Newcastle
— — a harbour town that turned to face the sea.
Not only on a wall.
“Newcastle sits two hours up the coast from Sydney, at the mouth of the Hunter River, and for most of the twentieth century its identity was coal and steel. The harbour still moves coal — more than any other port on earth — but the city behind it has quietly turned around. The old foreshore is a walking line now. Nobbys Headland still flashes from its sandstone bluff. Surfers come in off Merewether at first light, and the cafes along Darby Street open before the tide turns. — from the studio
Newcastle, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Newcastle is the second-largest city in New South Wales, set at the mouth of the Hunter River about 160 kilometres north of Sydney. The greater metropolitan area holds roughly 500,000 people. The Port of Newcastle is the largest coal export port in the world by tonnage, moving over 160 million tonnes a year, and that industrial spine — together with the BHP steelworks that ran from 1915 until 1999 — shaped the city's character. Since the steelworks closed the foreshore has been progressively converted to public space, and the city has built a reputation around its eastern beaches, its university, and a downtown light-rail line opened in 2019.
The city is defined by where the river meets the sea. The Hunter empties into the Pacific between Stockton Bight to the north and a chain of surf beaches to the south — Nobbys, Newcastle, Bar, Dixon Park, Merewether — that runs about six kilometres along the Bathers Way clifftop path. Merewether Ocean Baths, opened in 1935, is one of the largest ocean pools in the southern hemisphere at over 100 metres long. Surf Life Saving Australia was effectively founded on these beaches; Newcastle hosts a leg of the World Surf League Challenger Series each year, and dawn at Merewether on an east swell is the city's quietest crowded moment.
Nobbys Headland is the city's compass point. The sandstone bluff at the harbour entrance was originally an island twice its current height; convicts spent the 1820s cutting it down and building a causeway out to it, finished in 1846. The lighthouse on top dates to 1858 and still operates. Behind it, Fort Scratchley sits above the harbour mouth — built in the 1880s against a Russian threat that never arrived, and the only Australian fort to return fire in the Second World War, when a Japanese submarine shelled the city in June 1942. Both are open to walk through.