With its coastal setting and balmy weather, the Australian incarnation of Newcastle – located just a few hours of north of Sydney – lends itself impressively well to drinking and dining alfresco.
Regardless of whether you fancy sitting indoors or outdoors, the city has no end of hip cafes, upmarket restaurants and sleek bars showcasing a food scene that’s more than up to rivalling Sydney’s – just try out the five-course menu at Subo, or the breakfast stack at The Blue Door Café if you need proof.
Yet despite its increasingly cosmopolitan edge – evidenced most clearly in the boutique strip of Darby St and in the shiny development taking place by its harbour – heavy industry has defined Newcastle’s recent history, and the city wears this past with a refreshing lack of fuss.
Workman’s pubs, like the affectionally named The Commy (The Commonwealth) abound, easily distinguished from more contemporary offerings by their late 19th century architecture and external signage, promising the likes of a ‘sports bar,’ ‘ATM’ and ‘wagering’ inside. Wall-mounted blackboards announce weekly specials – such as $16 schnitzels on a Tuesday, with three chalk-drawn chooks parading jauntily beneath the offer.
You’ll likely notice that many pubs bear exterior wall tiles – not an uncommon feature in warm-weather countries – but step inside one of these establishments and you’ll see that the public-facing section of the bar is also adorned with them – as are the interior walls, to about waist-height.
Attractive? Yes – but their roots lie less in #interiorinspo and more in ‘wipeability’ – giving a whole new meaning to the expression ‘piss up.’
Thanks to licensing laws that persisted right through to the mid 20th century, pubs closed at 6pm, giving workers just an hour to drink before heading home.
Although aimed at limiting drunkenness, epic binge drinking was instead the result, and this hour, which became known as The Six O’Clock Swill, saw punters maximising their precious drinking minutes by urinating right where they stood.
It’s the kind of behaviour that one might associate with Newcastle UK, which for years has been plagued by a reputation of avid booze-swilling and scanty dress-wearing.
There is plenty of flesh on show in Australia’s version of Newcastle, although it’s more in celebration, rather than defiance, of the climate – and there’s definitely no shortage of places in which to enjoy the temperatures, in whatever state of (un)dress.
From the ocean baths at Merewether at Newcastle Beaches, to the beaches themselves: Newcastle is replete with opportunities for time outside.
The stretches of sand may be less iconic than Sydney’s Bondi or Manly, but they’re also less commercialised – and far less crowded.
The 6km Bather’s Way walk takes you past all of them.
From Nobby’s Head, where the Hunter River meets the Pacific, you can follow the rugged coastline all the way around to Merewether Beach. It’s a stunning route, with ocean views as far as the eye can see and plenty of excuses to stop and descend to sea level for a dip.
One of the best of these? The Bogey Hole, an impressive manmade pool carved into a low rock shelf.
Located about 15 minutes’ walk from Newcastle Beach, it was conceived of as a private bathing pool in the early 1800s and created by convict labour. Filled by tidal movement, its glistening rocks are now lounged upon by locals, sprayed, between refreshing dips, by occasional ocean plumes.
Established in 1804, it was an exile for the worst of Sydney’s convicts – an outpost for ‘the reception of desperate characters.’ Local Aboriginal peoples, the Awabakal and Worimi, suffered at the hands of these outcasts and are only now acknowledged as the traditional custodians of the land and its surrounding waters.
Glimpses of this past can be explored at The Convict Lumberyard, and at the Newcastle Museum, particularly in the permanent ‘A Newcastle Story’ exhibition.
One of the most telling remnants of this brutal history is also one of the city’s best loved landmarks.
Nobby’s Head, from which the Bather’s Way walk begins, was once an island known to Newcastle’s indigenous inhabitants as Whibayganba, believed to house within it a giant, earthquake-causing kangaroo.
Aboriginal lore colours every aspect of the Australian environment, which is why altering landscape runs counter to belief systems – yet the discovery of coal on the island saw convict labour linking the island to the mainland by way of a pier, which is now a breakwater constructed from rocks taken from the island.
Lopped to prevent ships losing wind as they rounded the Head into the harbour, Whibayganba – Nobby’s – today stands a good 15 metres shorter than it once did.
Newcastle is still the world’s largest coal export port, but the steel industry has also left its mark on the city, with BHP steelworks employing generations of Novocastrians until its closure at the start of the millennium. 2015 marked not only one hundred years since its opening, but also a century since the landing of the ANZACs (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) at Gallipoli.
To mark the anniversary, a section of the Bather’s Way has become a memorial walkway bringing the two events together in a bridge constructed with 64 tonnes of steel and funded, in part, by BHP.
The views along the coast and out to sea are as epic as you’ll get from here, and you share them with silhouetted steel figures of soldiers, engraved with thousands of names of local families who served in World War One.
For many travelling to Australia, the oenophilic delights of the Hunter Valley, one of the country’s most esteemed wine-growing regions, would be the next stop after iconic, can’t-miss Sydney – but Newcastle’s proximity to both should place it firmly on the itinerary.
And if your few days of beaching it up in Newy leave you short on time? Head straight from sand to cellar door at Inner City Winemakers, where a selection of wines is produced in an urban setting with grapes from the Hunter and beyond. With regular tastings and events held, it’s a great way to get to grips with the grape without leaving the city – and, critically, without a tiled wall in sight.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/04/geordies-everyone-else-need-visit-newcastle-australia-12348180/?ITO=squid
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