CARRINGTON has been shaped, in no small part, for ships - and by ships.
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Before the intervention of the British arrivals, this area was a swampy island, known as Onebygamba by the First Nations people. On an early colonial map, from 1801, it was called Chapman Island then Bullock Island. In 1887, it was proclaimed as the Municipality of Carrington, named after the New South Wales governor, Lord Carrington.
Carrington was a place not just surrounded by water but regularly inundated by it. In 1877, the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners' Advocate referred to the community's streets as "Sloughs of Despond".
However, in the mid 1800s, the engineer who was instrumental in the development of Newcastle port, Edward Orpen Moriarty, envisioned these swampy grounds as a key to reshaping the port, to create deeper channels and more shipping berths.
Based on his plans, the sandbank that once ran along the island was progressively filled in from the 1860s, creating what would become known as the Dyke. Initially, this long finger of land pointing towards Newcastle was built up using the ballast from the holds of visiting ships.
"Here we have geological specimens from every part of the world," reported the Herald in 1877, with the journalist prophesying that a geologist in the future would "not be a little puzzled if he makes a keen survey into the composition of this artificial island".
Yet so much of this reshaping of the harbour's edge and reclamation of land were for one geological specimen in particular: coal.
Wharves were built along the embankment and cranes installed, as more and more of the coal trade was moved across the harbour from the city's foreshore to Carrington.
With the shipping came the seafarers to Carrington - and so did the hotels. As Edward Coulin pointed out in his book about the suburb where he grew up, The History of Carrington, one of the pubs was even called the Sailors Home. Perhaps to even the ledger, another hotel, the Clyde, was later turned into a branch of the Seamen's Mission.
Neither the maritime air nor the pubs ever left Carrington, not even after it ceased being surrounded by water in 1908, when a section of Throsby Creek at the northern end of the island was filled in.
A few historic pubs remain in town, including the 1930s Art Deco beauty, the Seven Seas Hotel, which remains popular with port workers.
Another reminder of Carrington's early years as a maritime community is the hydraulic engine house, at the eastern end of Cowper Street.
Built in 1877, this beautiful sandstone assemblage provided power for the coal-loading cranes.
The engine house was the first of its type in Australia, predating similar technology in Sydney by almost a decade.
Historian and author of the book, A Harbour from a Creek, Rosemary Melville says she would love to have "a crystal ball in reverse" and see the engine house in operation and experience harbour life of the late 19th century.
"I think it's such an impressive building, and when it had its chimneys, it would have been a real landmark, and a real asset to coal loading," she says.
Rosemary Melville wonders if Edward Moriarty realised the extent of change he would bring to not just Carrington but wider Newcastle.
"He created a shoreline that enabled all of that infrastructure to be built," Ms Melville says.
"It's remarkable, considering it was a swamp. Just like the BHP steelworks were built on a swamp. In Newcastle, we've done pretty well from swamps!"
ALONG the western shores of Dyke Point, facing The Basin, are the vessels that help keep ships moving and heading in the right direction towards their berths in the harbour: the tugboats.
The fleet of nine tugs belongs to Svitzer Australia, which provides towage in the port. Nuzzling into the wharf just near the tugs is a row of smaller and older boats. They may not have the stature or the imposing presence of the tugs, but these modest little craft play a mighty role in harbour life. They are the lines launches.
When a ship is entering the harbour or about to leave, these launches skitter across the harbour, night and day, in fair weather and foul, so that their crews can help secure or release a vessel.
"Without them, we wouldn't be able to secure a ship safely or let a ship go safely from the harbour," Svitzer's port manager, Geophrey Gavin, says. "So they're vital to the whole supply chain of the harbour."
On this day, two lines launches head up the Hunter River, tracing the wake of the bulk carrier, the Potina, which is heading to the Kooragang 4 berth to load coal.
Each will head to the bow and stern of the 230-metre long vessel to be part of the team effort to have the Potina at rest by the wharf, ready to have its belly filled with coal.
There will be six linesmen on the wharf, and two crew members on each of the launches. In effect, those on the boats "run the lines" from the ship to shore.
On board the launch, the Wickham, is leading hand Jason Gough. He has been a linesman for almost a quarter of a century, about half the age of the seven-metre boat he is navigating up the river.
"They're a great little boat," he says. "There are better ones out there nowadays, but for what they're doing, they do the job, and they're doing it great."
As we pass ships already moored, trussed to the wharves with ropes, the linesman notes, "We pretty well tie up everything that goes into the port," which means about 2200 vessels each year.
"Every ship you see in the river we've tied up in the past couple of days."
At K4, the Potina is being pinned against the wharf by the tugs until the linesmen do their job. And that job involves quite a bit of work.
Jason Gough explains the web of ropes being used to lock the vessel in, from "springs" to "breast lines".
The launches at each end of the Potina bob about at the foot of the hull, waiting for the ship's crew to lower the lines. The little launches look even tinier with the great steel escarpment towering over them.
Mr Gough says with many of the ships' crews having limited English, the linesmen and the seafarers often rely on hand signals to communicate.
A headline is gently lowered to the launch Almax.
Deckhand Scott Jordan gestures and directs the ship's crew, while driver Danny Price steers the launch around the ship, keeping clear of the churn created by a tug.
The ship's crew gives a thumbs up. The thick rope is on the launch's deck, and it is taken across to the linesmen on shore waiting to secure it.
Jason Gough says using launches makes it quicker and easier to run the lines to shore.
But there are risks, working on a constantly shifting base at the mercy of the weather and dealing with lines loaded with potentially lethal tension.
"If a line snaps, it could cut you in half", he explains, so there are safety procedures to ensure workers stay out of harm's way.
It takes about 30 minutes for the Potina to be securely tied up at the wharf. But already the next job is heading up the river. The bulk carrier Corona Zenith is bound for K7 to load coal, so off the launches scurry like water bugs chasing the light.
Jason Gough loves the sight of ships arriving in the port.
"It supplies me with work, and I hope they don't get rid of coal too soon!," he says but acknowledges the port is keen to diversify what it handles. "It will keep us going hopefully, keep us employed."
Jason Gough could work on the tugs, just as his brother does, but he prefers the "hands-on" role of the linesman. Sure, it can be uncomfortable in rough weather, as the launch is tossed about or the rain is pelting into the cabin, but there are compensations.
"Over the last couple of years, we've seen a lot of dolphins, and there's a lot more wildlife coming into the harbour since the BHP has been closed," he says . "You get a lot of seals. Sometimes you'll see a seal [resting] on the [ships'] rudders coming in.
"You get a nice spring morning or a lovely summer's day, it's beautiful out here. You feel like diving in, but you can't!"
So Jason Gough will remain a linesman on the little launches, tying up and releasing the big ships.
"A lot of people don't see us," he says. "We just go about our business."
LEVITATING yet leaning towards the sea on the tip of Dyke Point is the bronze statue of a woman. She looks like a figurehead on a sailing ship, as if Dyke Point could break away and sail out past Nobbys, towards where the young woman is gesturing.
The sculpture was commissioned in 1999 to recognise and celebrate 200 years of commercial shipping in Newcastle port. The work, created by Julie Squires, is titled "Destiny".
"Destiny" shares this harbourside land with the ghosts of industry.
This was once home to the State Dockyard.
This facility came into being during World War Two. Another government dockyard that had begun upriver at Walsh Island had shut in 1933.
With the world at war once more, the State Dockyard, Newcastle opened in 1942. As the former NSW Premier, William McKell, wrote in a promotional booklet for the dockyard at the end of the war in 1945, the government had responded "to Churchill's clarion call for 'ships, more ships, and still more ships'", and had "successively established the impressive combination of shipbuilding, ship repairing and engineering facilities".
"This Dockyard has made a contribution of inestimable value to the maritime needs of the Allied nations at the most critical stage of the gigantic struggle recently concluded," Mr McKell wrote. "It remains a magnificent asset towards Australia's postwar industrial rehabilitation and development."
By October 1945, just after the war, the dockyard had produced 23 vessels, including frigates and cargo ships for the Australian and US forces. More than 600 vessels were repaired at the yard, including in the floating dock moored off the Carrington shore. Many of those ships bore the scars of war from fighting Japanese forces in the Pacific.
After the war, the dockyard was one of the city's industrial cornerstones and a major employer. At its height, the dockyard had thousands of workers, building vessels that supplied and transported the occupants of an island nation, from fuel tankers and ferries to the passenger ship, the Princess of Tasmania.
One former State Dockyard worker is Jeff Yates. He started as an apprentice boilermaker in 1968 and later worked in the yard as a painter and docker. For Mr Yates, the dockyard work was generational. His father had been a foreman of the riggers.
"It was real busy, with a lot of shipbuilding going on, and ship repair work," he says.
More than build ships, the dockyard created a community, according to Mr Yates' former colleague, John Milne.
"There were some great personalities and characters. Nearly every person at the dockyard had a nickname," Mr Milne says, declining to mention what his nickname was.
"The pubs at Carrington used to do huge business. The Oriental was the best pub ever."
Brett Bollinger is well-known around the harbour as a commercial fisherman, but, for two years from 1976, he was an apprentice shipwright at the dockyard. He remembers the hum and scale of the place.
"They had their own ferry service, their own launch, to get the blokes to and from work, taking us across to the Newcastle side," Mr Bollinger says.
Brett Bollinger recalls heading out of the harbour for sea trials on the newly constructed Bass Trader II in 1976. This ship was replacing the vessel of the same name that had been built at the dockyard 15 years earlier. The Bass Trader was Australia's first roll on-roll off vehicle and container ship, carrying cargoes between the mainland and Tasmania.
As the son of a fisherman, young Brett had already cruised in and out of Newcastle harbour many times, but that voyage out to sea on the Bass Trader II was a new experience.
"To go out at that height, it's a totally different feeling," he says. "The harbour looks so much smaller from a ship than a trawler."
By the time Brett Bollinger was learning his trade, the dockyard had been riven with industrial disputes and was heading out of large-scale shipbuilding. By the late 1970s, the workforce had shrunk from about 2000 to less than 500.
The organisation's role in ship repair seemed to be buoyed by the arrival of a new floating dock, the Muloobinba, in 1978. The yard kept producing smaller vessels, notably ferries for Sydney harbour into the early 1980s.
But the State Dockyard was going under. In 1987, the facility shut. These days, there is little that is tangible to show for that centrepiece of Newcastle's maritime character: A building or two, and a handful of vessels built at the dockyard. And there are the memories, and the skills learnt there, but they too are disappearing with the passing of the years.
"There are still those skills around, but they're not young skills," says Brett Bollinger, who laments that Newcastle lost what was a "brilliant" training ground for maritime work.
Jeff Yates and John Milne share that disappointment, along with ruing so much else that was lost.
"We used to build good ships and employ a lot of people," Mr Yates says
"We lost all those jobs, we lost the money in the economy, and all those skills."
Having grown up in Carrington in a family of seafarers and waterside workers, Jeff Yates sees loss all around the port, and he feels much of the city has been locked out of the harbour.
"In those days, there were no gates, and kids could go down to the wharf, fishing," he says. "The harbourside community has been decimated. There were thousands of workers in the 1970s. These days, it would probably be in the hundreds."
JUST near where vessels built by the State Dockyard onced berthed, cruise ships now disgorge their passengers for a daytrip in the Hunter.
The first cruise ship to enter the harbour since COVID-19 shut down visits more than two years ago slid past Nobbys on August 10. That vessel, the Coral Princess, is due to return to Newcastle for a visit on Sunday.
The ships dock at what is known as the Channel Berth at Dyke Point, so the passengers disembark in the midst of a working harbour. What is not there to greet them is a large permanent terminal.
A report commissioned by the NSW government had identified Dyke Point as the best place for a permanent cruise ship terminal. However, plans for that terminal foundered in 2019, after the state government's Infrastructure NSW withdrew funding.
Not that Port of Newcastle CEO Craig Carmody seems keen on a terminal, unless a cruise company home ports its ships here.
"You'd have to have home ported cruise ships," Mr Carmody says. "When ships just visit for two or three hours, it just isn't economically sensible."
Lord Mayor Nuatali Nelmes points out there is a facility for cruise ship passengers at Dyke Point, if not the terminal that was planned. She also questions the economic benefits of a permanent terminal, without cruise lines considering Newcastle a home port for their ships.
"Not only would you get the benefit of the supplying the ships, but all of the maintenance and the work that would go on, if a ship was actually home ported here," Cr Nelmes says. "Probably in terms of economic value for the city, that would actually be a bigger, a better economic outcome."
Still, the passengers - and their money - have started to flow into Newcastle for the 2022-2023 cruise season. Eleven visits are scheduled for this season, with an estimated 17,000 passengers stepping off among the industrial ghosts at Dyke Point - if not into a permanent terminal.
Hunter tourism leader Will Creedon says Dyke Point as a disembarkation place offers mixed views for passengers.
"If I was a regular cruise passenger, I would be used to disembarking in industrial areas around the world, so Newcastle is not unique in that," Mr Creedon says.
But a first-time cruise passenger, he adds, may not see it that way, and he notes there are other places around the port, closer to the CBD, that offer a "more aesthetic welcome".
However, he says, Dyke Point does offer easy access for the provisioning of a ship, and for transporting the passengers to the area's attractions. And the location presents a great view of the city across the water.
"You see the whole city, and it's extraordinary," Mr Creedon says.
No matter where a ship may berth, Will Creedon sees the cruise industry as an integral part of the city's life and future.
"Cruising is an essential ingredient to the region, and it deserves a home in our region," he says. "But it deserves to be aspirational and inspirational, not just for passengers but for those who live in the region."
UPRIVER from the Dyke berths where bulk products and coal are handled is the stretch where water was turned into iron and steel.
This was where the BHP steelworks were, and ships would come and go, delivering iron ore and carrying away the products created in that vast complex to help build a nation.
The water frontage and access to the sea were among the reasons that had led to the steelworks being built in the Hunter River's mouth.
Even before the steelworks were officially opened in 1915, the first ship had arrived in Newcastle with a load of iron ore from Whyalla. Within a few years, rather than just chartering vessels, BHP began buying ships and had its own shipping division.
According to Captain Iain Steverson, a retired Marine Superintendent of BHP Transport and maritime historian, the company involved itself in shipping "basically to ensure they had the ability to deliver their cargo, rather than the chartering exercise".
The company's fleet grew and, in the midst of World War Two, began building its own ships at Whyalla. The BHP fleet became commonly known as the "Iron Ships", including the Iron Hunter and the Iron Newcastle.
By the time Captain Steverson was appointed the company's Marine Superintendent in 1983, running the operation out of Newcastle, he oversaw a fleet of about 20 ships. In the 1980s, on average, there were three BHP ships in Newcastle's port on any given day.
"It was busy," he says. "As soon as one ship left, another ship would be alongside, much like Kooragang now."
One of those skippering an "Iron Ship" was Maitland-born and Mayfield-raised Captain Andrew Traill.
Having grown up around the wharves, it seemed almost inevitable that the teenager would navigate his life towards ships. He signed on as a deck apprentice with BHP in 1967.
Back then, there was comparatively little development on Kooragang, so "there was hardly anything past BHP" along the Hunter River's south arm. But there was a world to explore beyond Nobbys.
Captain Traill spent a lot of time on what was known as "the black and tan run", loading coke at Newcastle for Whyalla then bringing back a cargo of iron ore for the steelworks.
"There was always a lot of dust, mostly iron ore dust, particularly at this time of the year with the westerlies blowing," Captain Traill recalls of the Hunter River berth. "There were a lot of sounds and whistles hooting."
Both retired mariners remember the "thrill" of entering Newcastle harbour, but Iain Steverson says there was little time to admire the view.
"It was a pleasant harbour to come into, but invariably you were concentrating, because the ship was under your pilotage," Captain Steverson explains, saying that the BHP ships were exempt from having a local marine pilot on board to enter and leave the port. "Rather than look at the scenery, you had to concentrate on the navigation."
Change also made its way into the port. Iain Steverson says from 1991, Newcastle was no longer the operational hub of the company's shipping arm.
And as the Newcastle steelworks moved towards shutting the gates in 1999, the once familiar sight of the Iron Ships cruising in and out of the port lessened. By the early years of the 21st century, the mining and resources giant had ceased running its own ships.
To Captain Traill, who had left the company more than a decade earlier, it was sad to see the end of Newcastle's strong link to the Iron Ships.
"It was a part of the city, a part of the port," he says. "You lost a training ground for tug captains and harbour pilots, and you lost all that maritime expertise."
These days, much of the stretch where the BHP ships berthed is slowly deteriorating or has slipped into history.
Looking at a map of the present-day port, Captain Steverson traces a line where the wharves and the Steelworks Jetty used to be. He is surprised to see that part of the river has been reshaped.
Like the vast bulk of the former steelworks site, the waterfront section's open space holds snippets of the past and possibilities for the port's future.
"As long as it's put to some good commercial use, more coal loaders, a container port," offers Captain Andrew Traill. "The infrastructure's there, with the rail and road access."
Captain Iain Steverson says that area where iron ore and steel once predominated is "a green field" and "ideal" for the development of a container terminal.
But, as he knows from his days overseeing big ships coming and going, a thriving port helps create a vibrant Newcastle.
"The harbour city in those days was vibrant." Captain Steverson says. "The place really revolved around the port. It was really quite amazing.
"It's pretty bland now."
Next week: Part 7 of "Harbour Lives with Scott Bevan" looks at containers and coal.
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