Ms McNamee's father, grandfather and great grandfather were all doctors at 233 High Street, where the Shell service station now is, but Ms McNamee said the family line of work wasn't for her.

She worked for many years as an English and art teacher in Adelaide, and moved back to Maitland in the early 2000s with her husband who wanted to live somewhere on the east coast.

Ms McNamee knew just the place.

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"I guess Maitland's my heartland if you know what I mean," she said.

"It's where all my growing up happened, I appreciate the architecture and the history and I love the fact that it's so connected to the river."

Ms McNamee said she finds art and history very complementary of each other, which is clear in her Maitland Collection of art, where she captured historical parts of Maitland such as Maitland Hospital, Maitland Station, Coffin Lane and St Mary's.

"When I returned to Maitland to live in the early 2000s, I really wanted to record the memories I have of the places that were important to me when I was a child growing up," she said.

"In my art I recreated where I'd been and what was familiar to me as a child, and that became my Maitland Collection."

"As an artist you can recreate things and you can repair buildings, so I was able to actually draw the place that was the old surgery building in High Street, which was a lovely thing to do."

Ms McNamee's favourite subjects to illustrate and paint around Maitland are Walka Water Works, Cintra on Regent Street and old hay sheds.

"They tell a very big story," she said.

Ms McNamee is heavily involved with the National Trust, and as chairperson at Grossmann and Brough House, works very hard, along with her fellow volunteers, to protect the buildings and encourage visitors to appreciate the heritage.

According to Ms McNamee, the heritage buildings of Maitland show the strong long term connections between the people of the city.

"You have families who have been here for generations and generations, people tend to stay and love the place," she said.

"The community is changing so much, you only have to look at all these outlying estates that surround Maitland to see some of the pastoral identity is fast disappearing, but there are still people who treasure that,

"You only have to hear a few older people gathering and talking about old times with much warmth and humour."

Ms McNamee said Maitland is a terrific city with a strong community, and is so ideally situated in terms of proximity to big cities, amazing waterways, beautiful country areas and vineyards.

"The community is the whole basis of our culture really, we're not individuals alone and there's such strength in working together as a community as well as most importantly appreciating everything an individual brings with them," she said.

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