East Maitland's history has not been written up in as much detail as the former West Maitland's has been, but every now and then a precious unpublished piece of the East's rich story appears.
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In 1979 a life-long local resident, Arthur Gow (1904-84), wrote a memoir about the place he recalled from his youth. In it he described East Maitland as it was from about 1910 to the mid-1920s.
None of the streets were sealed. They were surfaced with blue metal brought in by train along with sandstone gravel from nearby One Mile Gully quarry and broken up by council workmen with sledgehammers, spread out and flattened with a heavy steamroller. Only the busy streets were gravelled: the rest were dirt tracks. Footpaths were bare earth or grass between the roads and the houses. Kerbing and guttering was still in the future.
Cars were few before the WWI. Arthur remembered the first one he saw, a bright red number owned by a Hunter coal baron. He and his schoolmates lined up to watch it drive past! Only main thoroughfares (like Lawes, Melbourne and Newcastle streets) had gas lighting. At dusk, a council employee on a bike or a horse would light each lamp atop a post about 12-15 feet (roughly 4-5 metres) high. He carried a long pole with a crook and a lighted oily rag on it. The gas was turned on with the crook and then lit from the rag. At daylight next morning another council man would do the rounds to turn off the gas which came from local coal burnt at the council's gas works on the corner of Banks and Brisbane streets.
Houses burned wood or coal for heating. On still winter mornings, smoke curled from each chimney. The air must have been far from clean. When there were atmospheric temperature inversions the smell of smoke would have been unpleasantly strong.
Nevertheless, despite the air pollution, there was bird life in abundance from tiny jenny and blue wrens to big white cockatoos. There were finches, willie wagtails, robin redbreasts, magpies, pee wees, hawks, crows, galahs, parrots, parakeets and rosellas. Especially in the many small areas of bush, they made a deafening cacophony of sounds.
There were the sounds of human activity, too, men working with horses and tip drays as they carted soil or gravel. Then there were the rattling trams, which plied between East Maitland and West from 1909 to 1926, and the trains.
The smells were not only those associated with burning coal and wood. Some came from the sanitary service run by a Mr Troy, a council employee, who parked his carts in his back yard at the corner of Victoria and Rous streets. He used tar liberally to quell the stench, though not always successfully.
One day, Arthur recalled, Mr Troy dropped a full pan in Victoria St. He calmly picked up its contents with his bare hands, loaded the refilled pan onto the cart and wiped his hands on his horse's tail! The like of that is no longer seen anywhere in the streets of Maitland!
. Developed from Arthur John Gow: 'Early East Maitland' (1979, unpublished memoir)