Names of early Maitland
The site on which Maitland developed has had several names, both official and unofficial.
Indigenous names
Aboriginal names for parts of the area included Coquon or Coquun (fresh water, referring to a reach of the Hunter River), Bo-un (for the area largely covered by today’s CBD), Boomi (for Wallis Creek or the original confluence of the Hunter River with the creek next to the site of today’s Maitland Regional Athletics Centre) and Coonanbarra (the Morpeth reach of the Hunter). Not far away, a reach of the Paterson River was known to the Wonnarua people as Yimmang.
Few other Indigenous place names, of which there would have been hundreds in the area well into the culture contact era, have survived, though AP Elkins listed several in his book, Morpeth and I. They were apparently written down by EC Close and included Daragen (the swamps of Morpeth), Illulaung (the general area of Morpeth stretching to the hills of East Maitland) and Mulberring (the country around Mulbring).
The first European names
An exploratory trip up the Hunter River by James Grant, William Paterson and Francis Barrallier in 1801 saw the name Schanks Forest Plains given to the general area from about Morpeth to the site that later became West Maitland. It has been suggested by local historian Brian Walsh that the area thus named may actually have been rather smaller than this and confined to the floodplain on the Hunter’s right bank just downstream of today’s Morpeth. John Schank (sometimes rendered as Schanck) was the designer of the Lady Nelson, the ship on which the trip was made: a street is named after him in today’s Metford. Barrallier’s map of the lower Hunter contains names of mountains and islands that have, like Schanks Forest Plains, not survived.
Soon after came the convict timber-cutters. One of the places they stayed at became known as The Camp, possibly near today’s Raworth. Soon after European settlement began in 1818, the name New Banks was used by some to distinguish what is now the central Maitland area from Old Banks, on the lower Paterson River and settled a few years earlier.
Then came the name Wallis Plains, bestowed by Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1818 during an inspection with Captain James Wallis, the Commandant of the penal camp at Newcastle. This trip saw several names appear: the areas to the east and west of the lower Paterson River were labelled the Macquarie District and the Wallis District respectively. Macquarie also named reaches of the Hunter River after himself and his wife Elizabeth, and gave Wallis Creek its name. Wallis apparently suggested that a large lagoon stretching from today’s Louth Park to the Farley area be called Lake Lachlan after the Governor’s son. Of these, only the creek’s name has survived in common usage. A recently-developed subdivision in Gillieston Heights is also named Wallis Creek.
Lake Lachlan was soon considerably reduced in size, drained to create farmland. Lake Paterson, in the Woodville area and named after William Paterson, went the same way.
There have been unofficial names, too. Several were associated with Molly Morgan, one of the first settlers of the area now known as Maitland. Part of Horseshoe Bend, according to Cynthia Hunter’s Bound for Wallis Plains the location of the land grant she took up in 1819, was widely known in the 1820s as Molly Morgan’s Bend, Molly Morgan’s Grant and Molly Morgan’s Swamp, and the town that developed at Wallis Plains was called by some Molly Morgan’s, Molly Morgan’s Plains or Molly Morgan’s Flat. The track from Maitland to Singleton was popularly known as Molly Morgan’s Line of Road.
Such frequent namings after an individual who was still alive when the names were unofficially bestowed imply contemporary peer respect. Molly, the ‘Queen of the Hunter’ to some local people in the 1820s, probably had more things named after her in the Hunter than almost anybody else in her lifetime apart from Macquarie. Her name persists still in the area: there is a Molly Morgan Ridge near Allandale and a Mount Molly Morgan nearby. A drive and a motel in Maitland and a Rothbury vineyard and wine labels also carry her name, though other names used during her lifetime have not survived into modern times.
This is indicative of the fact that place names can be not only informal but also impermanent. A number of locality names in the Maitland area (like Glenarvon and Midlorn) have virtually disappeared in comparatively recent times.
Smiths Island, next to the river near today’s Glenarvon Rd before the river cut off the Pig Run meander late in the 1870s, is another locality name that has disappeared. It was named for ‘Gentleman’ John Smith, a convict contemporary of Molly Morgan. At one stage he owned the land of Smiths Island, previously part of the McDougall estate which included the future Lorn.
References
Elkin, A P, Morpeth and I, Australasian Medical Publishing, Sydney, 1937.
Hunter, Cynthia, Bound for Wallis Plains: Maitland’s Convict Settlers, Maitland City Council, Maitland, 2012.
Keys, Chas ‘Our past: Maitland and District Historical Society shares Maitland’s past names’, Maitland Mercury, 9 September 2020.
Walsh, Brian, Woodville Uncovered, Paterson Historical Society, Paterson, 2021.
