Hi & welcome to Rob & Carol's HOMEPAGE. We would like to share with you our lifestyle........where we live, our family & what we enjoy most, exploring & camping with our camper trailer. 

     We live at Stockton a suburb of Newcastle, NSW, on the east coast of Australia, about  a one &  a half hours drive north of Sydney. Our suburb is a peninsular, therefore we are surrounded by the Tasman Sea which is part of the Pacific Ocean & the Hunter River.

     Stockton sits at the bottom of a beautiful 32 kilometre long unspoilt beach. The unique mobile sand dune system of Newcastle Bight is very extensive & said to be some 8,000 years old. It is moving westward at a rate of four metres a year.

     Both Carol & I were born on Stockton & have lived here all our lives.  We have two children, Lana & Patrick &  two grand daughters, Brydie Jayne, born 7th July 2004 and Mia Louise born 7th October 2009. Stockton is a great place to live.

     Our hobbies & interests are many & varied. They include 4 wheel driving, camper trailering & camping, swimming & surfing, beach fishing, fishing rod building, lure making, an interest in our great flora & fauna, bushwalking, the weather, photography, painting, local history, astrology, astronomy, tapestry, tai chi, the computer, gardening especially fern growing  & enjoying the great outdoors in general. 

     Newcastle Harbour is a busy port for international shipping. Coal & wheat are the two main cargos which are exported to destinations all over the world. It is nothing to see a backlog of twenty to fifty ships waiting off port to be loaded with coal. To address this problem the South Arm of the Hunter River is at present being dredged & additional coal loaders built. Newcastle Port Authority

    Newcastle has a temperate climate. Hot summers are cooled by a reliable nor'east  seabreeze, while winters are cool to cold with the colder blasts coming off Antartica. It does occasionally snow in winter on the 1500 metre high Barrington Tops some 100 kilometres to the northwest. Hunter Valley Weather  

     Newcastle & the Hunter River Valley have a fascinating history. The first Europeans to visit the Newcastle area was a party of marines in a ships longboat in 1797 lead by Lt. John Shortland looking for escaped convicts from Sydney's penal colony. Exploring the lower reaches of the river the party found seams of coal in the sandstone cliff faces, Shortland named it Coal River. It wasn't long till the worst convicts were moved to the Coal River to work in coal mines, burn oyster shells to make lime for building mortar & also to harvest cedar which grew along the banks river further upstream. The convicts formed rafts of cedar logs & floated them back down to the Coal River penal colony. The logs were then shipped to Sydney for government building works which still stand today.  Coal River Heritage

     Before European settlement the area north of the harbour was inhabited by the native Worimi Aboriginal people for some 15,000 years. The Worimi were made up of several tribes of which the Maiangal people, which is pronounced Mayan-gahl, inhabited the Stockton Bight area from the Hunter River north to the Tomaree Peninsular on the southern shores of Port Stephens. Their rich & well established culture did not last long after Europeans took up farmlands & grazed livestock on their traditional land. It is a shame the only remains today is on the Sydney Sandstone rock platforms in the form of mystical totem engravings,  along with hand, tool & weapon stencils inside caves. Worimi people

     The geology of the area is also of interest. Newcastle sits on a thick layer of sandstone built up over millions of years of sediments. These sediments also hold vast coal seams which are mined & exported around the world. Hunter Valley Coal

Polblue on the Barrington Plateau   http://www.robcaz.net/polblue.htm

Polblue Falls on Polblue Creek  http://www.robcaz.net/polblue_falls.htm   

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  Built by Rob  -  July 2004

                                                                                                                                                                updated - 9th December 2011

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