Maitland

Maitland is a city in the Hunter Region of New South Wales, Australia, on the Hunter River northwest of Newcastle. It is one of the oldest inland towns of Australia, and its High Street keeps shops and hotels from the 19th century.

The Wonnarua people are the traditional owners of the Hunter Valley. Farms were cleared on the river flats in the 1820s, and the settlement, first known as Wallis Plains, was named after Sir Thomas Maitland, a British colonial governor. Steamers carried wheat, wool and timber down the river from the wharves at Morpeth to Sydney, and Maitland grew into the main town of the Hunter in the middle of the 19th century. The coal mines of the lower Hunter later brought the railway and new suburbs, and Maitland was proclaimed a city in the 1940s.

The Hunter River flats around the city grow lucerne, vegetables and dairy pasture on their rich soils. The vineyards of the Hunter Valley wine region begin west of the city around Pokolbin, known for its semillon and shiraz.

Morpeth, a river port of sandstone buildings east of the city, has shops, galleries and a bakery in its old warehouses, beside an iron truss bridge over the river. Maitland Regional Art Gallery, in a former school building on High Street, shows art of the Hunter. Walka Water Works, a pumping station of the 1880s with a tall chimney, stands in a park beside a lake. Steamfest, held each April, brings steam trains, traction engines and old machinery to the city.