Taking a wander around the origins of Newcastle's 'Orrett's Paddock'

Take, for example, historic "Orrett's Paddock" on The Hill, in inner-city Newcastle, to the west below the Obelisk. Never heard of it? Little wonder, as memories are fading fast as to the origin of this once common name. A clue here is that builder C.K.(Cec) Orrett is listed as Newcastle MBA's (Master Builders Association) president in 1949-50 and the family home was nearby.

"Orrett's Paddock" is the old, informal term for a general area once known by generations of older local Novocastrians. But you might identify it better as roughly around the former site of NBN Television in Mosbri Crescent, off Cooks Hill.

The TV studios site, now being demolished, is at the base of a gully west of the Newcastle Obelisk. Directly above it, on Wolfe Street, is Arcadia Park, named over a fading, past sister city link with a US city. NBN TV started broadcasting on site in March 1962 and left 59 years later in November 2021 for new Honeysuckle headquarters.

The story of land here is part of modern Newcastle's growth. For it's a "lost" portion of the big city land grant of 2000 acres to the Australian Agricultural Company (A.A.Coy) in colonial times. This was established as a land development company working in Australia with the help of the British Parliament in 1824. For a million acres in Australia, the A.A. Coy's British shareholders paid a million pounds ($2million).

They originally tried to set up a sheep empire in Port Stephens, then moved their focus to post-convict era Newcastle to kick-start the economy here by mining coal at its 'A' pit off Church Street, The Hill, in 1831. Five major mines soon emerged in 19th century inner-Newcastle alone. The pits were named the A, B, C and F, along with Darby Street's more famous Sea Pit (1886-1916).

At the start, Newcastle township ended at Brown Street. Everything else out to Broadmeadow and down to Glebe Road belonged to this private development company. Today the company survives and prospers as the nation's largest beef producer.

Earlier, when Newcastle mining was ending after about 90 years, the A.A.Coy began to seriously sub-divide and sell more of its old colliery land. Because of the need to provide services to several Cooks Hill mines, some of the suburb was actually subdivided from 1860. Yet, somehow, a large parcel of the A.A.Coy's estate around the future Mosbri Crescent below the hill there remained undeveloped in late 1951. I remember this so-called "Orrett's Paddock" as a wasteland, a dumping place for rubbish. It was also rumoured to have been a hoped-for replacement site for Lake Macquarie's Blackalls Park zoo.

Now, an historic 1951 "parish of Newcastle" map has emerged from the files of legendary Newcastle surveyor and former long-time lord mayor John McNaughton. It shows a general, boomerang-shaped empty area ringed by about 20 surveyed home sites. There's no Mosbri Crescent yet, or Hillview Crescent, and Swan Street is very short. This November 1951 map was compiled by McNaughton's boss-to-be, surveyor Reginald Frederick Bruyn and, much later, McNaughton himself did land surveys there.

McNaughton said that while more investigation was needed, his plan showed the whole of the land that the A.A.Coy owned there in 1951 that builder 'Cec' Orrett bought into, possibly to own all of it.

"From memory, and this is going back about 60 years, the paddock was an old rubbish tip. No, that's wrong, it was a place where builders used to leave their unwanted materials, like timber, concrete and things like old wheelbarrows," McNaughton said.

"Orrett then sub-divided the paddock, around today's Mosbri Crescent. He was a well-known builder, but not a developer as we now know them," he said.

"There were family businesses where a son, or sons, followed a father into the building trade. Other similar families were the Dorans and the Stronachs.

"Cec Orrett's son John, in fact, even built a landmark circular house on stilts for himself in Anzac Parade above the paddock. It's hidden away now, and Orrett's daughter Beverly also lived nearby in Bingle Street, The Hill."

Close by, on the south-west hillside below, the A.A.Coy's almost forgotten 'C' Pit once operated.

"The mine was called C for cat not S-E-A, and my great-grandfather died at this pit. He was aged 72 years. There were no pensions in those days," he said.

"He was a surface worker, sharpening picks for miners. He was found lifeless on the ground."

(The 'C' Pit was sunk in the hillside in 1842, but it may have only lasted a decade. It seems to have started at the same time as the pioneer 'A' Pit off Church Street closed. Unusual cast iron, fish-bellied rail lines from 1831 were then relocated to the 'C' Pit and reused. Coal from this site was transported down a short incline to join up with the railway below servicing another A.A.Coy pit - the 'B' Pit.)

Surveyor McNaughton, who was registered more than 60 years ago, has hundreds, if not thousands, of work files. Besides his own records since 1955 are those of his former boss and mentor, R.F. Bruyn, and others. It's an invaluable history of Newcastle's progress.

"We were once the biggest Newcastle surveying firm by far, with only a couple of small, one-man business rivals otherwise" McNaughton said.

When he attended a recent surveying conference in Sydney, McNaughton found he was probably the oldest working surveyor there. But his fondest memories today are often of characters he has met, especially on The Hill.

"At one end of Barker Street there once lived a dentist, Dr Allan Way. People thought he was the best, real Mickey Mouse stuff, because he was a doctor," he said.

"His place even contained suits of armour and he had this big 17-inch telescope. He was into astronomy and was said to be a member of an international group mapping the surface of Mars.

"He even warned me one day not to look at the full moon with his huge personal telescope because I'd have a blinding headache the next day.

"Anyway, this dentist was a doctor alright, but not of medicine, but hieroglyphs, Egyptian sign writing, and he used to correspond with letters to people all around the world."