Rats have been a constant companion to human societies. The Australian bush rat (rattus fuscipes) is one of the few non-marsupial mammals, along with humans, dingos and bats, to have lived in Australia before British colonisation of the continent. After 1788, a variety of animal species including cows, sheep and horses began to be deliberately introduced into Australia. Unwanted stowaways also arrived including the black rat (rattus rattus) and the brown rat (rattus norvegicus). These animals continued the status they held in Europe as a pest, being regarded with a distaste which sometimes grew to fear. With its wharves, workshops and processing industries, Honeysuckle was prime rat habitat. Concern about their presence came to head in the early years of the twentieth century when bubonic plague arrived in Australia from Asian ports. Health authorities around the continent swung into action, cleansing the cities with a focus on killing rats. During the plague outbreak in 1900, poisoned baits were laid from the Pilot Station near Nobbys along the waterfront all the way to Honeysuckle Railway Station, at the end of Steel Street. People were encouraged to kill rats around their own homes and businesses and to bring them to be burned in a furnace set up for the purpose at the rear of the morgue at the harbour end of Merewether Street. From May, 1900, a docket for sixpence to be redeemed at the Harbours and Rivers Department was presented for each rat delivered to the incinerator. Public spirit and the opportunity to earn some easy money got the people of Newcastle moving, and they delivered more than 4000 rats for destruction in the first three weeks of the operation. One man was so keen that he turned in his wifes pet white rats. Faced with plague again in 1907, the NSW Board of Health sent two rat catchers from Sydney to Newcastle to work under the wharves including at Honeysuckle Point. The bodies of the rats they killed were tested by the District Medical Officer for Health, Dr Robert Dick, for evidence of being infected with the plague. Despite measures such as these, plague took its toll on Australians, killing 1215 between 1900 and 1910, including 14 in Newcastle in 1905. The war on rats continued and was one of the reasons for a shift from wooden wharves with their many hiding places to less rat friendly concrete wharves in the 1920s

On a hot December Saturday in 1936, 16 year old Carrington youth George Lundberg headed to Throsby Creek to cool off. Even though sharks were often spotted in the area, drawn by schools of fish and by refuse thrown from vessels moored nearby, the last fatal shark attack had occurred in the year George was born. George and his mate James Connors werent worried. George and James were mucking about along with a group of younger boys amongst the raft of imported logs stored by timber yards in the water near Herbert s boatshed, now the Inner Basin, opposite the outlet of Cottage Creek. The water was shallow near the sandy shoreline but the logs gave access to the 9 foot channel dredged through the middle of the creek. George was swimming in the channel when he cried out and then disappeared below the surface, as the water around him became tinged red with blood. James ran across the logs and pulled his mate out, horrified to see first, the black fin of a circling shark, and then, that one of his mates legs was missing below the knee. While two other boys tried to staunch the bleeding, James dashed to a nearby boatshed calling for someone to ring the Newcastle Ambulance Brigade. The ambulance arrived quickly and took George to Newcastle Hospital, but he died within the hour. Newcastles leading shark fishermen, Arthur, Jim, Joseph and Sidney Ayerst of Wickham, immediately began to hunt the shark. They patrolled the harbour, trolling lines behind their launch and setting fixed lines in Throsby Creek. There were false alarms the following day when a grey nurse shark was seen near the mud pans opposite Wickham Infants school and when a buoy attached to one of the shark lines disappeared and in both cases, hundreds of people rushed to the foreshore hoping to see the shark captured (see photo). Sharks were front of mind in 1936 when George Lundberg was killed. The fear of sharks was fed not only by films showing in local theatres at that time, including Zane Greys The White Death, about the hunt for a giant man-eating shark terrorising people at the Great Barrier Reef, and the Flash Gordon film Captured by Shark Men. Actual sharks were sighted off Merewether and Bar Beaches in December, leading to the sounding of the shark alarm. Three days after George was bitten, a 9 foot 6 inch grey nurse shark took the bait on a fixed line near the site of the attack. The Ayerst brothers captured her after a fifteen minute battle, with an audience of several hundred onlookers. In recognition of their good work, the Ayerst brothers were presented with a gift of 250 yards of stranded galvanized wire for fishing lines by Ryland Bros. George was buried in Sandgate Cemetery, with costs met by donations from the people of Wickham and Carrington. Calls were renewed for the state government to make money available to erect a shark-proof fence between the punts and the boatsheds at Wickham to allow safe swimming at the area called the Waters Edge or even better, to build a modern swimming baths at Carrington so people could swim without fear of sharks. Instead, the industrialisation of the waterfront continued and safe swimming was only available at the ocean baths.

Fishing at Meekarlba (Honeysuckle) has a history that goes back for millennia. Some of the earliest European images of Aboriginal people in Newcastle show them in pursuit of ma-ko-ro (fish) women fishing with lines from canoes and men hunting fish with a muting (spear) (see images). Spearing was made more efficient with the construction of stone fish traps in the tidal zones along what became Throsby Creek. Stone barriers were constructed so that fish could swim over the top of them at high tide, but became trapped on the land side as the tide fell. They remained in use at least until the mid 1800s. The names of some of the fish caught by the Awabakal people of the Newcastle area were recorded as wot-ta-wong (mullet), yu-rain (black bream), kur-rung-kum (large schnapper), mut-tau-ra (small schnapper), to-pe-a-ta-ra (flathead), ka-ro-burra (large whiting), tu-rea (bream), pur-ri-mun-kan (salmon), bo-a-ta (catfish), pun-bung (the sea slug or blubber), ka-nin (eel) and bun-run (red sea slug). Aboriginal people also collected shellfish, creating huge middens over thousands of years as they discarded the shells at their favoured spots. The mud oysters were mokai and the oysters that grew on mangroves were pirrita. After colonisation, new fishers arrived. Colonel William Paterson was so impressed that he recommended to Governor King in 1801 that the mouth of the Hunter River should become a fishing port. While surveying the river, his crew had used a seine net to secure a great haul of fish, including a 56 pound mulloway. The range and novelty of fish in Newcastle was so impressive that they were portrayed on the beautiful wooden collectors chest completed in 1818 for presentation to Governor Lachlan Macquarie. (See image). Before the harbour works around Honeysuckle began, areas of shallow water there were reported to abound with mud oysters; and prawns, crabs, crayfish, and lobsters are caught in great number. The work of redesigning the harbour and the Honeysuckle foreshore took their toll on fish stocks. Blasting underwater rocks near the Bullock Island Dyke in the 1880s with dynamite killed many fish, and dredging works disturbed habitat.(see photo) In 1907, the NSW Department of Fisheries noted that fish were not plentiful in Newcastle Harbour. By the twentieth century, while commercial fishing, including prawning, was undertaken from boats which moored in Throsby Creek, fishing along the Honeysuckle waterfront around to Carrington was largely amateur, enjoyed as a pastime and with the fish as a welcome addition to many tables. Young boys in particular spent a great deal of time dipping a line and not infrequently found themselves in trouble from falling into the harbour. Mrs Jean Roggers, who was born in Carrington in 1922, the eldest daughter in a family of six children, remembered that Throsby Creek came right up to the back fence of their Forbes Street home, north of the Cowper Street Bridge: Oh, we lived in that creek when we were kids. We'd go catching prawns, we'd go to catch crabs, we'd swim. The children fished from the stairs leading down to the water from the wharves to catch tailor, 6 or 7 inches long, for their supper: in those days things were very, very hard. There was a Depression on and at that time my dad was sick, he'd got TB [tuberculosis] and couldn't work. Men fished on their own or as part of workplace groups, including the Honeysuckle Point Loco fishing club which fished for bream from the Dyke on Saturday nights in the 1910s. Fishing was also a popular activity for couples, including the British migrants who arrived after World War II to work at the State Dockyard and were housed in flats at Carrington. According to one of the women, fishing gave the newly arrived families a chance to get to know one another better, and to talk. The fishing is a real community affair. Others waves of visitors and immigration brought different fishing methods (see photo) and different sea creatures to attention, including the octopus sought by those from Greek backgrounds. Fishing at Honeysuckle has long had to compete with other uses of the foreshore and has now been banned in many places, but you may still see fishing boats passing on their way in or out from berths along Throsby Creek, and you can walk up to the Commercial Fishermens Co-Operative at 97 Hannell Street, Wickham to see and taste the catch of the day.

In 1825, while living next to Cottage Creek, missionary Lancelott Threlkeld was invited to witness the burial of a young Awabakal girl. It took place in what he described as a barren sandhill covered with bushy scrub, likely in the area of the present sportsgrounds in Parry Street. Threlkeld was asked not to disclose where the body was buried because the mourners were afraid white fellow come and take her head away. They had reason to be worried as robbing the graves of Aboriginal people for scientific study or curiosity value continued throughout the nineteenth century. When Cottage Creek marked the edge of the town of Newcastle, the land bounded by the main road (then Blane, now Hunter Street) and its banks was considered a suitably out-of-the-way place for cemeteries to serve three religious groups: the Presbyterians, Wesleyan Methodists and Roman Catholics. (see map) Catholic burials began to the east of the creek in 1842; and Presbyterians were allocated their adjoining land in 1845. The space available increased after the railway was built on a causeway through the tidal flats on the harbourside of the cemeteries in the late 1850s. This embankment trapped run off on the land side, creating a pond between the causeway and Hunter Street (then Blane Street) which was later filled in, allowing the cemeteries to expand towards the railway. The water table remained high and some graves quickly filled with water, forcing grave diggers to hold the coffin down using long poles while burial took place. The cemeteries became the last resting place of many Novocastrians, each with their own stories. Martin Brennan, buried in the Catholic cemetery in 1853, had been a convict transported from Ireland who stayed in Newcastle as a coal miner after he served his time. Elizabeth Lintott was laid to rest in 1860 having died after falling into a fire while suffering what was thought to be an epileptic seizure. Second mate on the barque Dudbrook, David Murray, was buried in the Presbyterian section after he drowned in the harbour on New Years Eve 1863. One of the more grand memorials was a broken column dated 1870 which marked the grave of Archibald Rodgers.(see photo) In 1854 he had been the founder of one of the first iron foundries in Newcastle, located in Carrington. His hand was crushed at the foundry, leading to his death from tetanus.11 Annie Coglan was the mother of four children, one of them only a few weeks old, when she died of inflammation of the lungs and was buried in 1880. The last recorded burial in the Presbyterian cemetery was John Henry Davey aged 1 year and 7 months who drowned in a tank at his parents home at Hamilton Commonage on 30 August 1881. As the city expanded, the small denominational cemeteries were reaching capacity, and it was decided to move future burials to a modern new multi faith cemetery at Sandgate from 1881. Sandgate Cemetery was designed to be accessed by rail, and people wanted to make this journey in style in the 1880s, a high point in the Victorian culture of mourning. A mortuary platform was built near what is now Worth Place from which funerals departed, with special carriages for the body, which travelled free of charge, and the mourners, at regular fares. There was also a special mortuary tram carriage to bring bodies to the mortuary station.(see photo) Although closed for further burials, the bodies remained in the Cottage Creek cemeteries and concern about them grew. In July 1890, sickness in the Wickham area was being blamed on the countless germs and morbific matter which not only drained from the graves into the muddy and smelly Cottage Creek but also circulated as dust on the main roads. Many thought the land, now in a bustling part of the city, could be better used.(see photo) In 1916, the remains were exhumed and reburied, mainly at Sandgate but some at Swansea and the land was sold for private development.

The termination of the Newcastle railway line at the Newcastle Interchange has been controversial in recent years with opponents disappointed to lose a convenient public transport service to the east end of the city, and supporters keen to reconnect the city with the harbour. Going back over a century and a half, the initial construction of the railway was seen as a triumph and a blessing. When the Hunter River Railway Company applied to build a railway to carry produce from the Hunter Valley between East Maitland and the port at Newcastle in 1853, Honeysuckle Point, then owned by the Church of England, was chosen as the terminus. Up to 80 houses, boat sheds and a lime kiln were on the land the government resumed for the rail line and associated workshops and goods yards, and most were removed after work started near the site of the present Civic Station in 1854. Having borne the expense of bringing out plant, machinery and workers (see the Ellensborough story) for the project from Britain, the company ran out of money in 1855 and sold the unfinished line to the NSW colonial government. The Honeysuckle to East Maitland line was officially opened by Governor Sir William Denison on 30 March 1857 as the Great Northern Railway, just the second railway in the colony after the Sydney to Parramatta line. Mr. Beverly was the engine-driver, George Callow, the fireman, and John Martin, the guard, on the 50 minute first journey of the train. The engine that pulled it is now in the Newcastle Museums collection. At Honeysuckle Point, the opening was celebrated with a roasted bullock and a hogshead (250 litres) of free beer. The line was extended to Newcastle Station the following year. The railway reorganised space at Honeysuckle, creating a corridor which could be a barrier and had to be treated with caution. Access to Mr Hannells home and Nainbys soapworks (later the Great Northern Soap and Candle Works run by Charles Upfold) was cut by the railway so a gated crossing was created for vehicles. . While it caused inconvenience for some, Sir William Denison summed up the general mood when he said in 1858, every step towards the improvement of the means of communication in the valley of the Hunter must have the effect of facilitating the growth of produce, of opening up the mineral wealth of the districts and of increasing the shipments from the harbour on the shores of which your city is built and this increase in trade must have its result in the increased value of the property and the increased wealth of the inhabitants.