Newcastle East Women's History Walk

Newcastle East Women’s History Walk Researched by Jude Conway, on the suggestion of the Newcastle women’s group AWE and the Gender, Generation and Culture Network at the University of Newcastle map by AWE 1. Awabakal Stand at the top of the park at the end of Scott Street, overlooking Newcastle ocean baths. Newcastle harbour was called Muloobinba by the Awabakal people who frequently camped on the southern foreshore. Awabakal men and women both went fishing. The men used spears, while the women used hooks and lines and supplied most of the fish. The hooks were made of shell or bone and if they made their lines the same as the Worimi women from the north of the harbour they were made out of the inner bark of young kurrajong trees Awabakal woman Killigrant, back from fishing, painted by convict artist Richard Browne when at the Newcastle penal colony Lieutenant Coke based in Newcastle in 1827 noted that Awabakal women had the first joint of their little finger of the right hand cut off as it interfered with the drawing in of the fishing lines. An eye witness in Sydney wrote that it was the top two joints of the left hand and was done when the females were about three or four months old With maybe a baby on their shoulders, or even heavily pregnant the Awabakal women would have been precision-balanced in their flimsy bark canoes. They had small fires on clay pads in the canoe and cooked and ate the first catch of fish before taking the rest back to camp to be shared Image by Richard Browne shows fire in canoe Awabakal women also jumped off the rocks to catch lobsters, and told Lt Coke the water was still at a depth of 10 or 12 feet. 2. Newcastle Ladies Surf Club Look over the beach from site 1 rather than walk down to the beach, and imagine. After Newcastle Surf Life Saving Club was established on 3rd January 1908, ten days later women formed the Newcastle Ladies Surf Club. They gave an exhibition at the first surf carnival held on the beach on March 28 that year, the first of its kind in Australia and probably the world. Members of Sydney Club who competed were so much impressed by the ability in the surf of the women’s team in the surf that they invited them to compete in a carnival at Bondi on April 10. Attracted by the well-publicised appearance of the women’s team thousands turned up. Members of the team were Misses Williams, Grahame, Halbert and Muir and Mesdames Dunning and Dann. Their rescues were made after swims of more than 150 yards and they were given a standing ovation. The Newcastle ladies surf club membership grew to 62 in next to no time. The club had its own clubhouse. The NSW Surf Life Saving Association stepped in. It banned women from taking part in any form of surf competition. The women’s club eventually went out of existence. Influenced by the second-wave women’s movement in the late 1970s a campaign to allow women to join surf clubs and compete gained momentum. Some men regarded the proposal as ‘blasphemy. The Surf Life Saving Association finally saw reason in November 1980 Newcastle Herald, page 1, 3 November 1980 Note: Female lifesavers in England had been patrolling beaches since 1955 and despite Australia being the country that pioneered surf lifesaving, it was one of the last to admit women. 3. Dymphna Cusack, writer Move down sloping grass to look at the side of 1 Murray Avenue Possibly best known for helping write Caddie the Story of a Barmaid which was made into a film and for Come in Spinner with Florence James, set in a hairdressing salon in a posh hotel in Sydney in world war two. Made into a TV series. Cusack was born in Wyalong 1902; completed an arts degree at Sydney University and became a high school English and History teacher. Because she had a strong sense of social justice and episodes of an illness known as dog’s disease, Dymphna had a number of run-ins with the Department of Education. She reckoned in 1942 they “thought of the only place she was likely to be bombed’ and posted her to Newcastle Girls High.” Dymphna fell in love with the city from when she first arrived and wrote of the coast line sweeping north and south in innumerable bays fringing the great sweep of the Pacific, the harbour sparkling below the winding shores of the estuary … the twin arms of Nobbys and Stockton encasing it like the pincers of a giant crab. She even liked the ‘sign and seal of Newcastle’s existence, the smoke stacks of BHP pouring out billowing white clouds that turned grey as they rose in the upper air’ Newcastle was crowded with military personnel in 1942 so it was difficult to find a place to find accommodation. After a long search, found the Perfect Flat, the Perfect View and the Perfect Landlord, a flatlet in a run-down house in Murray Avenue Newcastle East. Dymphna in Newcastle with Timoshenko the cat she found 1942 (Photo located by Marilla North) After the bombing of Darwin on 19 February 1942 the belief was that, as the main producer of munitions, Newcastle was likely to be next. So with the other teachers she spent next fortnight preparing girls high school for air raids. No maps could be bought in town because, according to the locals with what Dymphna called their salty sense of humour, all the maps had been given to the Japanese who visited BHP before the bombing of Pearl Harbour and start of the Pacific war. On Sunday night 8 June Dymphna was in bed when around 2.30 a.m. ‘a terrific explosion sounding like crack of doom’ shook her building, rattled the windows and all the empty tins she was collecting to help build a spitfire fell off the shelf. She jumped out of bed and saw the sky was a blaze of light lit with a bluish glare and realised the Japanese were now shelling Newcastle. The warden knocked on her door ordering everyone to the air-raid shelter. She went down the dark narrow staircase and stepped into the half-light of the brown-out and went round the corner into Parnell Place. MOVE across to the start of the mid-street park in Parnell Place The second number 3 on left of the map – this is where the underground shelter used to be It was only a couple of hundred yards, but for Dymphna and her friend Mary it seemed the shells, which were whizzing by in all directions were aimed directly at them. They scuttled down the stairs of the air raid shelter and groped for seats in the pitch darkness. One old lady said to Dymphna ‘don’t you worry lass. I bin through three depressions and they’re much worse.’ They were in the shelter for about 2 hours. When the detonations subsided ‘we crept up out of the trench and watched the electric wires doing a brilliant fandango’. Dymphna took the day off school to write an article for the Newcastle Morning Herald At the start of 1943 Dymphna was transferred to Newcastle Technical High School because of the shortage of male teachers. It was based at the Tighes Hill Technical College because the new school, partly funded by BHP, wasn’t finished (it is now Merewether High). Dymphna was an inspirational teacher to a class of under-achievers but left at the end of 1943 and was invalided out of teaching in 1944 – found out later that the dog’s disease she had was MS. Out of her time in Newcastle came • the play Shoulder The Sky set in an Australian League canteen based upon one at Tyrrell Hall to service the troops from Stockton’s base camp; • another play Morning Sacrifice about a female teachers staff room which could have been based on some of the teachers at NGHS • her novel Southern Steel depicting the tumultuous life of wartime Newcastle The fictional families were blends of real people living in and around Parnell Place in 1942. Her landlord the owner of 1 Murray Avenue, a wharf labourer & his wife with a son in the RAAF, were a close-knit working-class family who had showed her great kindness, and Dymphna learnt how the war and hardships affected their lives. When she was writing Southern Steel in London and the South of France in 1950-52, she wrote to Miles Franklin that [whatever the view] was outside her window, all she could see were the beaches, the smokestacks, Nobbys and the thriving port of ‘...Newcastle, with its ugliness, its exploitation, its gallantry – it’s such a perfect epitome of the whole bloody system.’ When the book was published to acclaim in 1953, one man wrote from Western Australia to say it was untrue that Newcastle had been shelled. The media had been very restrained in its provision of information during the war. Southern Steel was translated into German and serialised in berlin in 1974 as ‘Clouds over Newcastle’. In the 60s and 70s Dymphna returned to Newcastle occasionally. In 1963 she was guest speaker at an Australian China Friendship Society meeting at Newcastle City Hall. In 1964 Dymphna had a ‘trip down memory lane’, back to the top of town and 1 Murray Avenue, and throughout the 1970s an English lecturer at Newcastle CAE, Jacqueline Thorpe, used to invite Dymphna up from Sydney to lecture on Australian literature Dymphna Cusack died in 1981.

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