AS if the sparkling effect of sunlight on the water is not enough, great harbours and rivers often wear jewellery to show off what they've got.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
Sydney has its Harbour Bridge. San Francisco has the Golden Gate and the Bay bridges. The Hudson and East rivers of New York City, the Thames through London, the Seine in Paris, and the Spree in Berlin, for instance, are garlanded with a string of bridges, ranging from the historical to the edge of tomorrow in design.
Newcastle harbour may not have the same profile, or be seen as possessing the same majesty, as some of those other waterways, but it too wears a crown. The Stockton Bridge.
The rainbow of concrete and steel soars for about a kilometre over the Hunter River's north arm.
The bridge is a harbour landmark, as it can be seen from the city, and from out to sea. From the top of the bridge, there is an expansive view of the mouth of the Hunter, and of the communities the river spawned and has sustained.
The arch connects Kooragang to the Stockton peninsula. Which means the bridge connects Stockton to the wider world.
Prior to the bridge officially opening in 1971, the people of Stockton often relied on the harbour to venture beyond their community, travelling on ferries and punts.
Stockton people were connected by water and, with their community embraced by the sea to the east and the river to the west and south, they have always been connected to water.
Water has shaped many Stockton lives and supported livelihoods.
Reg Inglis is a Stockton man and a lover of water.
His life has been dictated by time and tide. And the retired mariner's routine is as regular as the tides.
Each day at 12.30pm, the 84-year-old has a beer at the historic pub whose name tells you something about the clientele through the years: the Boatrowers Hotel.
As he sips his beer, Mr Inglis talks about his association with the harbour. He has much to tell.
"I've been on this harbour all my life," Mr Inglis says.
Reg Inglis grew up breathing the salt-spiked air near the southern end of Stockton, all the while observing the ceaseless activity on the harbour, from the commuter boats transporting workers to and from the BHP steelworks across the river to the pilot vessel Birubi, constructed just upstream at Walsh Island, chugging around the port.
He and his mates also fished from, and under, the wharves that once girdled Stockton, often "borrowing" the traps used by professional fishermen.
By the early 1950s, young Reg was on the water. He worked as a deckhand for the Walters, a local family who ran a passenger ferry service between Stockton and Newcastle.
Mr Inglis later takes me across the road from the pub to where the remains of a slipway are, with the rusting rails determinedly pushing into the river. This was where the fleet of Walters' ferries were maintained, while those not in service were moored just off the shore.
Along Stockton's edges, from the mid 1800s, there was a line of slipways and small shipyards, constructing and repairing vessels. A few had slipped away by Mr Inglis' time, however enough remained for the old seaman to be nostalgic about how Stockton used to be, when he was young.
As a teenager, Reg Inglis ventured beyond these shores and the harbour.
He began working on ships. But family life and Stockton kept calling him back, and he worked around the port, including on the punts that were a lifeline for his community before the bridge was built.
Three steam-powered vehicular ferries, or punts, criss-crossed the harbour, from the south-western side of Stockton to the Newcastle shoreline. Reg Inglis was a relief skipper on the punts, named the Koondooloo, the Lurgurena and the Kooroongaba.
"You name it, you had it on there; bicycles, buses, ambulances, all the general traffic in those years," he says, adding the punts were the connectors for people beyond Stockton, with produce brought down from the market gardens at Fern Bay to sell at the markets in Newcastle.
"They were the main thoroughfare.
"And there were a lot of blokes employed; toll collectors, firemen, deckhands, and the punts had to be maintained. So they employed a fair few."
The necessity of the punts in people's lives was made obvious by the long queues of vehicles, occasionally as far back as the Boatrowers Hotel, about a kilometre from the loading ramp. Those queues were also good for business.
"People in the queue would come in here for a quick schooner, then move down the queue," Mr Inglis recalls.
Reg Inglis also worked on the very thing that would ultimately push the vehicular ferries off the harbour and into history. As part of the Stockton Bridge project, he skippered a small tug and a barge carrying equipment.
Even today, more than 50 years since the bridge was officially opened, Mr Inglis has mixed feelings about that landmark and the change it brought to his community.
"I reckon the bridge buggered us, because you had more people coming through," he says. "But it did bring more freedom to get around, admittedly. You didn't have to wait in a queue to get over to Newcastle. And it opened up other parts of Newcastle, around Mayfield and Waratah, and Nelson Bay."
By the early 1970s, the vehicular ferries were gone, but Reg Inglis remained on the water.
He later worked on the harbour deepening project, driving launches that took crews and stores, including explosives, to the dredging and drilling vessels.
By the early 1980s, the harbour's main channel had been deepened to 15.2 metres, allowing larger ships to enter and, once they are loaded, leave the port.
After almost half a century working on the water, Reg Inglis retired. But, of course, water remains part of his life.
Built into his daily routine is a walk along the western foreshore, with Mr Inglis and his mates stopping under an old peppercorn tree that he calls the Worry Tree.
"That's where all the world's worries are solved," he explains.
He laments some of the changes along the waterfront.
The little boat harbour just in front of the Worry Tree is dominated by pleasure craft, with only a couple of prawn trawlers moored there. When he was a young bloke, there were more trawlers, and locals could buy a feed of prawns directly from the boats.
However, at least the Stockton Prawners Club is still holding its own just a little downstream beside the river. Perhaps that is because the club seems to be less about prawning and more about community.
Yet as he sits under the Worry Tree, watching the water and harbour life slip by, all is well in the eyes of Reg Inglis.
"Just watching the ships coming in and out, it's unreal," says Mr Inglis.
THE ground on which Reg Inglis walks each morning is a product of the harbour. The strip along Stockton's western shore is known as the Ballast Grounds.
In the 1800s through to the early years of the 20th century, ships entering the port would often be laden with ballast. Before they could load coal, the ships would have to discharge the ballast. It would be dumped close to where they moored, along the Stockton shore.
The peninsula, which has the shape of a tonsil dangling in the mouth of the Hunter, would grow progressively wider.
The ballast had not only been carried from faraway lands, it was also diverse. For a time, many of the ships crossing the Pacific from San Francisco carried the ruins of buildings toppled in the earthquake that devastated the US city in 1906.
So when Mr Inglis ambles along this part of the shoreline, he is walking around the world.
He imagines what this shoreline was like back in the last days of sail, when graceful masted ships tried to push off their inevitable demise by carrying coal across the seas.
"All along this foreshore there were wharves, and the clippers, the sailing ships, were tied in along here," he says.
When William H.S. Jones sailed into Newcastle on board The British Isles in 1906 to load coal, he was astounded by the sight of so many vessels along the wharves.
"The ships gave the impression of a forest of masts and spars and rigging, in a confused tangle against the skyline, as they were moored three abreast at all jetties on the Stockton side," Captain Jones wrote in his memoir, The Cape Horn Breed.
In his book, Sailortown, the renowned British seafarer, writer and folk artist Stan Hugill referred to "pretty little Stockton, where the ships went to discharge their ballast from Callao and elsewhere".
By the time Reg Inglis came along, the sailing ships had gone, and the ballast they had left behind formed the bedrock for local kids' playgrounds and adventure fields.
But Stockton kept growing due to the harbour. Reg Inglis explains how the tip of the peninsula was extended, with the shallows off its southern edge filled in with silt dredged from the harbour as part of deepening projects.
"There's a lot of reclaimed land, and it's made it better," says Mr Inglis of the area that is now parkland and play areas. "It's quite scenic when you come in through the heads and see it."
A GENERATION since Reg Inglis helped deepen the harbour, the work to keep the main channel at 15.2 metres goes on without respite. For the Hunter River continues to bring silt down to fill the channel without respite.
"I think it's a bit the same as someone who paints the Sydney Harbour Bridge," says Calvin Grills, Port of Newcastle's Dredging Manager. "You start at one end, and you go back and start again."
Each year, Port of Newcastle's dredging vessel, the David Allan, removes about 250,000 cubic metres of silt and sand from the nine-kilometre stretch of the channel, from Kooragang 10 berth to the breakwaters at the harbour's entrance.
But in recent months, the workload has literally piled up, with three flood events sending a torrent of silt down the river.
According to Calvin Grills, the channel was reduced to 14.4 metres earlier in the year.
Losing almost a metre of clearance in the channel can affect how much the big ships can load and be assured of not touching the bottom on their way out of the port.
"So they go out short loaded," says Mr Grills. And the economic impact of those reduced loads flows not only around the port but up the valley and over the seas.
So the dredging crews work at returning the channel to 15.2 metres. In the first three months of 2022, they removed a year's worth of sediment.
Then in the middle of the year came another onslaught from the weather. But in its never-ending tug-of-war with Mother Nature, the David Allan has received a reinforcement. The sweeper vessel, the Lydia, arrived in the port in July, to make the dredging work more effective.
The Lydia has a long bar off its stern, which is dragged along the harbour floor after the David Allan has been through, removing the furrows created by the dredger.
"It's basically the bulldozer of the harbour," explains the Lydia's master/engineer, Daniel Burgess. "You're making sure you've got that nice, flat, level surface all around the harbour."
A level harbour floor makes it easier for the David Allan to extract more silt next time it comes through.
On this day, the Lydia is working about 100 metres off the south-western shoreline of Stockton, where the harbour rounds the peninsula.
The area is known as the Horseshoe and is a much-used part of the port.
"Every ship comes through here, so it's important," says Calvin Grills.
But what shipping sees as a passage, the river uses as a dumping ground.
"The northern side of the Horseshoe is where we tend to find that most of the silt in a flood event accumulates," says Mr Grills. "It's based on the fact that when the [river's] north arm comes down into the south arm, the depth changes. The north arm is about four and a half metres to five metres, then it'll drop into 15.2, which is the channel depth.
"We get a velocity change with that fresh water that's flowing, and any silt that's in suspension will drop out and accumulate on the northern side of the Horseshoe. It occurs through other areas throughout the channel, but this is the main one that gets impacted upfront in a flood event."
For Calvin Grills, the harbour could well be a source of frustration. But he finds it a well of fascination. He began his career here, signing on as an apprentice fitter machinist at Forgacs, working on the floating dock. And he still considers the harbour a fascinating place - silt and all.
"I don't think there's any other harbour where you can be so close to residents," he says. "Even to be on the foreshore looking out, it's unbelievable to be that close."
TO take in a different perspective, and to view the harbour not from the shore but the water, is easy enough in Newcastle. Simply board the Stockton ferry.
Every day, from before dawn to late at night, about 1000 people step onto the ferry for the journey across the harbour between Stockton and Queen's Wharf.
On the Stockton side, the terminal is further south than it used to be. As land was reclaimed, the terminal shifted.
Reg Inglis recalls a long groyne was built into the harbour, and it became known by those walking along it to board the ferry as the "Giggle Strip". But in foul weather, Mr Inglis says, "it was no laughing matter!"
These days passengers can wait in a shelter, and when the ferry arrives, they receive a warm welcome from Steve Hoggart.
He works as a master and deckhand for Keolis Downer, the operator of the ferry service.
A few years ago, he left behind a career in the construction industry to professionally mess about in boats and become a ferryman, in the process becoming part of a Newcastle harbour tradition that reaches back into the 19th century.
"It's fantastic," Mr Hoggart says. "If you want an office to work in, this is probably the best one I can think of. You come and look at this every day, and you see all the different people. You get to know people, especially regulars."
As the passengers file on, Steve Hoggart greets them, naming quite a few of them.
"Morning, Charmaine, how are you?"
While Stockton people have the bridge, the ferry is a far quicker trip to Newcastle. What takes 20 minutes or so by car is only a three-minute journey by water. Usually.
"It takes on average around three minutes if it's a direct route, but you've got to contend with other vessels," Mr Hoggart explains. "So sometimes it could take you six, seven, maybe eight minutes to do your journey."
Ferries don't have right of way on the harbour - "the actual rule is give way to your right" - but sometimes in life, might is right, especially in the presence of a bulk carrier that is as long as three rugby league fields.
"If I was a smaller ship, I wouldn't want to cross the bigger ones, so that's probably a rule of thumb for everybody," says Steve Hoggart.
Among the passengers are office workers and students, so they are watching the clock. But on the water, getting somewhere fast is rarely the aim, as time becomes fluid.
"Some of them ask, 'Do we have to get off on the other side if we're just coming for a ride?'," says Steve Hoggart.
"The reply is, 'No, you don't have to hop off. You can just stay on and enjoy the ride there and enjoy a ride back. There's quite a few who do that."
Among those boarding the ferry are friends Cheryl Collins, from Fern Bay, and Mandy Tobin, from Stockton.
Moving to Fern Bay about three years ago, Cheryl Collins says the ferry was one thing that attracted her to this area.
"Just the sheer convenience," she says. "It's my life source to get over to the other side. It's a bit of a gift and a novelty, because we came from the country. And we certainly didn't have ferries in the country!"
Growing up in Kurri Kurri, Mandy Tobin would travel to Newcastle to ride on the ferry for pleasure. Now she rides on it for the same reason, particularly with her grandchildren.
"Just to be on the water and be able to travel across it without actually having to get your own boat in and everything, it's just amazing," she says.
Cheryl Collins says the ferry has been an escape in the midst of a pandemic.
"After COVID, it was like, 'Well, we can't go overseas. But let's go overseas to the other side'."
To both women, the Stockton ferry is an "iconic" part of Newcastle harbour.
"I liken it to Sydney Harbour Bridge," says Cheryl Collins.
"The Stockton ferry is just a part of Newcastle, even though sometimes we think we're quite forgotten over this side. This at least links us with the other side!"
As Cheryl and Mandy head off to lunch in Newcastle, Steve Hoggart prepares to welcome aboard the next lot of passengers for the journey to Stockton.
Diplomatically, he says he doesn't have a preferred direction between Stockton and Newcastle.
"Either one's just as good," he assures. "Every trip's a good trip, every trip's a different trip."
Anyway, it's not about the destination; the joy is in the journey. Steve Hoggart says there is wildlife to be seen - "we have dolphins, we have seals, we have many birds" - and there is the harbour life, with vessels of all sizes coming and going.
"Some of the passengers, we pull up to the berth and they're still sitting on the ferry because they're just enjoying it," Mr Hoggart says.
"It's a couple of minutes before they actually get up and realise they're there, because they're just looking at everything outside."
THE final leg of the journey rounds the tip of Stockton, known as Pirate Point. That evocatively swashbuckling name was conjured from something more desperate in 1800, when convicts escaping in a stolen vessel, the Norfolk, came to grief on the southern point of Stockton.
Ahead lies the northern, or Stockton, breakwater, which offers ships protection from the ravages of the sea - and helps ensure the safe passage of the enormous economic benefits that cruise in and out of the port.
Yet to many Stockton residents, what the breakwaters have given to the harbour, they have taken away from the coastline.
The erosion of Stockton beach has long been an issue for the community. But in recent years, residents have seen more and more of the coastline being eaten away by the waves, with little to replace it.
One of those residents is Ron Boyd, Honorary Associate Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Newcastle and a member of the Deputy Premier's Stockton Beach Taskforce.
Professor Boyd explains that with the predominant weather systems in the Tasman Sea being from the south-east, sand tends to move north along the coastline.
"If you stick a barrier in the way of that, such as a breakwater or a deeply dredged channel, you stop the sand," he says, adding that "a lot of the sand that should be at Stockton is at Nobbys", along the southern side of Macquarie Pier.
Professor Boyd says no one expects the breakwaters would be moved, particularly considering the role they play in generating billions of dollars in the coal trade.
But given coal prices have soared to more than $US400 a tonne recently, and 156,665,674 tonnes were exported from the port of Newcastle in 2021, Ron Boyd argues a fraction of the billions of dollars the NSW government earns in royalties could flow back to cover the cost of repairing the damage.
"I think ideally divert a very small proportion of one year's royalties to pay for putting the sand back on the northern side, where it's been artificially prevented from getting," he argues.
And part of the solution may lie in the harbour itself, according to Professor Boyd.
Ancient sand beds under sections of the lower reaches of the Hunter River, such as around Kooragang, and near Walsh Point, where the river's north and south arms meet, could be used.
"It's not unreasonable to take some of that sand and transport it back to Stockton," he asserts.
MORE than helping create calmer waters for ships, the long finger of rocks that is the northern breakwater also serves as a headstone for the graves of some of those vessels that fell victim to the sea's moods and the perils of Newcastle harbour's entrance.
About 200 ships have been lost in and around Newcastle's waters since the Norfolk was wrecked at Stockton in 1800. And many of the ships came to grief entering or leaving the port.
A notoriously treacherous stretch just to the north of the entrance was called the Oyster Bank. According to the late Terry Callen, a Stockton-born writer and maritime historian, 41 ships were lost on the Oyster Bank.
Work on the northern breakwater began in the late 1800s, and its path extended over the Oyster Bank. The bones of wrecked ships were incorporated into the breakwater, helping protect other vessels from the same fate. And not all those bones are buried.
The remains of the French barque Adolphe, which came to grief in 1904, remains a highlight of what is called Shipwreck Walk. The sailing ship's rusting hull looks as though it has run aground on the breakwater, and a viewing platform allows visitors to peer into its skeleton.
The Adolphe lies on, or very close to, four other wrecks, all from the 19th century; the Lindus, the Wendouree, the Colonist, and the Cawarra.
The sinking of the Cawarra was one of Australia's worst maritime disasters. When the paddle steamer sank during a gale while trying to enter the harbour in 1866, 60 people died.
As well as being reminders of loss and tragedy, the wrecks are attractions for divers.
Owner of dive business Grey Nurse Charters, Tony Strazzari, has been exploring the breakwater wrecks for more than 20 years.
"What struck me was because there were so many wrecks, and they're on top of each other, there's stuff all over the place," Mr Strazzari says.
With often poor visibility and a pile of rusting steel to contend with, it can be hard underwater to interpret the different wrecks.
"They're fairly broken up, and the masts have fallen in different directions, so it's hard to work out which mast is from which ship," the dive operator says.
The ships' corpses have brought on new life, with a profusion of marine flora and fauna on and around the wrecks, from soft corals to wobbegongs lurking in crevices.
Yet the diver doesn't lose sight of the wrecks' significance.
"It's absolutely fascinating," Tony Strazzari says of the wreck dives. "It was a busy harbour, and with those sailing ships, when they went across the sea, it was dangerous, when they were coming into the harbour, it was dangerous. Just about every part of those voyages was a risk."
Even these days, with a much safer harbour for vessels to enter and leave, those charged with the port's operation keep out a weather eye for the ships and the welfare of those on board.
When asked if is there a better feeling than being on a ship heading to sea, Newcastle's Harbour Master, Captain Vikas Bangia replies, "When a fully loaded Capesize sails out of the harbour, when I see the stern of a ship, that's also very, very pleasing".
"It's great to see a safe-loaded ship leaving the port of Newcastle for her next voyage."
BEYOND the breakwaters, the security of the harbour ends, and so begins the world of possibilities and dangers that the sea holds.
But for those whose lives are based around the harbour, they continue to look over the horizon, imagining what this port can become.
Port of Newcastle CEO Craig Carmody sees this place, the world's largest coal export port, having a much more diverse revenue base in the near future.
"Fifty per cent non-coal revenue by 2030," Mr Carmody says, as he lists what he envisions coming to the port: container terminal; hydrogen hub; all the unused land becoming occupied and productive, and; a more developed marine services precinct, including the possibility of building ships in Newcastle once more.
"I'm not being Pollyanna here," says Mr Carmody. "That is an actual possible business.
"But what we've got to do is build the base of everything again in some ways. We ran it all down. I think COVID has reminded everybody of the importance of having a bit of sovereign control over manufacturing, over products, over shipping. And what an exciting time to be in the port."
And if the port's prospects are exciting, so too are the city's, according to those who ride the ebb and flow of life around the harbour.
"I'm the supreme optimist," says the Reverend Canon Garry Dodd, from Newcastle's Mission to Seafarers.
"I think Newcastle is good at reinventing itself. We've seen it before. BHP was a great example of that. As coal perhaps decreases, there will be something there that will fill that vacuum.
"So I think Newcastle will always be a city that is dependent on the port for so many different things. I think we'll always be a really strong port city."
As US President John F. Kennedy once said, "All of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean."
We Novocastrians, then, are tied to the harbour. It is a part of us. And we are a part of it. The life of the harbour and ours are bound.
Our lives are harbour lives.
Read the whole series:
WHAT DO YOU THINK? We've made it a whole lot easier for you to have your say. Our new comment platform requires only one log-in to access articles and to join the discussion on the Newcastle Herald website. Find out how to register so you can enjoy civil, friendly and engaging discussions. Sign up for a subscription here.
