Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser (NSW : 1843 - 1893), Thursday 12 February 1885, page 7


THE HUNTER FIFTY YEARS AGO.

(T0 the Editor of the Maitland Mercury.)

SIB -The following extract from a letter, received the other evening, from an octogenarian, resident at present in Nelson, New Zealand, and who formerly resided in this quarter, may probably amuse some of your many readers. If you think so, please insert.

" The very old hands at Dungog are now getting few. I first passed over what is now Dungog in April. 1832, when the ground was covered with ti-tree, about four feet high. There are great towns now, where tbere was not a house then, and some not even surveyed when you carne. At Morpeth there was not a house, and it was known by the name of "The Green Hills,"" or the "St. Michael;" the old bulk [?hulk] being shingled in, and moored in that river, as a store ship. Not a house at Hinton; Miller the boat builder, was squatted down on the forest, which stille (sic) bears his name. Not a house at " Raymond's Terrace," Seaham, Clarence Town, or Dungog. One solitary settler on the Manning River, Mr. Wynter, who had a grant tbere, and bad been Secretary to some admiral, I think Admiral Lord Howe. He was a plain man and a Magistrate, and frequently visited Port Macquarie. I visited Buladelah and Kempsey, on the Macleay River, before there was the sign of a house, and con-sequently I knew much of the district. Raymond Terrace took its name from the drunken surveyor who laid it out. He was there eight or nine months drunk, and people thought he would never move, so called it Raymond's Terrace. The Paterson township was then called the " Old Banks," and was the end of the world, on that river. Paterson is years older

than Maitland, which was at that time called the. " New Banks," or " Wallace's Plains," after the man who discovered them. It took its name from Sir George Maitland, at that time Under Secretary for the Colonies, and M.P. for the Borough of Whit-church, in Hampshire, England."-Yours truly,

SENEX,

Dungog, 9th Feb., 1885.