The second largest of New South Wales cities, Australia's Newcastle lies on a peninsula bounded by the Hunter River in the north and by the Pacific Ocean in the southeast. Nobbys Head, at the tip of the peninsula, is where the Hunter and the Pacific meet.
As a waterside metropolis, Newcastle has its share of attractive beaches, including surfing beaches made famous by Newcastles's own former world champion surfie Mark Richards. Water sports and leisure activities certainly abound around the river and ocean shores. And there are harbour cruises to take.
In the city itself, a variety of restaurants and live-music venues add another dimension to quite sophisticated Newcastle life and pushes the city away from a disparaged image of a smoke-belching industrial city.
Heritage buildings built in colonial times give sections of the city an old-world charm, even as the city itself pulsates to the beat of modern living.
Pleasant and friendly
Originally named Coal River, Newcastle was founded in 1804 as a place to send the state's intractable convicts, earning the settlement its early appellation of "hell of New South Wales."
As one of Australia's largest ports, it is the loading wharf for Hunter Valley coal. This, plus massive steelworks and other industrial plants, mainly in the city's outskirts, gave rise to an undeserved image of a smoky, grimy steel-and-coal city.
While not immediately perceived as a place to visit, Newcastle is in fact a pleasant, friendly place with the added aura of waterside living and leisure.
It is, too, a central gateway to such popular destinations as the Hunter Valley and its vineyards and wineries, and the coastal resort towns of Port Stephens and Port Macquarie in the north and, on the Central Coast, The Entrance and Terrigal in the south.
And Sydney is but a two hours' drive away.
