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Pre-European settlement:
Like most of the non-tidal areas of the Hunter River estuary,
the City Farm site was once covered by lowland floodplain rainforest.
For local aboriginal peoples the forests and adjacent wetlands were
a rich source of materials for medicines, weapons, utensils and
culture. They also supplemented their mainly seafood diets with
fruits, tubers and wildlife they found in these forests and wetland
areas.
Timber getting:
Prized timbers such as Red Cedar, Rosewood and Ash were removed
during the first two decades of European settlement when Newcastle
was a convict settlement for Sydney’s second offenders.
Share-farming for AW Scott
From the late 1840s, William Milham share-farmed for the first
European owner of Ash Island, A.W.Scott.. William bought an area
of land which covers most of the present City Farm site from Scott
in the mid-1860s The main clearing of the site, and most of the
rest of Ash Island began around this time.
A farmhouse is built
A wood slab hut built in the 1840s beside a well and two pears
trees became too small for the Milham family of eight and in the
1860s a sandstone and seashell mortar farmhouse was built. There
were four rooms downstairs with a small room and large dormitory
upstairs. The kitchen was separate from the house. An orchard and
rose garden were planted in the yard. Today, ruins of this house
make for a pleasant picnic spot.
William Milham junior
William Milham junior established a very productive dairy farm
on the site, having imported 97 head of `well-bred Alderney’ milk
cows from Germany. The farm, like the rest of Ash Island, suffered from periodic flooding (minor
ones about every seven years and major ones every 50 years) including
a devastating one in 1897 which wiped out William's entire herd.
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Milham’s Farmhouse circas
1920s. (Photo courtesy of Jean Butler and Pam Harrison) |
By the 1990s only the
sandstone walls of the ground floor remained. |
A well and pear tree mark
the site near where the original slab hut was built. The foundations
in the foreground are of a labourers quarters built in the
1930s |
Dairying Community
Milham's (later Murison’s) farm was one of 17 that `flourished
' on
Ash Island for about a hundred years to the 1960s. In the early
days all milking was done by hand and the milk and cream turned
into cheese and butter on site and taken by boat to markets at Newcastle
and Wallsend. From about the 1940s, milking was done by machine
and milk collected from the various farms was transported in
tankers to a large processing plant at Hexham.
Land eyed for industry
After the devastating flood of 1955 (Ash Island was two metres
under water), the NSW government resumed the land intending to reserve
the area for industry. In the meantime the land was leased to farmers
who ran beef, rather than dairy, cattle. By the 1980s uncontrolled
grazing and little land improvement had resulted in the site becoming
degraded. The planned industrialization of the Ash Island (or western
end of Kooragang Island), including City Farm, did not eventuate
due to environmental and other factors. In 2001 the area received
Environmental Protection status under the 2001 Newcastle City
Council LEP
(Local Environment Plan). This level of protection however still
leaves the site vulnerable to development if the latter is deemed
to be of `State significance’. |
