POWERHOUSE COLLECTION

Medal commemorating centenary of Newcastle NSW

Object No. N12218-2

This commemorative medallion celebrates the centenary in 1897 of the discovery of Newcastle, 117 km north east of Sydney on the Hunter River of New South Wales. The medallion features representations of industries and activities important to Newcastle at the time including a steam ship, signal masts, Nobbys Head, a colliery poppet head and a hydraulic wharf crane lifting a railway wagon full of coal for loading into a ship. Newcastle was discovered in 1797 by Lieut. John Shortland, a naval officer who came out to Australia with the First Fleet on board the HMS Sirius. In 1797 Shortland was sailing up the New South Wales coast in pursuit of runaway convicts who had seized the government's best boat and had absconded in it. Shortland entered the estuary of the Hunter River and discovered coal there. In 1801 a penal settlement was founded at Newcastle by Lieut. Col. William Patterson under the command of Corporal Wixtead but was abandoned in 1802. The penal settlement was re-established in 1804 under Lieut. Charles Menzies and this site was consolidated between 1816 and 1819 under Capt. James Wallis. The penal settlement was closed, and the site was gazetted as a free settlement in 1823. It was surveyed the same year by Henry Dangar, declared a free port in 1846 and the town of Newcastle gazetted in 1848. The British military forces were withdrawn from Newcastle in 1851, it was proclaimed a municipality in 1859, designated as a chief town of the county of Northumberland, and thrived between the 1850s and 1880s. Newcastle's early industries included coal mining between 1804 and 1912, lime burning between 1809 and 1822, maize, wheat and barley growing from 1812 onwards, shipbuilding from 1818 onwards, salt-making between the 1820s and 1830s, and tobacco growing between the 1830s and 1840s. Margaret Simpson, Curator October 2020 Reference: Phillip Simpson, 'Historical Guide to New South Wales', Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd, North Melbourne, Vic., 2020.