painting our national colours across the land – a beautiful symbol of Australia and Australians.

In February 1928 pioneer Australian aviator Bert Hinkler became the first person to fly solo from England to Australia and the first to fly solo across the Southern Atlantic Ocean.

Hinkler’s daring and sense of adventure made him famous. After he arrived back in Australia he undertook a tour around Australia to meet his fans, flying into major cities and small country towns alike. When Hinkler flew into a town he got a rock star welcome, with enormous crowds cheering his arrival and jostling to meet him. The reaction became known as ‘Hinkler hysteria’.

Here in Cessnock a committee raising money to erect memorial gates to honour the late NSW state politician, William Kearsley (1863-1921) had run into financial trouble. A suggestion was made to ask Bert Hinkler to visit, they believed his popularity could be used to raise much-needed funds. Much to the committee’s pleasure Hinkler agreed, even better, he was to stay overnight.

At 4.15pm on 6 June 1928 Hinkler and his wife, Katherine, flew in from Maitland, landing on the Cessnock Racecourse ground. Ten thousand people, estimated to be the largest crowd ever assembled in Cessnock, roared their support.

The next morning, as Hinkler prepared to fly out to Armidale, he discovered that the tail and the undercarriage of his plane were both damaged. Most probably this had happened when he had landed the day before. And so Bert Hinkler stayed in Cessnock for another four days while repairs were undertaken.

For the first two nights he slept underneath the wing of his plane, on a stretcher bed from the racecourse’s First Aid room. The plane itself was housed under the verandah of the racecourse stand. Local mechanics and tradesmen had their 15 minutes of fame as they assisted the world-famous aviator repair his plane, with his extended stay in the town becoming source of great delight to the residents.

On 11 June 1928 Hinkler finally flew out. It was the last time we would see him in Cessnock. He was killed less than five years later, on 7 January 1933, when his plane crashed in the Italian Alps while attempting another solo flight from England to Australia. 

Rural and regional roads often have bad reputations as death traps, but there is one stretch of road which is locally notorious. Officially it’s Wollombi Road just outside of Bellbird, but to us it’s ‘the Pelton pinch’.

This narrow piece of road with its distinctive twist was known by locals as ‘the pinch’ as far back as 1916. In that year the Newcastle-Wallsend Colliery Company opened the Pelton Colliery and as part of this development built a rail line from the Bellbird Colliery to the new pit and a link into an already existing colliery rail line. This meant building a rail bridge over a local road.

Newcastle newspaper the Northern Times, reported that it ‘will cross the Wollombi road by a viaduct at the top of ‘The Pinch’ – a steep hill [a] mile and a half from Bellbird.’

As private motor cars became more affordable and so more popular this narrow stretch of Wollombi Road, where it passes under the railway line, became an infamous traffic black spot. With its single lane, blind spots and sharp turn accidents here soon rose.

By 1938 there had been so many deaths and near deaths that the Deputy Coroner of Cessnock recommend that warning signs be erected on either side of the bridge, trees on the northern side which blocked motorists’ vision be removed, along with the piers in the middle of the road, the overhead rail bridge be reconstructed and that Kearsley Shire Council take up road matters with the colliery company.

Accidents, near accidents and fatalities continued for decades. Kearsley Shire Council, the police, colliery proprietors and local residents regularly described the site as a ‘death trap’. As if negotiating the roadway itself wasn’t difficult enough, in 1944 lumps of coal falling from the wagons on the rail line above on to the roadway below created even more hazards for drivers to contend with.

It took until late 1962 for State government funding to be made available for this urgent upgrade. The following year Wollombi Road at ‘the pinch’ under the overpass was divided and became two lanes, but despite this, warning signs and centre of the road barriers it continues to be the local road with a most hazardous history.

This year has seen an enormous public outpouring of emotion as we’ve commemorated the centenary of the end of World War I on 11 November 1918.

For Australia, in terms of the numbers of deaths and casualties, this war remains the costliest conflict in our history. At the outbreak of war in 1914 Australia’s entire population was less than five million people, an extremely small number. To put this in perspective, currently Sydney alone has over five million people. From this tiny 1914 Australian population 416,809 men enlisted.

One hundred years ago our local residents were celebrating the first Christmas at peace for four years. For many families it was to be the most joyous Christmas imaginable as husbands, sons, brothers and fathers came home at last, or at least there was the sure knowledge that they were coming home.

Repatriation itself was a long process. The large number of Australian troops deployed overseas mean that it was a long trip home and most soldiers did not return until 1919.

Other families were not as lucky. Not only were the men in their families not coming home, their bodies could not even be returned. They were in mass, or unknown, graves and so for those families there would be no headstone in a local cemetery over which to cry.

In this environment public war memorials listing the names of individual soldiers took on a greater significance than just honouring their military service. For many families these memorials became the only site where they could lay flowers, grieve their loss and have a site of commemoration for the lives of men they loved.

This year Cessnock Council won a Centenary of Armistice grant through the Department of Veterans Affairs to document these war memorials across our Local Government Area (LGA). The information collected and photographs taken will be uploaded early next year to the register of War Memorials in NSW website where it will be available to everyone: www.warmemorialsregister.nsw.gov.au

One of the interesting aspects of this project is the variety of memorials which exist across our LGA: tributes to individual soldiers, marble scrolls, wooden honour boards, engraved church plaques, honour gardens, memorial gates and lone pine trees. Do you know any hidden memorials which we need to document?