For emergency help in floods and storms, ring 132 500. For life threatening emergencies call triple zero, 000.
City of Newcastle
The Newcastle Civil Defence Organisation was operating in 1956, with the Lord Mayor, Ald Frank Purdue, the first local controller. Several heads of sections were appointed and wardens and welfare staff selected, and from the early 1960s there was a large and active signals section under Bruce Wearne, later the controller of the Sydney Northern Division. At one stage Wearne had nearly 70 members who developed the high-frequency radio communications for the four sub-local controls that were established. His group was a leader in communications within the NSW Civil Defence Organisation, being used to run state communications conferences and being called upon often to help in police stakeouts. The Newcastle organisation was hampered, as was civil defence in general in those days, by cramped headquarters facilities and outmoded equipment. The members met at first in the Civic Wintergarden Theatre.
From these unprepossessing origins a large unit was built during the 1960s. At one stage the ‘nominal roll’ claimed nearly 500 members, half of them wardens. Many were not very active, but the number does suggest the scale of the recruitment goal in the large urban centres and predictably the numbers in courses were huge: one in 1964 attracted 180 students. The Newcastle Civil Defence Organisation (like the Sydney one) employed a paid civil defence staff officer (John Tennent) for a time to help with the planning and public relations tasks. The organisation penetrated its community well, many council works staff joining up and the Supply and Transport Section recruiting people whose normal jobs were in the rail, road, shipping and air transport industries. There was also an auxiliary which raised funds and arranged social functions to help establish an esprit de corps within the organisation. By 1966 Ald DG McDougall was the controller, the Signals Section was still active and was providing communications for the Mattara Festival, and unit exercises were being held frequently − one of them on an all-night basis and another lasting a weekend. There were displays at local fairs, and by 1970 more than 50 civil defence members had been to Mount Macedon for training.
A new headquarters was set up in Islington in 1972, and another at Nobbys Head in 1979 gave the unit much-needed space. In the early 1970s a 1940 Ford Blitz truck was acquired: it was restored and fitted out by means of a loan (which was repaid by collecting and selling bottles) from a local volunteer. This and other early vehicles were not only ancient but they were unreliable. Today’s Newcastle SES is better off in this regard and has two rescue trucks, two four-wheel drives, a sandbagger, three trailers and two floodboats. The unit’s present base, in the city’s Emergency Management Centre, was acquired in 1992, and there are 60 members. Two noteworthy predecessors of the present controller, Brian Carr, were Ald Don Geddes from 1978 to the early 1990s and Bob Myles from 1992 to 2005. In Geddes’ time the unit used council tip trucks for operations. The unit has played major roles in many storm damage operations, in the response to the big earthquake in the city in 1989 (when, among other tasks, the unit did a huge catering job), in a train derailment operation at Hexham in 1973 and in many other emergencies including bush fires, searches, floods and the Thredbo landslide. In addition, members help in community events such as the Bikers’ Toy Run, shows and festivals.
(Bruce Wearne, Brian Carr, Bill Paterson, LG, CK)
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