c. 1918
2014
The original photo was probably taken from an upper story balcony. To achieve a similar perspective in the 2014 photo I used a highly technical photographic method of gaffer taping my camera to a long pole and using the self timer.
“Butter Battle” – not a reference to Dr Seuss’s little known, but excellent Cold War allegory, but my two word review of Peter Jackson’s third movie in The Hobbit saga, “The Battle of the Five Armies”.
Firstly, “Battle” – because that just about sums up the movie – not much else happens. The actual battle of five armies in Tolkien’s book takes up only 5 pages, but Peter Jackson somehow spins it out to encompass most of the 2hrs and 20mins of the movie. The scenes between the battle scenes, seem cursory, superfluous to the plot, with many of them additions not in the original story, added merely to give the viewer some respite before plunging into yet another predictable battle scene, with many of these also additions to the original story.
Secondly “Butter” – because to borrow words from a rather erudite author, adapting just 50 pages of original story into a 2.5hr movie “feels all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.”
This photograph is possibly taken on 9th September 1890, the day Lambton celebrated the turning on of the electric light system. In the centre of the photo adjacent to the road is an electric light pole. Just to the left of the pole in the distance can be seen St John’s Church of England in Morehead St. This is the old wooden church, so this photo pre-dates 1907 when the wooden church was replaced with a brick one.
The tramline at the bottom of the photo is the Newcastle to Plattsburg tramline, which these days is Hobart Rd New Lambton. The road at the top is Howe St. On the far horizon, going up the hill, can be seen Dent St North Lambton.
[Update October 2020: When I originally posted this back in 2014 I made a guess that the occasion was the inauguration of the electric light system in 1890. Thanks to the keen observation of Robert Watson that the overwhelming majority of the adults are women (74%) and that one of the children is waving a NSW state flag, led me to suspect that this event is a school function occurring on a weekday when many men would be at work. It is highly likely that this photograph is from 25 February 1903 and shows parents, teachers and children returning from a school picnic day at Toronto. A specially hired train picked up the picnickers on the Lambton Colliery railway at 9am and returned them to the same spot later that afternoon.]
The University of Newcastle Cultural Collections has a photographic panorama of Lambton, taken from the top of Noble St in North Lambton in 1904. I have created an annotated version of this photograph with the following streets marked …
and the following items of interest marked …
Any corrections or suggested additions to the annotations are welcome.
Technical note: The annotations were done using Visio 2013, but unfortunately Visio doesn’t handle exporting to raster image formats when there is a large image involved – it just gives a horribly unhelpful “Visio is unable to complete exporting” error message. To get around this, I exported to SVG format, then used the CloudConvert online image conversion site to convert the SVG to a JPG file.
I believe that the empty site in the middle of this picture is the where the generating station for the electric lights in Lambton was located. The generators were situated between Young St (now Newcastle Rd) and High St, in a former quarry. The electric lighting scheme sent the council bankrupt, and the generators were sold off in 1904 and the building housing them demolished. An earlier photo of the generating station from 1890 (below) taken looking north from Young St/Newcastle Rd shows a long thin rectangular building behind it, and I believe this is the same rectangular building that can be seen in the photo above.
The Council Chambers was built in 1887.
The building became the local branch library in February 1950.
Most of the photos in this “Then and Now” series highlight similarities – things that have remained relatively unchanged through the course of years. Today’s photos highlight difference. The site of the former Lambton colliery has been radically changed with the removal of all the colliery infrastructure and earthworks to create a sporting oval and behind the oval new housing subdivisions. The only point of similarity between the two photos is the outline of Sheperds Hill in the distance, on the horizon.