Stand Off Bar Dangerous
Did you know that bringing ships into and out of the Port of Newcastle was extremely hazardous in the days of sail? As shipping masters and pilots, George Menzies and his sons-in-law had to be very careful because the entrance channel was narrow as well as shallow and many vessels, including some early steamships, came to grief at the entrance to the harbor. In fact today the northern breakwater is called ‘Shipwreck Walk’ because it is built over the wreckage of a number of vessels, whose remains can still be seen.
George, no doubt like other seaman of his time, had strong views about what should be done to improve things. He knew that the entrance to the port was relatively shallow and the deepest parts formed a ‘channel’ that had been gouged by the Hunter River over millennia. According to old charts of the onetime NSW Department of Navigation this channel was only 26 feet (8 metres) deep at low tide but it increased to about 31 feet (9.5 metres) at high tide. The correct path for ships to follow was found by lining up 2 beacons or ‘leading lights’ erected on the shore on the far side of the entrance. If a vessel strayed from this narrow path it was likely to get into trouble. The southern side was edged by a rock shelf over which the sea broke in bad weather. On the northern side the sea floor gradually shelved to a shallow bottom which came to be known as ‘The Oyster Bank’. It was treacherous because there was only about 10 feet (3 metres) of water over it at low tide and of course if a big sea was running there might be very much less water in the trough of the waves. Beyond this the bottom shelved up to Stockton Beach.
The problem for pilots and ship’s captains was that if a storm had blown up and big seas were sweeping across the entrance to the port a ship might be pitching and plunging many feet as it approached and it was not uncommon for vessels to ‘touch bottom’. This could damage a ship’s plates and at worst hold the vessel fast resulting in it being quickly overwhelmed by the sea. Another hazard was the strong crosswind that frequently blew in from the Southern Ocean which made it very difficult to steer a straight path. For this reason it became mandatory for ships to be brought in by one or more steam tugs depending on their size and the state of the weather. This had its risks too and some ships were lost when their towropes broke. This is what happened to the big French barque “Adolphe” in 1904. She approached harbour in ballast meaning that she was not fully loaded and rode higher than usual out of the water so that she was badly affected by the gale that was blowing. Her towropes broke and she was driven sideways onto the Oyster Bank. Some vessels in this situation endeavoured to save themselves by dropping their anchors but in a big sea, anchors drag and chains break and in a narrow waterway there is no margin for error.
Cross section of the Entrance to the Port of Newcastle c 1905 showing its shallowness
On the left the soon to be completed northern breakwater built on the Oyster bank and over shipwrecks
Note that the horizontal scale of the diagram is 1:10
When George and Jeanetta Menzies first arrived in the port in 1865 with baby Annie Isabella, their first born, the southern breakwater had already been built from the headland near present day Fort Scratchley out to Nobbys Island. Built with convict labour, at first it was called Macquarie’s Pier and it eliminated the nasty seas that washed in to the mouth of the Hunter River from in front of the headland. Over the next thirty years debate raged about what to do next to make the port safer for shipping and in 1875, when George and Jeanetta’s 6th child, Robert, was born in Stockton, work began on extending this breakwater from Nobbys out into the Pacific Ocean. By the time their youngest daughter Maggie was born, eight years later, the southern breakwater had been extended about 1600 feet (500 metres) into the ocean. But this triggered more debate; the extension seemed to be interrupting the currents flowing across the mouth of the river and pushing seas into the port and bringing more sand in from nearby Stockton Beach, which was the opposite of what was wanted.
Meanwhile a ‘training’ bank had been built along the southern shore of Stockton with the intention of harnessing the river current to take silt out to sea rather than depositing it at the river mouth. After the controversy over the success or otherwise of the southern breakwater extension the government decided to build a northern breakwater from Stockton Beach out into the ocean and parallel to the southern one. Work began in 1890 and being close to their home there is little doubt that George and his sons closely ‘supervised’ the work. His eldest son John, would have been 20, George 18, William 16, Robert 15 and the youngest son, Richard, 12 years old.
The alignment chosen for the new breakwater was to follow the ‘edge’ of the Oyster Bank, a wise decision because ships continued to be lost there under the effect of the prevailing winds and seas. It was not coincidental that before the construction of the breakwater had gone very far several sunken ships lay along the same line. The government even added others to facilitate construction. The sailing ship “Adolphe” went aground there in 1904 and the tipping of large rocks for the new breakwater reached her in 1906. Her rusting remains are still visible today embedded in the northern side of the breakwater.
Around 1900 several suitors for the hands of George Menzies’ daughters were appearing. Ernest Warner had married George’s eldest daughter, Annie, in 1885 and served as a pilot in Newcastle up till 1900 when he moved to Sydney. He brought ships into Newcastle while there was only one breakwater, the southern. In 1890 George’s second daughter, Jessie, married Thomas Aubrey, a butcher, who did well out of the rapidly growing volume of shipping in Newcastle. One of Thomas’ sons, also called Thomas, first went sailed out of Newcastle as a deck boy in a sailing ship in 1904. George’s third daughter, Jeanette, married Captain Thomas Carson in 1906. Tom was in and out of the port in big steamships such as SS “Maheno” around this time and he too would have taken a keen interest in the construction of the northern breakwater. Bert Brew, who was to marry George’s youngest, Maggie, first arrived in Newcastle in 1905 as Master of the sailing ship “Wavertree”. The derilict “Adolphe” lying awash at the end of the new breakwater must have been a sobering sight for his crew.
Work on the northern breakwater was completed in 1912 by which time it was a more than 3000 feet long (nearly 1 kilometer) and by design it was not as long as the southern. Tom Carson was now master of the pilot steamer “Ajax” and became one of the pilots in Newcastle the following year. Bert Brew was in England sailing the north Atlantic in steamships but in 1914 he too became a mate in “Ajax”, and was appointed a Newcastle pilot in 1919. Debate over the effectiveness of the breakwaters resulted in one more extension being made to the Southern Breakwater and another 500 feet (140 metres) was added between 1912 and 1915. The bad days were now over and Tom Carson and Bert Brew only knew the Port of Newcastle with both breakwaters in place.
But there was one more problem. Attention was now focused on the depth of water at the entrance to Newcastle Harbor. Ship owners were now pursuing economy by building bigger ships which sat deeper in the water and the shallow depth over the ‘bar’ or sea bottom at the entrance meant that it was becoming common for the bigger ships to only partially load or to avoid Newcastle altogether. Pressure was mounting to deepen the water not only at the entrance but also at major berths in the harbor especially those involved in the export coal trade and in the new steel making plant being developed by BHP further up the river. Soon after the construction of the breakwaters was completed dredges of various kinds started work on deepening the harbour floor. By 1966 the water depth had been increased to 33 feet (11 metres) and finally in 1983 it was announced that the port had a minimum depth of 52 feet (15.2 metres) and could handle the biggest ships.
By then however the family had moved on: the big sailing ships had been lost to history, the pilots’ cottages had been left empty and the only reminder of the family’s contribution to the life of Newcastle were gravestones in Stockton and Sandgate Cemeteries.
JR Brew 6/9/16
