NEWCASTLE, N.S.W.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XVI, Issue 36, 11 February 1881, Page 4

NEWCASTLE, N.S.W.

The following interesting contribu° lion from a oorreppondeot appears in the Inangahua Times : — Npwoastle has « population of eocdp 25,000 or 30,000, retorue four members of Parliament, and is therefore a pluce of come considerable iroporlance ia the political system of New South Wales, of which it is a seemingly very docile yet highly profitable appendage. Originally the place was a convict settlement, and did not therefore start out in life with a very .good character ; but, the convict establishment as well probably as the convicts tberaseives heve been long defunct, and a substantial breakwater and. one or two minor public work* wUch wero conotrucled entirely by prison labor are the only vestiges that rernniu of " old hand " colonisation. Tljg history of the pluco ph ifc is now known hardly runs back more than twenty yenrs, when land wna to be purrlissed ob all. sides at £6 an acre; now, £6000 stj acre is required as a sort of Sheviir gale piice for <he seme land, arid it is hardly (0 be got nt that figure. The district owes its real settlement to the enterprise or cupidity, it is bard to say which, of 0 number ol enterprising companies, foremost among the number being what ia now known as the Hay oncl Corn Company. This corporation about the period stated, obtained a grant of 80Die 1,600,000 acres of land from the Government ; upon consideration of their opening up *he coal deposits then known to exist. They were hampered with no restrictions as to the selection of the lam!, but allowed to ttke it up wherever the? thought fit, and, kb may be iraegiued, they did it with no disadvantage to their own interest. In this coauner they became, possessed of eoree seven or eight stations in the Interior, besides all the choicest frontages to the bay and a large slica of the city area and the coal fields. Of course, the whole arrangement was then, and is etil 1 , denounced a 8 a swindle, but the Company certainly obteioed the land and did I start the coal industry, and it was like rolling 0 enow ball down p hill, for it has been rolling until it has obtained prodigious bulk, and the wealth of the Company is now considered to be j inestimable. Several other Companies followed in the wake of the one just spoken of, and obtained equally favorable concessions from the Government, and the resnlt is, that although the coal mining has been pushed to an enormous pitch of productiveness, the very eyes of the land about have been picked out by these Companies, tind is now held in an iron grip, which has retarded the natural growth of the place and shut the city up within limits which are all too narrow. In Bpite, however, of these drawbacks, up to within a year or co ago Newcastle was perhaps one of the finest and most thriving communities within the territory of New South Wales. The output of coal had reached to nearly 40,000 tons weekly, and its enormous shipping trade rivalled that of Sydney itself, end it appeared cs if no possible bounds could bo put upon the magnitude of its trade iv the fature. But in the full flush of ell this bouDtiful prosperity Newcastle suddenly sustained a blow which was like the bursting of a blood vessel in its commercial system. The history of the rupture is a short aDd instructive one, and ns it is oot without its moral in your community, which hopes some day to grow rich from its coal fields, I shall endeavor briefly to sketch it upon 6uch slender materials as I was able to gather from pereons'on the;spot. For some years after the commencement of the coal wot kings there the number of men em ployed in the pits wes comparatively email, and ns they were paid the current rate of wages they worked on in peace and apparent contentment. But as lime progressed, with tbe growth of the colonies and the needs of shipping the industry rapidly expanded, competing colonies rose into existence tbe mining population was multiplied v thousand fold, and the men feelinp their owu, or their presumed strength, began to dub tbe word "labor," with b capital letter and (0 secretly discuss Bchemeß for the advancement of their interests. For a long time the only outward manifestation of such a movement was an occasional meeting of the colliers at some common rendezvous. Later on, however, these assemblies began to wear a little more bold ant) menacing; aspect. The efforts 0/ professional agitators bad inflamed the minds of tbe men against the painted bog-bear, Capitol, end the long pent up agitation finally burst forth in a peremptory demand for higher wages. This brings the history of the place down to within tbe last few years, by which time the coal trade had reached undreamt of magnitude. Tbe •whole of the Australian Colonies, San Francisco, China, and innumerable other countries were dependent entirely tipon Newcastle for their coal supply, and it is hardly too much to say that tbe shipping interest of the world at large was concerned directly or indirectly in ibe production of the mines. Whether as ballast to return shipping, or as direct cargo, there was hardly a port British or Foreign, which did not draw largely upon its etore of wealth, snd in short Newcastle tfforded perhops the most wonderful instance which the colony has yet seen of the ranscendant power of coal in building, up a country's commercial greatness All this the miners ef course saw, but, in themselves alone recognised the instruments of that greatness. They bad seen by experience tbat the utmost resources of every mine were required to keep pace with the demand, and, holding over their employers the dread of an inatent strike, they put forward their demand for higher pay. To this request the maßters rf plied that owing to the great disparity between the capacity of the mines, no increase in tbe rate of wages could be paid without closing several of tbe collieries, as while some pits could turn out 150,000 tons annually, others oould not with equal labor yielded more than half that quantity. At this juncture the mer, convinced of the aoundnees of the masters' contention, came forward with one of the moßt absurdly iniquitous, tbe moet stupidly illogical proposals titot was ever devised to curb industry

and fatten monopoly. It was what is termed tbe " Vend system,' but it was the application of the Veud system to conditions which were wholly at varirace with tbe principles upon which that system proper resie, beiDg, in short, that the highest yeaily production of coal should be taken as a bcsiß, and that divided by eight* the number of collieries working, should be n.ade the maximum quantity put out by each during any year. Under this scheme aDy colliery was to be allowed to turn out its 15,000 tons in three or four mouths, if the miners chose, but the pit was to rmaiu idle for the balance of the year. The whole design of tbe system was, of course, to limit the actual supply of coal, aud thereby raise tho price of the commodity, and in that way enable the owners to feed the exactions of the men. To this proposal most of the less fruitful mines naturally acceded* but the larger mines quite as naturally rejected it, whereupon the miners did their worst—they struck work and threatened to hold out until the refusing miners joined the " Vend." The affected companies, however, sent to Sydney for new hands, who arrived ia due time, but were prevented for a day or two from going to work, but the arrival of a military force soon put mob law to flight, and "bo the tumult ended. Thus after months of agitation and idleness, during which the men taxed themselves to a considerable extent to send delegates about the country and [maintain the married of their clasa, they were compelled to seek work at the old rate. But tho injury to Newcastle was, and must for many years, continue to bed irreparable. The stoppage of the mines for a time paralysed the shipping trade of Australia, locked up innumerable factories, and did a widespread and inestimable injury to nearly ali branches of colonial industry. The intercolonial steamers were either laid up or running on short allowance ; the enormous collier trade was brought to a standstill, and in this emergency recourse had to be had to the mines at Russell, Bay of Islands, the trade of which place received an enormous impetus. But it was not in the loss of the earnings of the strikers or the temporary banishment of the intercolonial trade that Newcastle sustained its heaviest disaster, but the worst of the injury extended further afield. As soon as news of the strike reached Ban Trancisco, China, and other places, steps were at once taken to guard against anything co disastrous as a coal famine, and accordingly the shipping interest of those places, combined with private capitalists, sent out extensive plant to Japan and British Columbia to open up long dormant coal mines there. These coal mines are now being worked upon a large scale, and the whole coal supply of San Francisco has since been drawn from Vancouvers Island, while China is fed from Japan, and these two enormous consumers have thus entirely withdrawn their trade from the colony aDd placed ib in a channel from which it is never likely to return. The coal mines at Newcastle are situate about two miles from the harbor, and are connected by a Government railway, the companies paying so much per ton for transit and provide their own trucks. The coal, that is, round coal, is put on board for 9s per ton. The colliers earn from 8s to 10s per day of eight hours, or 3s 9d per ton for breaking out. Some of the workings are very extensive, and formerly gave employment to thousands of men. The pits are ventilated by means of fire blasts. One of those furnaces, just completed at the time of our visit, was inaugurated by a public banquet underground, and afforded sitting accommodation for no less than 600 guests, the Duke of Manchester being amongst the number. The whole of Newcastle from the sea shore for miles inland is one vast bed of coal, in fact its magnitude can hardly be estimated. The facilities for putting the coal on board ship are all that they should be. There is abundance of wharf accommodation, eight enormous cranes worked by hydraulic pressure stand at convenient distances along the quay to lift the coal on board. The loaded trucks are run on to the wharf, and are lifted holus bolus by the crane, swung round over the ship's hold, and the contents, consisting of from three to five tons, are shot below through a trap-door in the truck. In this manner 1000 tons of coal can be placed on boaad a vessel in eight hours. The cranes are owned and worked by the Government, and derive their pressure from a building nearly a quarter of a mile away. It is a splendid stone box like structure, of the most massive and substantial character. Its foundation is down 20ft in the earth, and is upon the whole a perfect pyramid of strength. At each end of the edifice is a massive stone tower, one hundred feet high, in each of which is an iron tank or cage containing fifty tons of stone. These tanks are hauled to the top of the tower by a steam winding engine, and the n disconnected like the weights of a clock, and their downward pressure upon the cisterns conveys motive power to the cranes, by means of strong mains. Nothing could exceed the rapidity and facility with which they are worked. Their movement is in fact cat-like, so quick and noiseless is it, and to see one of them snap up a loaded truck as though it were a band-box, is one of the sights of the place. The immense superiority of hydicijlic cranes over those worked by stc.tfn lies in the fact that they do not take up more than one-third of the valuable wharf space, and clean, silent, and far more rapid and sure in their movements, are always ready for instant work, and can be manipulated with the utmost safety by any person. It is said tbat the short line of railway between the wharf and Wallsend is the best paying one in the woi'ld. Newcastle is now connected with the interior by rail for a distance of 200 miles and it is intended to eventually continue the line on to Brisbane. There is as yet no land line to Sydney, but the project like the West Coast railway, has been long agitated and will no doubt be some day carried out. Opposite Newcastle on the north shore of the Hunter River, are large tin-smelt-ing works, the ore being obtained from the Richmond River district, some miles up the Hunter. Tho river where it debouches into the bay is a magnificent tidal stream, quite half a mile

wide, and. is navigable for steamers of medium draught as far up as Maitland, 40 miles distant, which is the heart of the agricultural and pastoral country. The most remarkable feature about Newcastle is the immense area of reclaimed, land, which has been raised from the water of the bay solely by the deposit of ballast from incoming shipping. A space larger than the whole of Keefton has been built up in twenty feet of water by nothing else than the ballast of twenty years shipping. It represents the contributions of probably every country under the sun, and when the geologist of the future goes skirmishing around the heterogenous deposit, he will come to the conclusion that the history of the science will have to be re-written* The city itself is picturesquely situated on the Boiithern side of the bay. It possesses one main business Btreet, about half a mile long, but the buildings though permanent are unpretentious in appearance; and the number of hotels by no means underrates the drinking capacity of colliers in general. Everybody was complaining lon dly of the dullness of the place and the injury sustained by the strike, while not a few despaired of the place ever recovering itself.