Newcastle

Newcastle is a port city on the coast of New South Wales, at the mouth of the Hunter River north of Sydney. It took its name from Newcastle upon Tyne, the English coal town, because of the coal seams in its cliffs.

Lieutenant John Shortland, a British naval officer, came upon the river and its coal in 1797 while searching the coast. A penal settlement for convicts sent to dig coal and burn lime opened there in 1804, first called Kingstown. Free settlers took up farms in the Hunter Valley from the 1820s, and the Australian Agricultural Company mined coal near the town from the 1830s. BHP opened a steelworks on the harbor in the 1910s, which shaped the city for most of the 20th century until it closed near the century's end.

Nobbys Head, a headland linked to the mainland by a long breakwater, carries a white lighthouse first lit in the 1850s. Christ Church Cathedral, on the hill above the city center, was built in Gothic Revival style over many decades from the late 19th century. The Newcastle Ocean Baths, opened in the 1920s, have an Art Deco pavilion facing the surf and a large pool filled by the sea. The Newcastle Knights won rugby league premierships in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with Andrew Johns as their halfback.

The Port of Newcastle ships coal from the Hunter Valley mines to Japan, China and Korea, and also handles grain and fertilizer. Nib, the health insurer, has its head office in the Honeysuckle district on the old railway land of the harbor front. Inland, the vineyards of the Hunter Valley around Pokolbin grow Semillon and Shiraz, wines first planted there in the early 19th century.