Blue Gum Flat (sometimes spelled Bluegum Flat) was an informal name of a flat area situated between Jesmond and Wallsend. Being an informal name rather than an official district, only a general idea of the boundaries can be gleaned. [Ourimbah, on the Central Coast was also originally called Blue Gum Flat, but that is not the subject of this article.]
The name first appears in a newspaper report in 1861 …
A reward of £100 has been offered by the Wallsend Coal Company for information tending to convict such party or parties who recently placed a log of wood on their line of railway near the Blue Gum Flat Bridge.
The Newcastle Chronicle and Hunter River District News, 3 AUGUST 1861.
Further details of Blue Gum Flat appear in an advertisement on 20 August 1862 for the lease of “a substantial house, with 10 acres of land” being “near Wallsend” and “near the three lines of railway now starting”.
The railway referred to would be the Newcastle-Wallsend Coal Company railway that was constructed in 1861 and operations of the mine and railway were just starting in 1862. Parrott’s 1893 map shows two rectangular areas adjacent to the railway with a number of houses marked.
It may be just a curious coincidence, but overlying the 1893 map into Google Earth, measurement shows the area of those two rectangles to be 10 acres, the same area as in the 1862 advertisement.
In a funeral notice from 16 February 1880 for William Edmund Wilkinson, Blue Gum Flat is described as being at Brookstown, Wallsend. Brookstown was the area near the old Wallsend Hospital.
In 1887 the residents of Blue Gum Flat were petitioning for a railway platform …
Blue Gum Flat township is about two miles from Wallsend, and close to Jesmond. There are a large number of residents in that locality who, although they are blessed with a railway on one side and the tramway on the other, are unable to avail themselves of either means of transit unless by walking nearly two miles. The proposed platform will be on the Newcastle side of the Wallsend Tunnel Railway.
Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate, 22 September 1887.
From this description, Blue Gum Flat is the area between the Newcastle-Wallsend Coal Company railway (yellow), and the Wallsend tramway (green), with the proposed site of the rail platform “on the Newcastle side of the Wallsend Tunnel Railway” marked with a red star.
An article on 27 July 1889 reporting on storm infers that Blue Gum Flat was an alternative name for Heaton. However the full range of mentions of Blue Gum Flat would suggest that it also referred to some areas north of the private town of Heaton.
At Heaton, or Blue Gum Flat, a considerable amount of damage was done to fences and vegetables by the overflowing of a creek, but the houses escaped.
An article from 4 December 1894 indicates that John Wilkinson operated a slaughter house at Blue Gum Flat.
Usage of the name appears to peter out around 1905. One of the last references to the locality is in August 1946, in the death notice of Mrs C Arnott aged 83, who “was born in the eastern boundary of Wallsend, then known as Blue Gum Flats.”
In summary, although some sources say that Blue Gum Flat was an early name for Jesmond, this is only partially true as the locality was only the portion of modern day Jesmond west of the old Wallsend/Lambton municipal boundary, now the inner city bypass.
This page is part of the collection of Newcastle’s Obsolete Place Names.