In researching for my March 2025 article on the New Lambton real estate riot, I came across information that enabled me to identify the location and approximate date of this Ralph Snowball photo . See my page on Horsfield’s Lease for more details.

To avoid duplication, I have moved content originally published in this blog post into my June 2022 “That was then, This is Now” article page.

My January 2022 column for The Local is out now. This month is on the story behind Lambton Fire Brigade winning this trophy in 1888.

My article for the December 2021 issue of The Local is out now, this month on Marshall St and the inner city bypass. The article is titled “A very long road story” for three reasons.

1. Marshall St (on early maps at least) is a very long straight road, stretching 5 km from Jesmond to Kotara.
2. This story took a long time to come to fruition. I’ve had plans to write various versions of this story for over five years, before I completed it this year.
3. With the construction of the final section of the inner city bypass to commence in 2022, as I researched the history of this project I was quite surprised to find how long ago the bypass was first announced – in 1945! When construction is completed in 2025 it will have been 80 years in progress, making it a very long road story indeed.

My October 2021 article for The Local is out, this month on William Thomas Dent.

Often my research for these articles leads me in unexpected directions, and this month was no exception taking me to the short lived Hartley Vale colliery of James and Alexander Brown in the Broadmeadow area, and all the way to the other side of the world to the coalfields of Durham where William’s father Mark Dent was a key figure in the great miners’ strikes of 1844 .

One of the things that struck me about the story of the Dent family is how much things can change in the space of one generation. Because of his involvement in the miners strikes, Mark Dent found it hard to get work, was subject to poverty and was “driven from his native land” to seek a living in Australia. William arrived in Australia after his father, lived and worked in a coal mining community, grew wealthy as the head of major financial institution, was an alderman for 17 years, many of them working cooperatively alongside Thomas Croudace the Lambton colliery manager.

The unexpected find from this month’s research is that Dent St North Lambton is probably named in honour of Mark Dent the famed mining unionist who died in Lambton in 1882, rather than William Thomas Dent who was only a relatively junior alderman at the time Dent St was named.