Bygone World,close To Home
Newcastle Herald
Saturday December 12, 1998
THERE is a tiny church in the secluded seaside village of Catherine Hill Bay where you could get married and spend your honeymoon as well.
The wooden Holy Trinity Church was bought from the Anglicans four years ago by Ross and Carolyn Brogden of Swansea.
Over the next three years they converted it into a weekender, with double bed and two bunks, kitchen, lounge with TV/radio, toilet with septic tank and a back veranda with ocean views.
After friends enthused over the place the Brogdens opened it, first to their friends then to the public, since which a steady stream of Sydneysiders and Novocastrians has enjoyed weekends or even weeks there.
The church was originally built behind Catherine Hill Bay's sole pub and at roughly the same time: the mid-1870s.
The village came into being to house coalminers working at the New Wallsend Coal Company colliery established in 1873, and was named for the schooner Catherine Hill that was wrecked in the area in June, 1867.
The church was moved later by horse and dray to its present site, on a hill between the two groups of small houses that make up the Catherine Hill Bay community.
The village, including the miners' homes, the Wallarah pub and the church, is heritage-protected but the pub is attuned to modern demands with a TAB and Sky Channel dish in the backyard, half-a-dozen poker machines and a courtesy bus to take customers home.
Apart from the church, Catherine Hill Bay boasts other tourist accommodation: the sandstone Beach House can take up to nine and one of the miners' cottages is available for seven adults plus a couple of children.
The colliery, plant and jetty would be something of an eyesore to those looking for a picturesque beach retreat but this is a mining village before it's a tourist resort. And north from by the hilltop surf lifesaving club, there's an excellent surf beach.
Apart from the beach, the very antiquity of the village, with its lines of old wooden and fibro cottages, is an attraction.
There's also a bowls club and a general store (next to the bush fire brigade) but the social centre (as one might suspect) is the pub, which bills itself as `the only Catho hotel'.
Opened in 1875 to assuage the thirsts of the miners, it has been doing so ever since, and these days also has a popular restaurant.
One wall of the pub is devoted to stories and pictures from the village's and the mines' long history. The first mine lasted only four years from 1873 but the Wallarah Coal Company reopened it in 1889 and it's been in production since.
© 1998 Newcastle Herald
