It’s not quite yet the new Berlin, as some have whispered, but a tipping point might have been reached as Australia’s sixth-largest city is being reimagined to embrace a very different future.
Not that Newcastle can ever escape its industrial past. Coal will forever occasionally wash on to its beaches from exposed coastal seams, while Newcomen Street, Bolton Street and Watt Street in the city centre salute 18th century giants of power generation. And though there’s no Pitt Street, there is a Pit Street.
But in the old warehouses, former customs house, railway station and central post office, there are the strong bones of an evolving city.
Not long ago, empty shops and offices pocked Newcastle’s main thoroughfares. Then, in 2008, a homegrown program called Renew Newcastle was a catalyst for change. It was the idea of Marcus Westbury, which has since spread internationally, to revitalise the city centre through the letting of unused buildings, for peppercorn rents, as spaces for creatives to make and trade their wares.
At the same time the University of Newcastle began to upscale its presence in the CBD with major building projects. A new light rail replaced the existing heavy rail line between Wickham and the CBD in 2019, freeing up an enormous corridor of land and adaptable infrastructure, though at a cost of about $600m.
Last year the distinctive Roundhouse building of the City Administration Centre, a 1970 design by modernist pioneer Frederick Romberg, was repurposed as Newcastle’s first five-star hotel. A coup as brutalist buildings worldwide are disappearing fast.
The Hunter River now glides past eateries, hotels and parkland. Riverside wharves have been reborn as a lifestyle precinct and once ghostly streets are lined with bars and cafes. Huge bulk coal carriers pushing upriver against the current look more and more like aberrant intrusions.
But gentrification is not everyone’s cup of soy latte, and not just because Newcastle’s median house price has surpassed $1m.
The test for gentrification will be whether it can avoid losing the distinctive non-Sydney feel of the place.
It rubs against the rough edges of old Newcastle – Bill Dobell’s iconoclastic portraits, the grungy cool of teenage Daniel Johns; the southern hemisphere’s biggest KFC drive-through built atop one of Australia’s oldest Aboriginal middens; the dumb insolence of the Star Hotel riot; the Newcastle psychoscape of Sarah Kendall’s brilliant Frayed; or champions who took on the world, such as Dunghutti boxer Dave Sands and surfer Mark Richards.
Awabakal inhabitants called today’s CBD area Mulubinba, thousands of years before it was renamed Coal River, then Kingstown and finally Newcastle, by British invaders who established a penal settlement in 1804 (for 34 Irish prisoners, exiled for their role in the Vinegar Hill insurrection).
From the start they took coal and cedar, and lime made from the innumerable ancient shell middens. In the 1820s settler-capitalists began exploiting coal, timber and pastures further up the Hunter Valley into Wonnarua country and north into Worimi and Biripi country. So began a cycle of extraction and export that still goes on today, though that is inevitably changing.
Weatherboard and ripple iron speak of working-class toil. Religious edifices and huge pubs dominate the historic mining towns beyond the city.
Maybe the Newcastle 500, the V8 Supercars street race, is a nod to that traditional hard yakka Newcastle. But petrol-heads and waterfront real estate don’t mix and I suspect it will turn out to be a valediction for a Newcastle fast disappearing.
Whether or not they can co-exist, it’s likely Newcastle’s dynamic calendar of arts and culture, not street racing, will become more central to what defines contemporary Newcastle. The Newcastle writers’ festival (March), Newcastle music festival (August) and the experimental multi-disciplinary festival This Is Not Art (October) are local in inspiration and national in quality and ambition.
Newcastle’s coastal location offers a remarkable, almost physically affecting experience. But for the inner life there’s also the glory of the refurbished 1929 Civic Theatre – designed, like Sydney’s Capitol and State theatres, by Henry White – and her sister auditorium, City Hall, another White design. Rehoused in former railway workshops is the Newcastle Museum – the original convict lumber yard is now restored as an open-air historic site. Nearby Civic Park (once a coalmine) is animated by one of Australia’s finest public artworks, Margel Hinder’s 1966 water sculpture. The city’s classic mid-century modernist library building is its backdrop.
Next door is the Newcastle Art Gallery, closed for a long-overdue expansion. A doubling in size will provide a venue for blockbuster exhibitions and a fitting home for its superb collection, the second largest in NSW. This might just be what cements Newcastle as a premier destination.
Road-trippers will find it two hours north of Sydney, or fly to Newcastle airport, half an hour from the CBD.
Matt Dickson is a Hunter Valley-based arts writer who has been visiting Newcastle for four decades.
