Lake Macquarie - Culture and History

In 1800 Captain William Reid became the first European to make his way into the lake. Sent from Sydney to collect coal from the mouth of the Hunter River he mistook the channel for the river estuary, ventured inside and encountered some members of the Awabakal tribe, who then occupied the area from the bank of the Lower Hunter to the southern and western shores of Lake Macquarie. After he inquired about coal the Aborigines directed him to some embedded in the headland. It was only upon his return to Sydney that he realised his error. The lake was thus known as Reid's Mistake until 1826 when it was renamed in honour of Governor Lachlan Macquarie.

Reid's discovery excited no initial interest as Newcastle was, at the time, a penal settlement which the government wished to keep isolated from Sydney. Eventually pressure from settlers wishing to move into the Hunter Valley caused the penal settlement to be removed to Port Macquarie.

Lieutenant Percy Simpson was probably the first European settler in the whole Lake Macquarie area. He received a 2000-acre grant in 1826, was assigned six convicts who cleared the land, grazed cattle, and built a homestead and stockyards near a ford over Dora Creek. He left after two years but one of his convicts, Moses Carroll, stayed on as a stockman and was made constable of the area in 1834. Although settlers were thin on the ground, convict escapees, cattle thieves, timber-getters and the indigenous inhabitants caused him some difficulties.

By far the most important of the early settlers was a missionary, the Reverend Lancelot Threlkeld, an ex-actor and businessman who, in 1826, established a 1000-acre reserve for an Aboriginal mission which occupied the whole northern peninsula, from Pelican north-west to Redhead and north-east to Croudace Bay.

Threlkeld chose the land after noting it was a gathering point for Aborigines, drawn by the living conditions and food around the lake. He held his Aboriginal friends in high regard and learned their language so as to communicate and to translate scripture (this work being an early landmark in Aboriginal studies). The mission house, called 'Bahtahbah', was located on a rise overlooking Belmont Bay. It was connected to Newcastle by a rough dray track. Threlkeld started the first coal mine around the lake at Coal Point, c.1840, and subsequently bought ten acres at Swansea Heads for coal-loading and storage around 1842.

Thomas Williamson, of the Shetland Isles, bought 100 acres of land around present-day Belmont in 1863. He built two cottages, established a farm and grew grapes and bananas. Fellow Shetlander John Anderson bought 40 acres of adjacent land and began farming and dairying. There was soon a small contingent of fishermen in the district and a steam-driven sawmill was built at Cardiff Point, at the north-western tip of the bay.