The mystery of The Murdering Gully at Merewether Heights

The canine, running ahead of him, suddenly disappeared. He called out to his dog but there was no response. His faithful companion had simply vanished without a trace.

After a while, there was a muffled yelp from below. The dog had fallen into a deep fissure hidden in the undergrowth. Looking down the narrow crack, the owner saw the animal wedged and trapped maybe 15 feet below, shocked but apparently unhurt.

The canine was rescued from the crevice. But it was only one of a number of cracks that had opened up in the hillside off the walking path, concealed by undergrowth. Newcastle City Council workers tipped truckloads of rock into the previously unknown splits in the ground to protect others from future harm.

Initially though, it seemed as if another mystery of "Murdering Gully" had emerged. The dog rescue occurred in dense bushland just off Scenic Drive, Merewether Heights, as you enter Hickson Street.

The earth cracks were probably not totally unexpected as the Burwood (Merewether) Ridge around there once had three 19th century coal tunnels, now sealed off, piercing the hillside under the road. Something's likely to give eventually.

Further down, by the seaside, where a coastal coal railway ran until 1944, the conglomerate cliffs are regarded as geologically unstable.

Of course, since 1936 remote Murdering Gully has been closely identified with the Burwood Beach wastewater (sewage) treatment plant. Surrounding bush has also always had a dark reputation. Or is it undeserved?

For years the wooded hills, now part of the Glenrock State Conservation Area, were known instead as Murmuring Gully, because of the low, eerie moan of wind among the trees. Then it was somehow linked through lurid mysteries and even murders, giving it a colourful reputation, a place to be avoided.

Murdering Gully, or Burwood Gully, and nearby Burwood Beach with its buried wastewater outfall pipe, derives its name from the Burwood Estate, the original European name for Merewether.

The Aboriginals who inhabited the area north of Glenrock Lagoon called it Kona-konaba.

According to archival research shared by Professor John Maynard of the University of Newcastle, the strip of sand between the sea and Glenrock Lagoon was a pre-history "munitions factory". Natives here made hard rock weapons which they then traded with inland tribes. At least two stone axes were once found in what is now Murdering Gully.

Most people today might think that the bushland gully is largely untouched. But that's untrue - there were once coal mines nearby and the beach was called Smelter's Beach, with copper slag and broken Victorian-era pottery shards in vegetation above the shoreline. That's because pioneer Newcastle businessman James Mitchell initially bought 900 acres of coastal land extending from Merewether Ridge to Glenrock Lagoon, calling it the Burwood Estate in 1835.

In 1853, Mitchell established the Newcastle Coal & Copper Co to work both mines and a smelter. It was a big undertaking, including a two-storey brick building "130ft by 32ft" and furnace, but it only lasted two years. Years later, the operation was revived. Today nothing remains on Smelters Paddock.

Around the corner in the 1850s, coke ovens were also built behind the present Merewether baths on the northern approaches to a tram/rail tunnel (part of the "coffee pot" coastal railway to Glenrock coal mine). Now sealed off, the two ocean-front rail tunnels, built in 1861 and 1862 respectively, are claimed to be the first in Australia. A Merewether historian, though, believes some miners died while sleeping on these same railway tracks. Others got drunk regularly on nearby Burwood Beach.

One of them may even have drowned, or been poisoned, as was reported in July 1936 when a mystery body was found buried in sand below the high-water mark on the lonely beach. Only the man's elbow was protruding from the sand. He was lying on his right side with a flask under his head, clothed in dungarees and wearing black boots.

The Herald at the time reported: "The beach has a sinister reputation and is known as 'Murdering Gully'. Many years ago the decomposing body of a man was found there and the manner by which he came by his death was never satisfactorily cleared up."

This might easily refer to stories of a skeleton being found in bush by passing youth, possibly around 1900.

There are unverified reports of a man's skeleton chained to a log being found after a bushland fall-in there. It was speculated he had been a dead convict from up to a century before from an unrecorded small pit. It all seems unlikely, but in living memory there was a sudden fall-in at the Bailey orchard further south, which exposed shallow mine workings of unknown age and origin.

All that seemed to wind up the Murdering Gully story, except I was surprised to learn the site adjacent to the Water Board treatment plant had also been an "unknown" council dump for a while back in 1948. That's when smoke from a fire caused by spontaneous combustion raised the ire of Merewether ratepayers.

Then I stumbled across a yarn told by former Herald newsman Ian Healy in the 1940s. Healy wrote that back in the heyday of sailing ships, in the early 1890s, Darby Street (then old Lake Road) in Cooks Hill was a tough place, with 10 hotels between Hunter and Bull streets.

A resident told Healy that just after midnight one Sunday there were gunshots and a cart soon moved off from the Old Oak Hotel lane with several people on board.

Years later, a "foreigner" gave himself up to police in Melbourne saying he had been implicated in a murder in Newcastle. Police took him back to the Burwood Estate where a body was said to have been dumped but nothing was found and the man was deported. Healy's informant said he himself later saw bloodstains under the linoleum in a room in the hotel.

A few years later, some youths exploring Murmuring Gully said they screamed when they came across a skeleton of an unknown man and raced home to report it to police.