How Jesmond Was Founded by Coal, Convicts, and One Remarkable Family
Most Australian suburbs begin with a surveyor’s line and a speculative estate map. Jesmond began with a family.
Long before its streets filled with post-war cottages and university students, Jesmond was a patch of rough country known as Dark Creek, a shallow valley shouldered between Lambton and Wallsend. And at the heart of its transformation stood one man whose influence reached far beyond the boundaries of his 80-acre holding: William Australia Steel (1830–1905).
He is remembered by local historians—quietly, but accurately—as the godfather of the Newcastle and Lake Macquarie coal industry. Jesmond, in many ways, is his monument.
Long before the Steel family arrived, this country was home to the Awabakal people, the first inhabitants of the Jesmond and Newcastle region. Their enduring connection to the land, waterways, and cultural sites remains central to the story of this place.
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The Steel Line Arrives in Newcastle (1826)
The story begins with William’s father, James Steel, who arrived in New South Wales in 1826 at the head of a large family and an even larger responsibility: he had been appointed engineer and mine manager for the Australian Agricultural Company, charged with taking over the government coal mines of Newcastle.
By 1833 he had built a substantial home at the top of Brown Street, a mere hundred metres from A Pit—the beating heart of early industrial Newcastle. From this vantage point, he oversaw convicts marching up from the gaol each morning.
Police constables marched as many as 200 prisoners to the Steel residence daily, where James assigned them to underground labour or, on quieter days, to cultivating the garden that became the pride of the hill.
His children grew up in the rhythms of industry and authority. For young William Steel, coal was not merely a resource. It was the family trade.
Apprenticed to the Industry That Would Define a City
William was apprenticed as an engineer under the AA Company and worked under his father at pits C, D, E, F, the Borehole, and the Sea Pit.
By his twenties he had amassed a rare gift: expert knowledge of the coastal seams, an instinct for boring and sinking shafts, and an ability to read the earth with the fluency of a surveyor and the daring of a speculator.
He held a controversial belief for his time—that the Borehole Seam extended all the way from Newcastle to Lake Macquarie. History proved him right.
But William saw something else clearly: to be constrained by the AA Company was to be constrained by someone else’s ambition.
Sometime after 1847, he resigned. And then he changed the map of the Hunter.
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William Steel, Founder of an Industry
Steel’s entrepreneurial explosion is breathtaking in hindsight. He helped develop or directly founded:
- Newcastle Coal Company
- Waratah Coal Company
- Redhead Coal Company
- Newcastle–Wallsend Coal Company
- Operations at Burwood Estate, Merewether for the Brown/Donaldson partnerships
- Pits at Carrington, Wickham, Bullock Island, Lambton, and more
He travelled to England to secure rails for transporting coal from Merewether to Newcastle—an early gesture toward the region’s future as an export powerhouse. Shareholders trusted him because he had an uncanny ability to “reach payable seams,” and he repeatedly proved them right.
By mid-century, the Steel family were not just participants in the industry; they were its scaffolding.
From Dark Creek to Jesmond
In the late 1850s, William purchased 80 acres at Dark Creek, then little more than a wooded pocket west of Lambton. He built a steam-powered sawmill, operated by his brothers, which supplied timber to the rapidly expanding mines and settlements of Wallsend, Jesmond, and Lambton.
But more importantly, he renamed the place.
The old colonial designation “Dark Creek” carried none of the ambition he felt for the area. William christened his homestead “Jesmond,” after a district in Newcastle-on-Tyne—and soon convinced others that the locality, too, should bear the name. The place responded. Jesmond grew.
Steele’s Sawmill was one of the earliest industries in Jesmond—a steam-driven operation run by Michael and Ralph Steele at a time when cedar grew thick across the district. The mill stood on the southern side of the old S Bend, at the junction of Robert Street and what is now Newcastle Road, a spot later remembered as Tom Hamilton’s Paddock.
Bullock teams and horse-drawn drays hauled logs to the mill from as far north as Morpeth, with smaller loads arriving from Speers Point to the south. As early as 1867, timber cut here was already finding its way into cottages and homesteads throughout Lambton and Jesmond.
William also built a small coal mine, the Dark Creek Colliery, next to the sawmill to supply coal locally.
The Steeles and their crew were also keen fishermen—keen enough that when the fish were biting down at Hexham, the saws stopped spinning and the mill closed for the day.
By 1883, a small but thriving village had taken shape here, home to around 600 residents. The 1880s also saw the arrival of new industry, including the Campion & Cunnington’s Soap and Tallow Works, a soap works owned by John Campion that became well know throughout NSW in the early 1900s..
The Streets That Remember the Steels
Over time, subdivisions carved William’s land into the streets we know today. Some of those streets still carry the family legacy:
- Steel Street, Jesmond — named for William Steel
- Steel Street, Newcastle — named for his father, James Steel
- Michael Street, William Street, Robert Street, and others likely honouring various members of this sprawling and industrious clan
Jesmond may not trumpet its origins, but the map quietly remembers.
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The Legend of a Builder of Cities
By the time of his death in 1905—tragically caused by severe burns from a house fire at the historic Brown Street home—William had sunk hundreds of shafts across the Newcastle and Lake Macquarie region.
Some he owned.
Some he directed.
Some he bored under contract.
All helped shape a region that would become the coal capital of Australia.
His father James Steel, who died in 1868, is remembered for delivering the first steam engine for the coal pits and the Great Northern Railway into Newcastle. Between them, father and son changed the trajectory of the city, its labour, its wealth, its spread, and its horizons.
The Steel family had 14 children, two marriages, and generations of kin who worked in the AA Company pits or in allied trades. They left their mark in railways, mines, subdivisions, and stories told over hearths in coal towns from Wallsend to Waratah.
Steel brothers circa 1870
Why Jesmond Exists
Jesmond was not founded by accident. It was shaped—deliberately, ambitiously—by the Steels:
- James, the engineer-commander of convicts at A Pit
- William, the visionary prospector, company founder, and industrial strategist
- And the dozens of children, in-laws, and descendants who spread across the Hunter, building, boring, sinking, and directing the coalfields that powered a region.
If Newcastle is built on coal, Jesmond is built on Steel.
Thanks to Michael Lancaster of Lake Macquarie Early Years group for much of the research on this page and various Steel family members for these photographs.
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