Royal Newcastle Hospital stood on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the Hunter River port of Newcastle, New South Wales, from 1817 until 2007.  The history of Newcastle’s most enduring hospital is an epic tale: how many other hospitals started as a convict gaol and ended after an earthquake? The hospital grew in step with one of Australia’s earliest towns from its founding as a penal settlement and coal port. The hospital was strongly shaped by Newcastle society and the seaside location, and by revolutionary changes in medicine over nearly 200 years. The views of the sea, the shipping in port, city workers, East End residents, coal miners and steelworkers, nurses, doctors and volunteers – all played a part in the hospital’s history. Tens of thousands of patients, staff and supporters, generation after generation, were involved with the hospital and its many campuses. Royal Newcastle in turn had a powerful influence on the city centre and portside communities and on people’s wellbeing throughout the Hunter Valley. By 2007, the year the ‘Royal’ closed, this was one of the oldest and best-known hospitals in Australia. In the intervening years public hospitals had been transformed from mean and dirty places giving scant aid to ailing prisoners and the poor into massive and complex institutions of medical science caring for all classes of people. The convict hospitals of NSW were replaced by those run by community boards, with subscriptions from patients as well as increasing levels of government funding. Successive hospital buildings at the Royal faithfully reflected those social and medical changes and the growth of a great city. There is at this Newcastle a government house, a jail, a store house, a church, and an hospital which are but indifferent buildings compared with those of Sydney. (Letter from convict, John Slater, 1819) Newcastle was ‘Sydney’s Siberia’, established in 1804 as a place of exile for re-offending convicts. They endured harsh conditions crawling through damp tunnels to cut coal and load it with baskets onto ships anchored in the Hunter River. Rations were poor, medicines were few, and violence was rife. The men and some few women prisoners suffered outbreaks of scurvy, venereal disease and dysentery, pneumonia, fractures and self-inflicted injuries. A temporary hospital was opened in a convict hut in 1810, and a permanent hospital was established on today’s site in 1817. The first Newcastle Hospital was one of the most prominent buildings in the penal settlement. The hospital, converted from a gaol, was completed in time for Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s visit in 1818. His secretary described ‘An excellent Hospital, well aired and well situated, constructed with Stone with a Viranda round it, and enclosed with a suitable Paling.’There were two large ward rooms and five small rooms. The entrance passage was also where meat was cooked for the meals. William Evans, who was appointed Assistant Colonial Surgeon in 1811, and spent 11 years running the hospital, was less than pleased with its amenities. He lacked blankets, soap and the most basic medicines. ‘Dropsy’ was endemic due to the convicts escaping from the hospital, ‘running into the bush and living on improper food’. He complained that the hospital was too small, and struggled to squeeze 29 sick men into the two wards. But the same convict building was used for nearly 50 years, until Newcastle’s free population was large enough finally to build its own new hospital. This half-century was a time of growth, decline and resurgence in the Hunter district, as free settlers replaced convicts and troops. The new hospital stands about the centre of a large allotment of land in Pacific Street. The front of the building will face the street and the town and the back will look on to the Pacific Ocean... There will be a neat verandah on the ground floor and a shady balcony on the upper floor which will afford a magnificent healthy promenade for the patients. (Newcastle Chronicle 7 April 1866) In 1824 Newcastle ceased to be a penal settlement, and began to grow with the arrival of free settlers from Britain. In the 1850s the numbers of mining companies, mines and miners at Newcastle escalated, triggering a long coal boom and a spectacular rise in population and shipping. But this was a working community with few resources. The ‘colonial hospital’ passed into their hands, but they had to make do for many years with a sorely-inadequate building. In 1863 former convict Henry Usher bequeathed money for a new hospital, boosting the vigorous fundraising efforts of Mayor James Hannell.  The new hospital opened in 1866, although funds permitted completion of only half of the design. There was great jubilation when the Hannell Wing was added in 1888. Even so, as Newcastle’s population exploded, the hospital was cramped for space. Turn-of-the-century postcards depict the hospital as a Newcastle showpiece set in gardens, but building over the spacious grounds was well in train. The hospital’s town setting was also improved when Pacific and Shortland Parks were formed in the 1890s. Outpatients and hospital visitors, doctors and nurses would sit in the park and take the air, and also enjoy the beach. Both doctors and nurses played active roles in the new Surf and Life Saving Club. Through the nineteenth century the hospital existed in a noxious environment of disease and suffering. The influx of immigrants and rising numbers of seaborne passengers carried killing diseases with them: smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, influenza, whooping cough and diphtheria. Notoriously bad local conditions, impure water and poor sanitation brought regular outbreaks of ‘dirt fever’ (typhoid). Anaesthesia, asepsis and antisepsis radically improved survival rates, and there were also important changes in caring for the sick poor. Concerns were often raised over the standard of treatment. In 1870 the first Nightingale-trained nurse, Jane Morrow, was appointed as matron. By 1914 the hospital was a respected nurse training school in its own right with a separate nurses’ home. Medical and technical staffwere often innovators. In 1871 Dr Richard Harris operated using antiseptic treatments, and in 1896 Newcastle Hospital was the first in Australia to successfully use X-ray photography by Walter Drowley Filmer. Hospital financing remained an unstable mixture of private donations, local fundraising, government subsidy and patient contributions. As many as 28,000 seamen visited the port each year between 1880 and 1920 when Newcastle was the fifth largest port in the world: a record 5,043 vessels arrived in 1906. The hospital was conveniently located close to the harbour for seaborne patients, who were often the largest occupational group. Captains would open their ships to the public for a silver coin, with a share of the proceeds going to the hospital.Support for the hospital also came from the subscriptions Newcastle’s miners and later steelworkers employed at the massive BHP works, and from middle-class men and women who were doctors and nurses and voluntary committee members and supporters. In 1914 the longest-serving board president Archibald Rankin set the hospital on a firm financial footing by establishing an Industrial Contribution Fund for workers. Construction of the third hospital on the site began in 1913. This was the imposing North Wing, with its well-ventilated ‘Nightingale wards’. York Wing, named after the Duke of York (later King George VI) was opened alongside it in 1927. Construction involved not only larger buildings covering the old site, but also took the hospital beyond long-established boundaries, to the west across Pacific Street and along King Street. By 1938 these buildings formed a hospital precinct at the eastern end of the city, a much larger complex than the small group at the top of King Street in 1901. The hospital also spread out to include subsidiary hospitals in other suburbs to serve Newcastle’s expansion into an industrial and suburban city. Newcastle’s industrial character intensified with munitions work during World War Two, and its blue collar ethos strongly influenced the hospital. The port was crammed with warships. Resident Medical Officer Dr Mackenzie, while teasing hospital colleagues one night by flicking the common room light on and off, triggered a security alert at Fort Scratchley. He had hit on a secret code on the night a large troop convoy was proceeding north. Japanese submarines prowled the coast, and their torpedo attacks killed and injured soldiers and nurses on troopships and seamen on BHP vessels carrying vital supplies of iron ore and coal. In June 1942 a Japanese submarine lobbed shells across Newcastle harbour at the steelworks. Nurse Poppy Adam was on duty in the hospital when the shells exploded and the call went up: ‘Nurses, do not panic!’ The Board was instructed to build a temporary hospital in bushland inland from the coast as Newcastle Hospital was clearly in danger of damage from Japanese naval guns. Rankin Park Chest Hospital - another Newcastle Hospital campus – was opened in 1947. Ultimately, this land would be the site of the John Hunter Hospital that would replace the Royal. The war transformed hospitals in other ways. The introduction of the antibiotic penicillin heralded revolutionary changes in clinical treatment, patient survival and hospital care. Australians were the first civilians in the world to gain access to this ‘miracle drug’ from 1944. In Rankin’s time as President/Chairman (1914-51), Newcastle Hospital grew from a daily occupancy of 73 patients to 416, with outpatients rising from a yearly 2,000 to more than 170,000. After World War Two, under a change of name to ‘Royal’ the hospital grew to its maximum size, rising skywards with the 10-storey Y-shaped Nickson Wing, the Irene Hall Nurses Home and an Outpatients Wing. The outpatients building (1971) and the clinical sciences building (David Maddison Building) (1981) also extended the boundaries of the old East End campus. Royal Newcastle Hospital had the largest outpatient department in NSW, with nearly one million visits in 1973. By then the Royal was one of the largest hospitals in Australia and the hub of a distinctive system of regional health services. The Royal’s massive patient numbers and community health services contributed to Newcastle’s selection as the place for a new medical school. From the 1930s to the 1960s medical superintendents Dr Kenneth Starr and Dr Chris McCaffrey dominated the hospital, together with the formidable Irene Hall, Matron from 1915 to 1958.Dr McCaffrey believed that the hospital should not be run as a workshop for the convenience of doctors or nurses. He broke with the past by introducing a system of full-time staff specialists who combined the traditional authority of hospital doctors with formal management roles. McCaffrey cultivated links with Newcastle Trades Hall and Labor Party figures, regularly inviting them to morning tea. But in an echo of bitter public rivalries between doctors in the previous century, things fell apart in a violent dispute between McCaffrey and medical staff. The Minister dismissed the Board and McCaffrey resigned in 1965, but the new outpatients building was named in his honour the McCaffrey Wing in 1980. Over its long history Newcastle’s oldest hospital had coped with scanty medical supplies and funds , dealt with the ill effects of shipwreck, mining accidents, and epidemics of typhoid, cholera, polio and influenza, with personal rivalries and political manoeuvering, with sandstorm, earthquake, and two World Wars. But it did not survive bureaucratic rationalisation. In the 1980s the outpatient fund was abolished in favour of centralised government funding, and regionalisation brought an end to the independent hospital board, control moving to the Hunter New England Area Health Service. The Health Service decided to build a replacement hospital on a spacious inland site closer to the expanding suburbs. The shock of a severe earthquake in 1989 hastened events. York Wing was demolished due to earthquake damage, but heritage activists helped prevent demolition of the Royal’s other historical buildings, and the three nurses’ homes and North Wing were sold for reconfiguration as apartments. Mass protests in 1991 gave warning that the Royal’s closure also needed careful handling, and many commemorative events were arranged. Patients were gradually moved to other facilities and by 2006 most of the remaining health services were transferred to the John Hunter. Royal Newcastle Hospital finally closed in mid 2007. The hospital’s history between 1989 and 2007 was also one of intense community involvement: Newcastle’s people adapted to the changes at the Royal but voiced apprehensions about the fate of the buildings and the use of the site after closure. The Redevelopment team held public briefing sessions and acknowledged that the redevelopment would be one of the most significant urban renewal projects in Newcastle and ‘a showcase in the inner-city’s revitalisation program’. Construction giant Mirvac has taken ownership of the Royal Newcastle Hospital site and yesterday revealed details of its $300 million plans for a luxury hotel, upmarket apartments and retail precinct on the prized beachfront land.(Newcastle Herald 1 October 2007) Landcom commissioned a Master Plan in 2004, aiming ‘to take the natural, historical and social attributes of the site to create a place where people can live, work, shop, eat or simply stroll and enjoy the beach and ocean’. When the final Concept Plan was approved expressions of Interest were called from companies wishing to partner with Landcom in developing the site. Mirvac Group was selected in 2007. Mirvac finished demolishing the hospital buildings in May 2008 and began constructing the first three new buildings on the beachfront site. The developer also acted to celebrate the history and culture of Royal Newcastle Hospital in photographs, by working with archivists and historians, and creating public art projects. Back To Top