NSWPort & river
Belmont (NSW)
A mission station on the lake became a guesthouse village, then the end of a railway.
1825Lake Macquarie mission site chosen
WHAT STARTED IT
In 1825 a site at Reid’s Mistake on the eastern shore of Lake Macquarie was fixed for Rev. Lancelot Threlkeld’s London Missionary Society mission, chosen because Aboriginal people gathered there and food was plentiful. Settlers who took up lakeside land from the 1860s farmed, cut timber, fished and built boats, using the lake to move goods and passengers.
WHAT SUSTAINED IT
Thomas Williamson’s Belmont House guesthouse, licensed as a hotel in 1876, and a post office in 1877 anchored a village that grew through the 1870s, when Belmont was also the ferry terminus for travellers between Cooranbong and Newcastle. A colliery railway reached Belmont from Redhead in 1916, and lake-view subdivisions such as the Lewers Estate sold well from 1919.
TURNING POINTS
1825A 10,000-acre reserve at Reid’s Mistake is set aside for Threlkeld’s mission, which he works from 1826 until it moves across the lake.
1866Thomas Williamson and Robert Kirkaldy take up the land where they build Belmont House.
1877Belmont post office opens on 1 September, with Williamson as postmaster.
1916Special trains run from Newcastle to Belmont on Boxing Day as the railway extension opens.
1971The last passenger train leaves Belmont station on 9 April.
WHAT IT DOES NOW
A Lake Macquarie town centre on the Pacific Highway with about 7,300 residents, sailing clubs and a hospital opened in 1968. Passenger trains stopped in 1971, and the old line is now the Fernleigh Track.