Bull’s Garden, Whitebridge

Mike Scanlon in a Newcastle Herald article on 12 May 2017 has an interesting story on Bull’s Garden, an exotic pleasure garden established by Edmund Bull in Whitebridge around 1860. The gardens lasted about 70 years and were closed in the 1930s.

A 1911 map held by the National Library of Australia shows the location of Bull’s Garden, to the east of Bulls Garden Road. I have overlaid the map into Google Earth to identify the location in the current landscape. (KMZ file for Google Earth)

Portion of 1911 map, showing location of Bull’s Garden, Whitebridge. National Library of Australia, MAP RASC 33.
1911 map overlaid in Google Earth.
Location of former Bull’s Garden, Whitebridge.
The location of Bull’s Garden, 1944 aerial photograph overlaid into Google Earth.

Update, August 2023

While browsing the Newcastle Library Hunter Photobank site, I came across a Ralph Snowball photograph titled simply “Bush scene”. After studying it for a while and noticing quite a number of landscaped elements such as rock walls, paths, bridges and steps, I realised that it was a photo of Bull’s Garden in Whitebridge.

Bull’s Garden, Whitebridge, not dated. Photo by Ralph Snowball. Newcastle Library, Accession Number 001 002710

Comparing the central rocky creek bed and precipice from Snowball’s photo, with an aerial photo of 76 Bulls Garden Rd Whitebridge from the SIX maps site, confirms the location of the Snowball photo.

Aerial photo of portion of 76 Bulls Garden Road, Whitebridge. SIX Maps.

The McMystery of the turned comma

In looking at old newspaper articles on Trove, I have often come across surnames that started with a capital M followed by what I thought was an apostrophe. For example, M’Michael, M’Ewan, and M’Dicken.

It was only through an email conversation with Robert Watson today, and looking a bit closer that I realised that it’s not an apostrophe, but an inverted comma. I wondered whether this was a typographical convention to use the inverted comma instead of a superscript C, and whether those names were actually McMichael, McEwan, and McDicken?

A bit of searching proved my guess correct. Michael G. Collins, in his academic paper “M’Culloch and the Turned Comma” writes

But two or three centuries ago, not all printers setting type by hand would have had a lower-case superscript “c” in their repertoire. John Smith’s eighteenth century Printer’s Grammar indicates that most printers’ “founts” would not have included a “superior c”, and suggests that the “inverted comma” was a substitute for it. To make do, therefore, printers apparently took the piece of type for the comma, and turned it upside down when representing either “Mac” or “Mc ”. Thus the comma [,] when flipped, became [‘] – a poor man’s superscript “c”.

The Skyline drive-in

I met up with Paul Zuljan on the weekend, who grew up in Lambton, and we went looking for some places he remembered from his youth, one of them being the old Skyline drive-in theatre.  I vaguely knew where it had been located, but in looking at the following map from 1960, the outline of the theatre is clearly marked.

Portion of Northumberland County District scheme map, 1960. University of Newcastle, Cultural Collections.

I overlaid this map into Google Earth …

… then put an outline around the area, and now the location of the drive-in relative to the modern landscape is clearly visible.

If you have Google Earth installed, you can download the KMZ file for the overlay and outline.

The lost chambers of Lambton

My latest article for the Lambton and New Lambton Local is out, this month on the Lambton Courthouse, that was opened in 1879 and demolished in 1937.

An unexpected outcome of researching this article is that I discovered a few places I didn’t know about before, where council chambers either existed or were planned, in Waratah and in Lambton.

In Lambton, I discovered that before the council was even a year old, in January 1872, it applied to the Minister for Lands to have an area in Dickson St set aside for Council chambers. The land was never used for that purpose. The courthouse was built on the adjoining block in 1877-78, and the block originally intended for the council was resumed in 1886 for the construction of the police barracks and lockup.