ASH ISLAND – TIMES PAST
“Industrial island was a land of plenty”
By Norm Barney – Newcastle Morning Herald Saturday, December 16 1995
It was one of several Hunter River islands and for many years it was the source of Newcastle’s milk supply. For a period, before the coming of industries, it also supplied residents with fruit and vegetable.
Moscheto Island, or Mosquito Island as it was also known, is today part of Kooragang Island but there was a time when it was very important to the fledgling city of Newcastle. In its early years of settlement Moscheto Island produced the first locally grown fruit. The soil and temperate climate were ideal for growing oranges, apples and peaches. The fruit was shipped to Newcastle by row boat. When a smelting works was built on the site on what later became part of the BHP steel works, the death knell of the orchards was sounded. Trees, which once provided a natural wind screen for the orchards, were gradually destroyed by sulphur fumes. Some of the families who lived on the island also made a living from fishing and oysters.
At the height of the season fishermen on Moscheto could earn between £1 and £2 a day. A succession of floods destroyed the oyster beds and the younger fishermen moved north to settle near the Clarence, Bellinger, Richmond and Macleay rivers. Those settlers who remained took up dairying, some of them becoming very successful. Among the families who lived on Moscheto were the Turners, Bedfords. Jordons, Newtons, Tongues, Dempseys. Fosters, Pilleys, Croeses and Morrises. Among the pioneer settlers of the island was Captain Tonkins and his wife. The couple came to Moscheto Island after spending a few years trading between Australia and Fiji. It was said that the house they built on the island in 1860 was shipped from Fiji. Captain Tonkins once commanded a man-Of-war, and a brother died at the Battle of Waterloo. He lived until the age of 91 and, with his wife, was buried on Moscheto Island.
Their remains were removed to Sandgate Cemetery towards the end of World War I. The island also had its own church, school, and post and telegraph office. Church services were held every Sunday and were conducted by a bank manager, Mr J. Langley, who would be picked up in Newcastle by one of the islanders and rowed to the island. The church did not have a bell so when he was ready to begin his service, usually at 3pm, Mr Lanzlev would hoist a flaz outside the became a bishop. The late Mr James Turner arrived with his wife on Moscheto Island in 1863. Later in life he recalled that there were only a handful of families on the island at that time. In 1917 Mr Turner said that there were not many people in the town (Newcastle) when he arrived,… perhaps a couple of thousand.’ ‘The town area was not very extensive,’ Mr Turner said. ‘These suburbs we (now) see in all directions stand where there was nothing but thickly timbered country. Oak and gum trees grew to great proportions on the land.’ He was present at the first land sale at Wickham when the ‘land was almost given away, it was scrub’.
Hunter St was then ‘a rough thoroughfare’, and Watt St was ‘all day holes’. There were about :W head of dairy cattle on Moscheto Island when the Turners arrived. ‘These supplied Newcastle’s wants as far as milk was concerned. No butter was made except that for the dairyman’s own household.’ In 1866, Mr Turner purchased eight cows from another island resident. Mr Creese, and began his life as a dairy farmer. His dairy herd never passed 60 head. Mr Turner rowed twice a day to’ Newcastle, each a return journey of more than 6km. ‘The seas used to tear through the heads, and at times it was a terrible rough crossing from Carrington. which was then only a sandbank’ A shipwright named Howden was the only resident of the sandbank that would eventually become Carrington. ‘At low water we used to walk across from Carrington to Honeysuckle Point but when the tide was high and a big sea outside, the water would be very rough along where the dyke is now. We have taken as long as three hours to row the 6kn1, with a boy baling all the time.
A hand-worked punt was introduced between the island and the mainland in the early 1890s. It made it easier to get the milk to the city. The best milker Mr Turner had was a common cow of no particular breeding but the majority of cows on the island were Ayrshires. ‘The island, at its best, supplied five or six hundred gallons (2300 litres to 2700 litres) a day to the people of Newcastle,’ Mr Turner said. In 1866 the price for milk was sixpence a quart and it never went below threepence a quart. Fifty years after Mr Turner became a dairyman, his milk was still selling at sixpence. When the Government decided to resume a large part of the island and proposed to build houses on it for employees of the Walsh Island Dockyard, the Turners retired to the ‘mainland’, to Bingle Hill, at Tighes Hill. Some dairying continued for a while on Moscheto Island but it was obviously earmarked for development. In 1930 Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) secured a special option over the island with the intention of building a chemical plant there. It did not eventuate. Moscheto Island is no more. The place where oranges and peaches once grew and cows grazed has been taken over by industry