East Maitland, a century ago
East Maitland’s history has not been written up in as much detail as the former West Maitland’s has been, but every now and then a precious unpublished piece of the East’s rich story comes to light. In 1979 a life-long local resident, Arthur Gow (1904-84), wrote a memoir about the place he recalled from his youth. In it he described East Maitland as it was from about 1910 to the mid-1920s. This article draws heavily on Arthur’s memoirs.
Arthur Gow
(Bill Gow Collection)
Sights, sounds and smells
None of the streets back then were sealed: bitumen became widely used in New South Wales only from the 1930s. Some streets were surfaced with blue metal brought in by train and mixed with sandstone gravel from the quarry at nearby One Mile Gully where it was broken up by East Maitland Municipal Council workmen with sledgehammers. The mixture was spread out and flattened with a heavy steamroller. Only the busier streets were gravelled: the rest were just dirt tracks. Footpaths were bare earth or grass between roads and houses, and kerbing and guttering was still in the future.
Cars were very few before the First World War. Arthur remembered the first one he saw, in 1914, a bright red number probably owned by the Hunter Valley coal baron John Brown and driven by a chauffeur. Arthur and his schoolmates lined up to watch it drive past. It was a memorable, era-defining event.
Only the main thoroughfares (like Lawes, Melbourne and Newcastle streets) had gas lighting even though such lighting had originated in Australia as long ago as the 1860s. At dusk, a council employee on a bike or a horse would light each lamp atop a post about 12-15 feet (roughly 4-5 metres) high. He carried a long pole with a crook and a lighted oily rag on it. The gas was turned on with the crook and lit from the rag. At daylight the next morning another council man would do the rounds to turn off the gas.
The gas itself came from local and Greta coal which was processed at the council’s gasworks at the corner of Banks St and Brisbane St. West Maitland had a council-operated gasworks too, on the site of today’s Reading Cinemas.
For heating and cooking, houses burned wood or coal. On still winter mornings, smoke curled from each chimney. The air would have been far from clean, and when there were atmospheric temperature inversions the smell of smoke would have been strong.
Nevertheless, despite the air pollution, there was bird life in abundance from tiny jenny and blue wrens to big white cockatoos. There were finches, willie wagtails, robin redbreasts, magpies, peewees, hawks, crows, galahs, parrots, parakeets and rosellas. Especially in the many small areas of remnant bush, they made a deafening cacophony of sounds.
There were the sounds of human activity, too, men working with horses and tip drays as they carted soil or gravel. Then there were the rattling trams which plied between East and West Maitland from 1909 to 1926, and the trains on the line to Newcastle and Sydney and up the Hunter Valley. Much earth was needed to level the ground for the tram tracks.
A tram in East Maitland
(Ken Magor collection)
The smells were not only those associated with burning coal and wood. Some came from the sanitary pan service run by a Mr Troy, a council employee, who parked his carts in his back yard at the corner of Victoria St and Rous St. He used tar liberally to quell the stench, though not always successfully. One day, Arthur recalled, Mr Troy dropped a full pan in Victoria St. He calmly picked up its contents with his bare hands, loaded the refilled pan onto the cart and wiped his hands on his horse’s tail!
Much of the nightsoil he collected was ploughed into a paddock at Rathluba. Some may also have gone to Chinese market gardens of which there were several in the Maitland area into the twentieth century.
All that is now long gone, the pans replaced by sewerage piping to the treatment plant downstream of Morpeth. The ubiquitous outdoor dunnies from which Mr Troy and other ‘pan men’ collected pans gave way to indoor lavatories.
There was little in the way of service reticulation in the early 1900s. Water came from rain, harvested from roofs, collected in above-ground tanks and used for drinking and cooking. The overflow went to wells for the purposes of washing and bathing.
Domestic lighting was by candles and kerosene lamps: only a few houses had gas from the council’s gas plant. There was no reticulated electricity until 1923, and it was a long time before all houses had power. Not many had telephones, either, although businesses and the better off had had them beginning in the 1880s.
Life and housing
There were some substantial houses, including Chadlington at the top of the hill on Newcastle St between Victoria and Burg streets. Chadlington was a two-storey brick building complete with a spire and modelled on an English gentleman’s residence. Two-storey houses were few and always the homes of the well-to-do. Cars, likewise, were owned only by the rich. Horse-drawn sulkies were owned by a few who could not afford cars.
Chadlington House, East Maitland
(Wright family collection)
There was another end to the housing scale. In the many patches of bush, along the railway line and in Eastville, people lived in shacks cobbled together from timber and old iron. Some of the building materials were scavenged from the local rubbish tip. There was little council regulation or control over housing standards.
In 1920 about 8000 people lived in East Maitland. Today’s population is more than twice that. Much of the urban fabric was quite loose: in Metford, Tenambit, Ashtonfield, Greenhills and Rathluba there was only scattered housing. Large-scale housing estates came much later to these areas.
Some people kept a cow or two in a vacant paddock near the house. Milking them was a chore that often fell to children. Some of the yield was heated, the cream separating on cooling.
Houses had no refrigerators, just cooling ‘safes’ with sugar sacks (hessian) draped around the sides with a large flat tray on the top filled with water. Flannel strips placed in the tray and over the bags soaked the bags and kept the food cool inside.
Kids played in the streets, quite safe with few cars and only horses, carts and drays to be wary of. Vacant lots and the bush were also favoured areas for play. Billy cart racing was popular in cleared areas in the bush, goats harnessed to carts like small trotting gigs with bicycle wheels. There were pick-up games of football and cricket on vacant lots, too.
School and Sunday School picnics were much looked forward to by the kids of the time. Ice cream was a treat, not yet a regular staple in children’s diets.
For adults there were a few cricket, rugby union and rugby league clubs and a small number of tennis courts. Few opportunities for women to play sport existed, though some of the better-off played tennis. Netball had not arrived, and junior sport on an organised basis was still in the future.
Economic activity
There was much economic activity in East Maitland during the 1920s, and workplaces were more interspersed with dwellings than is now the case. Town planning was in its infancy and doctrines of land use separation created by zoning were yet to take root. Many people lived with industrial noise and pollution as a result.
Many businesses operated in the shopping and business centre in Melbourne St and on the lower portion of Newcastle St. This was the second largest commercial area in Maitland but very much junior to High St in West Maitland. There was a bank on the corner of Melbourne and Newcastle streets and then, proceeding along Melbourne St, a baker, a grocery shop, a mixed business, a fruit shop, a café and a hairdresser. Then came the Bank Hotel, a bootmaker’s premises, a butcher’s shop, another mixed business, a tailor and mercer, another grocery shop and then the Hunter River Hotel.
On the other side of Melbourne St were a wine salon, a wholesale fruit and vegetable market, a blacksmith, the Prince’s Theatre (later the Chelsey) and East Maitland’s only chemist. Lower Newcastle St housed a grocery store, a butcher, a barber, a doctor’s rooms, a blacksmith and a timber yard. None of these remain in the buildings that still stand from those days.
Melbourne St, East Maitland, about 1915
(Photographer: A Galloway)
(Maitland City Library Collection, available on Flickr)
On the hill above Melbourne St there were scattered mixed businesses in the front rooms of houses. The Lawes St shopping area did not yet exist, but there was a blacksmith there.
Important industrial establishments included two slaughterhouses on the edges of the built-up area, one near the Victoria St station and the other off Mt Vincent Rd. The Turton and Baker brickyards were on either side of Lindesay St. These brickyards, based on local clay, were central to the Maitland economy for decades. There was a pottery business near them. A very substantial Pender and Foster sawmill was located off Pitnacree Rd.
Pender and Foster, East Maitland, 1945
(The City of Maitland General Information and Mayoral Report for the Year 1945, Maitland City Library Collection. Available on Flickr)
There were many public buildings including the Gaol, the Lands & Survey Office, the Court House, the Police Station and the gasworks and offices of the East Maitland Municipal Council. Such functions were intended when the area was surveyed in 1829, East Maitland being conceived as a ‘government’ town when High St, West Maitland, was taking shape as a centre of business. Between them, East Maitland’s public buildings provided substantial employment. The local council was particularly important as an employer, as were its equivalents in West Maitland and Morpeth.
Beyond the built-up area were the many small coal mines of the area now known as Ashtonfield. This area was peppered with disused shafts, not fenced off and a distinct hazard to anyone wandering about especially at night or under the influence of alcohol. There were also shafts along Mount Vincent Rd and near the site of the present Stockland Green Hills centre. Indeed shafts existed throughout East Maitland, and there were many mine galleries beneath the town.
Carriers with horses and drays carted the coal to the brickworks, the gasworks and the East Maitland Railway Station. Many men operated drays, in effect knitting the local economy together by carting soil, gravel, coal, farm produce and an array of items to be sold in shops. Horses, carts and the men and business houses that operated them were central to the functioning of the area, and blacksmithing was vital in keeping the carts, sulkies, drays and buggies on the roads.
Groceries, bread, meat, milk and fish were all delivered door-to-door from carts. For a time a man known simply as ‘John Chinaman’ hawked silk, cottons and pins to East Maitland houses from big round cane baskets carried over his shoulder on a pole.
Transporting people to work and to shop in the 1920s was by tram, train, bus, bicycle and walking. A few, men in professions in Newcastle’s Central Business District or semi-skilled men working at ‘the BHP’ in Carrington, commuted by train. Women worked in their homes or nearby, mostly in domestic service but to a degree in retailing and clerical work. They were not seen in manufacturing or outdoor labouring activity.
Today there are more people but less economic activity than in the East Maitland of a century ago. It is more a dormitory area than it once was, employment concentrated at Stockland Green Hills and residences generally more separated from places of employment. Housing is of a higher standard, the virtual humpies of the poor have gone, the streets are all sealed, kerbed and guttered and living standards generally are much higher than they were. These things are also true of the former West Maitland and Morpeth. Much material progress has been made over the past hundred years.
References
Gow, Arthur, Early East Maitland: memories of Arthur John Gow, unpublished memoir, 1979, Bill Gow collection.
Keys, Chas ‘Our past: East Maitland - the way it was over a century ago’, Maitland Mercury, 22 July 2022.
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: life, housing in the east’, Maitland Mercury, 29 July 2022.
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: Melbourne Street was the heartbeat of the east’, Maitland Mercury, 6 August 2022.
