Newcastle: a city reborn
The steel town has a new life.
It’s a far cry from what Marcus Westbury found when he returned to his hometown a decade ago. “You could have shot a cannon down Hunter Street [Newcastle’s main thorough fare] and not hit anyone !” recalls the Melbourne-based broadcaster, writer and urban renewal advocate. “I was shocked.” That was late 2007, eight years after the B HP-owned steelworks that defined and employed much of Newcastle for most of the 20th century shut down. Marcus, who’d visited regularly after moving away during the early 2000s, walked the city centre, past graffiti-besmirched walls and boarded-up shop fronts and counted 150 empty buildings. “There were some really self-perpetuating dynamics happening here,” he says. “Because everything was empty, no-one wanted to open anything and this sort of bad feedback had come into play.”
The unhealthy, but reassuringly reliable, smoke plumes from the steelworks’ exhaust stacks that once hung over Newcastle had gone. But in their place a huge cloud of malaise seemed to be stifling the city. It led to Marcus setting up the not-for-profit project Renew Newcastle. “We started working with some of the owners of those vacant properties to lend them to creative and community projects,” he explains. “There’s been something in the order of 270 projects launched at more than 80 properties in the decade since then, and a lot of those have gone on to become viable businesses. That collective effect has played a big role in inspiring confidence and getting more people to move back into and set up shop in the city.”
The Renew project has since become a template for cities in other parts of the world undergoing economic rebirth and Marcus went on to consult with many of them. He’s currently CEO of the Collingwood Arts Precinct urban revitalisation project in Melbourne.
Renew was an early cog in the machinery that’s been steadily rebuilding Newcastle, stoking its conf idence and relaunching the place as a dynamic 21st-century embodiment of a modern sustainable city. It’s a resurrection that mirrors the post-industrial recoveries of cities such as Glasgow in the UK and more recently Pittsburgh in the USA.
THE NEWCASTLE AREA has links with Aboriginal peoples that stretch back many millennia and continue strongly today. But the city began in 1804 as a convict outpost near the mouth of the Hunter River – just 120km north of Sydney but far enough away to stash some of the new colony’s most despicable felons. The discovery of coal in the surrounding Hunter Valley led to the growth and development of the Port of Newcastle and ultimately BHP, which took advantage of the nearby
It’s impossible not to be swept along by the energy presently pervading Newcastle, Australia’s second-oldest and seventh-largest city, which is said to now have more cranes on the skyline than Perth and Adelaide combined.
Building work is now proceeding at a pace along the foreshore and city centre.
coal supply for steelmaking. Newcastle grew to become the world’s largest coal port and remains so today.
In 2014 a consortium with substantial Chinese interests paid $1.75 billion to lease much of the port for 99 years. While most of that money went into wider NSW coffers, more than $600 million has been funnelled back into Newcastle to fund the city’s rebirth. The following year, in what’s seen as another critical part of the renewal process, work began on ripping up the train line into Newcastle. It had been laid during the late 1800s, when water views weren’t as highly prized as they are today, and was a physical barrier between the city’s centre and stunning harbour. In the years immediately following the steelworks’ closure, it also fed a supply of vandals into the city centre at the end of the line. About the same time a state government fund was set up to address mine subsidence and its impact on development in the Newcastle CBD. Most of the city centre is in a mine subsidence zone, which affects development potential, particularly for projects above three storeys. Taller buildings require expensive structural reinforcements to foundations, which had been a huge deterrent for developers. A lot of that work is now being subsidised by the Newcastle Mines Grouting Fund, which has made the city a far more attractive proposition to out-of-town developers.
The upshot of all this is that building work is now proceeding apace along the foreshore and city centre, and a light rail system is being built to service the rapidly emerging new CBD, harbourside developments and glorious city beaches.
THERE ARE PLENTY of geographic high points in Newcastle from where you can see what all this has meant to the city. But one of the best perspectives is from the 450m-long cliff-top Memorial Walk that climbs from Bar Beach to Newcastle’s Strzelecki Lookout. Itself a symbol of the recovery, the walk provides a panoramic overview of signposts to the future and doffs its hat to the past. There’s arguably no better person to point it all out than Neil Slater.
Newcastle-born restaurateur Neil, now aged 61, has been one of the city’s staunchest advocates for more than three decades. He came up with the idea for the Walk but it was rapidly picked up by local architects, engineers, historians, former steelworkers and other business people. “It became the most sensational community-developed project that anyone could ever be involved with,” Neil says proudly. The Walk opened in 2015, the year that marked a century since the Anzac landing at Gallipoli and the start to steelmaking in Newcastle. It’s inscribed with the names of every man and woman from the region who enlisted in World War I (about 11,000 of them) and has been built using 64 tonnes of stainless steel (a gift from the old steelworks), part of which has been symbolically twisted into the double helix shape of DNA, the basis of all life. Metaphors about mateship, hard work and cooperation that represent the blue-collar heart of Newcastle abound in this structure. And the fact that thousands walk up and down it every week is equally symbolic of the reinvigoration of the city.
And back out to sea there’s always a queue of ships waiting their turn just offshore.
From the top of the walk you look south over gorgeous yellow-sand beaches, including Merewether, which was this year named Australia’s “best city beach” by Tourism Australia’s Global Beach Ambassador, Brad Farmer. To the west is the city in bustling rebuild mode beside a sparkling harbour edged by massive coal-loading facilities, other port-related industry and the former steelworks site. There’s invariably a huge ship being guided in or out of the harbour by three or four tugs. And back out to sea there’s always a queue of ships waiting their turn just offshore. Beyond the city and the harbour is the picturesque Hunter Valley that’s incongruously shared by vignerons, winemakers, dairy farmers, coalmines and power stations.
Neil’s passion to get people to Newcastle to see all this began in the 1980s when he was in his early 20s working on Thredbo’s ski f ields. This was when he became aware of the negative perceptions outsiders had of his hometown. “I’d say I was from Newcastle and people would say, ‘Oh that horrible place, bet you’re glad to get out of there!’” he recalls. “It was all these people who’d drive past, see the puff of smoke that was BHP and think that was all there was to Newcastle and didn’t see this amazing natural environment around us – the beaches and the parklands.”
IT’S SAID THAT if you’re going to have a stroke in Australia, have it in Newcastle. That’s because in the wake of the steelworks’ closure, health and medical research has risen to become a major force in the region and stroke and brain injury research and treatment have been among several key areas where Newcastle has developed a world-class reputation. Reproductive medicine, Indigenous health, cancer and the treatment of respiratory illnesses such as asthma are other key areas.
The linchpin in this has been the University of Newcastle, which first opened in the 1950s, and its close connections to the region’s health facilities. These include the huge John Hunter Hospital, other key local medical services and more recently the health research behemoth that is the Hunter Medical Research Institute (HMRI), which began the year before the steelworks shut.
“We started with 90 researchers and $100,000,” says the institute’s current director, Professor Michael Nilsson. The HMRI now has 1600 affiliated researchers, 500 in a state-of-the-art $90 million research facility that’s part of a massive health and medical precinct 15 minutes drive from the CBD and includes the John Hunter. “We’ve had fantastic growth and work very closely with our partners, the university and local health district,” Michael says. “But the real DNA of this organisation is its integration with – and the strong support it receives from – the community.”
This “integration” Michael talks of, between the community and places such as the HMRI, is being seen as hugely important to the way health research is put into practice around the world and the way it’s being done in Newcastle has been attracting much international attention. It was, Michael says, one of the main reasons he decided to relocate to Newcastle five years ago to head the HMRI. He was previously Director of Research, Development and Education at northern Europe’s largest teaching hospital, Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden. And he represents the extraordinary calibre of research talent Newcastle is now attracting. They come for the science and are hooked by the area’s lifestyle opportunities. “When I came to Newcastle for the first time I was impressed with the research community, the opportunities and the pioneering spirit that was evident,” Michael explains. “And the emphasis on translational research [putting science into practice] here also attracted me to the HMRI position.
“But it’s a phenomenal place to be for so many different reasons,” he adds, listing a range of lifestyle factors that clinch the deal for many researchers looking to move to the area. Those include local beaches and other waterways, the nearby wine region and being “very well positioned to Sydney”, by which he means close enough but not too close to dilute the region’s lifestyle attractions.
BACK AT NEIL SLATER’S harbourside restaurant, fine dining has a backdrop of massive capesize and panamax ships sliding up the harbour. “Where in the world can you experience this?” several diners comment to each other. Neil beams proudly as he hears them.
“There’s been a real coming of age for Newcastle, since the steelworks closed,” he says, although he admits it took time for that to be realised. “Sure, the steelworks built this place and there’s a great legacy there, but when BHP was here people didn’t need to look further for other opportunities. With the steelworks gone we needed to look outside the square and see what other opportunities there are and now we’ve started to come into our own.
“People used to say, ‘That horrible place, why would you want to live there?’ But now it’s, ‘Wow, you’re from Newcastle, that’s a really cool place! Tell us about what’s happening there.’”