Come back in time with us for a moment or two, to the lost harbours of Newcastle and the watermen who inhabited them.
Kris Eyre's maternal grandmother grew up at Nobbys Road and was born in Alfred Street in Newcastle East in the late 1890s.
"On her birth certificate, her father's occupation states waterman," she said.
"It took a long time to realise what this meant."
Kris, of Cardiff, read Herald history writer Mike Scanlon's recent story about the watermen and Newcastle's lost harbours.
"Surprisingly, five sheltering boat harbours once dotted our shorelines. Today there's one survivor and it's inside the pilot station on Wharf Road, near Nobbys Beach," Mike wrote.
Kris said her mother, now 90, and her sister, now 96, recalled that a bell would ring when the waterman was needed for work.
"His name was Franz Josef Shuck Jnr, born on Ash Island. His father Franz Josef Snr was a landowner on Ash Island and would bring produce down the river for sale.
"He lost his life on the river going to Raymond Terrace, when his boat overturned. The river also took the life of one of his young sons and a friend coming home from school on Ironbark Creek."
Franz Jnr died on the railway tracks near their home at Nobbys. Apparently, he was talking to a train driver and didn't hear another train coming.
"I am told he was decapitated," she said.
With a dash of black humour, she sees the irony because he liked to keep his face private.
"I am told he would never have his photo taken," she said.
He was supposedly too shy.
"He would not even give his daughter away at her wedding for the same reason. I have suspicions he may have been a wanted man," she said.
When Kris looks at photos of the old boat harbours and the watermen, she wonders if one could be her relative.
"Often, I bike ride or walk past the pilot station harbour and wonder how it would have been so long ago. Wouldn't a time tunnel be great," she said.
Kris also mentioned the video and story about the Scott Sisters of Ash Island, which Topics reported on Wednesday.
"When my mother was a teen, she became friends with a girl who lived on Ash Island and spent a lot of time up there on their [the Sutton family] dairy farm.
"They are still close friends in their 90s. It is funny how the Ash Island connection came around again in her life, where her grandfather was born."
A War Story
Another relative of Kris Eyre was mentioned in David Dial's Herald column on Wednesday, The Hunter Remembers WWII.
John William Parsons, of Broadmeadow, was referred to in the column as a "Borneo prisoner".
Taken prisoner in Singapore in February 1942, he was the husband of the grandmother previously mentioned who grew up at Nobbys Road.
"She met him because he was up at Fort Scratchley," she said.
He served in both world wars.
It was after the fall of Singapore that he became a prisoner of war. He was part of the forced Sandakan death march, which is considered the worst atrocity committed against Australians in WWII. He died as a prisoner of the Japanese on July 12, 1945.
"He made it all the way to the end [of the death march]. We suspect he was executed," she said.
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