My article for the February 2025 edition of “The Local” is now out. This month on one of the lost names of Newcastle – “White Gates.”
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Old battle anew
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I was reading a newspaper article today about a public meeting protesting the impending loss of park land at the location of Wallarah and Blackley Ovals in New Lambton. One contributor to the meeting said …
A park of considerable dimensions was required in their midst. There was every probability that the population would increase, which made it all the more necessary that they should have all the parks they could get for recreation purposes.
Interestingly, this statement is not from 2024/2025 when the NSW State Government (in collusion with Newcastle Council) want to hand over much needed sporting fields for the construction of a basketball stadium. No, this is from a public meeting 126 years ago on 15 May 1899. Attendees at the meeting were railing against the state government’s plan to sell into private ownership, at bargain basement prices, large swathes of publicly owned land previously promised for a district park.
Fortunately for us now, the community back then kicked up such a fuss that within a couple of months the government revoked their plans for the sell off. The image below shows an old parish map that has the Homestead Selection Area 585 outlined in red. I have overlaid this into Google Earth then shaded in green the areas that are still green space or used for public recreation today. This amounts to 35 hectares of land that we would not have now if the residents of 1899 had not been vigilant, and actively protested the government’s intentions to flog off public land to the public’s detriment.
The old battle is with us anew.
Anniversary and Archive
This month marks 10 years since I started writing monthly local history articles for The Local. I initially submitted a one-off article and was somewhat surprised when Mark Brooker, the publisher, responded asking if I wanted to write a monthly column. At the time I thought I only had material for half dozen articles and so initially only committed to that number. Ten years on I’m up to article 116, and the ideas for articles keep accumulating.
My writing about local history in the Lambton area began in the summer of 2014-2015 with a series of ‘then and now’ photographs published over the course of 16 days. To mark the ten years since the summer of 2024-2025 I have revisited each of the locations and taken another photo in the ‘then and now’ series.
Having written much local history content on this website over the last 10 years, the question of how to preserve this digital content in the long term was increasingly on my mind. However thanks to the recommendation of Ruth Cotton (noted community historian of the Hamilton area), my website has been added to the State Library of NSW Pandora archive of digital content.
Each year the library will store an archive of the local history content of my site (everything under the https://lachlanwetherall.com/then-and-now URL), so that when this site is no longer available, my content will still be accessible via the library archive.
Being added to the Pandora archive was a great honour, and a spur for me to re-organise my site to make sure that all the significant local history content is under the “/then-and-now” URL and can be reached via the That was then, This is now index page.
Microsoft’s AI tax
While preparing a household budget today for the next calendar year, I was somewhat shocked to discover that my Microsoft M365 subscription for next year was jumping from $109 to $159, an increase of nearly 50%. A bit of research showed that the price jump was due to the introduction of AI capabilities (branded as Copilot) in the suite of Office products. I have no use for these AI functions, and was somewhat miffed that I was going to be slugged for features I’m never going to use.
The good news is that it is possible to revert back to an M365 subscription without the AI, and avoid the inflated price. The process to do this is slightly non-obvious. You have to …
- Sign in to your Microsoft Account
- Go to the “Services & subscriptions” tab
- On the M365 subscription, click “Manage”
- Click the “Cancel subscription” link, which will then take you to page where you have the option to …
- Choose the “Microsoft 365 Personal Classic” subscription (with no AI)
Just to demonstrate how pathetically useless AI is, I asked Microsoft’s Copilot to “generate an image of an evil corporation sucking money from unsuspecting consumers”, and this is all I got. 🙁
Wallarah Oval basketball stadium submission period
The exhibition period for the proposed new basketball stadium on Wallarah and Blackley ovals is now open closed.
Now is the time to formally submit your opposition to this project going ahead on this site, that will result in the loss of vital green space and existing sporting facilities.
Submissions must be made by Monday 11 November 2024, at the NSW government planning portal, on the Hunter Indoor Sports Centre project page.
Update, 4 November 2024: I have completed my opposing submission on the project planning portal. In summary I have three principal objections:
- Loss of green space.
- Significant negative impacts on traffic and parking.
- Unfairness to existing users of the site.
You can read a PDF of my full submission.
Croudace Road, Elermore Vale
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Community disengagement
The project to build a new basketball stadium on Wallarah and Blackley Ovals has now been listed on the NSW government’s Major Projects Planning Portal. I had a quick skim through the available documents, and two things stuck out.
Firstly, the Scoping Report has a section on Community Engagement, that has a list of stakeholders that Newcastle Basketball has “undertaken consultation with to inform the project planning.” Conspicuously missing from this list are the two groups that will be most negatively impacted by the project.
- The sporting groups who currently use the ovals.
- The local residents who will have to suffer the traffic and parking chaos the development will cause.
I am at a loss to decide whether these omissions are due to incompetence, error, conflict avoidance, or deliberate action to keep the community in the dark.
The second item that caught my eye, was in the “Heritage NSW Advice on SEARs” document, which states that “the site does not contain any known historical archeological relics.” During World War 2, the site of Wallarah Oval contained four gun emplacements, as shown in the 1944 aerial photograph below.
As recently as 2014, aerial photographs show parch marks that hint that some remnant of these gun emplacements may still be under the surface. The extent and significance of these remains is uncertain.
Update, November 2024: After the initial writing of this blog post, additional documents were made available on the project portal, including “Appendix HH – Historical Archaeological Assessment” which does include details of the WW2 gun emplacements, which apparently were dummy guns.
The gathering storm clouds of war
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