The second city. Social and urban change in Newcastle, New South Wales, 1900 - c.1929

Abstract

In the 1900s the prospects for Newcastle, the centre of Australia's coal industry and the 'second city' of New South Wales, seemed poor. The anxiety of contemporaries arose from the simultaneous decline of local coal mining and the opening up of rich new mines in the hinterland which together caused considerable population loss. Heavy industry appeared to offer the city a secure future; in 1913 the Broken Hill Proprietary Company began work on a steelworks at Newcastle and the State government began building a dockyard for its shipping needs. Stimulated by the Great War, the new heavy industries expanded rapidly and Newcastle grew in response. The city's population rose from 54,000 in 1911 to 84,000 in 1921 and reached 100,000 by 1929. In this period a large part of the present city's stock of buildings was created as was the general pattern of land use. Yet despite the physical growth it generated, heavy industry failed to provide stable employment or to broaden greatly the city's social make-up; Newcastle continued to be a working class city dependent upon a single, vulnerable industry, just as it had been in the nineteenth century. Moreover, outside interests, both public and private, continued to control the city's economic life. Show more