Boom times for the pretty city with the lake
INDIGENOUS Australians living in the beautiful stretch of NSW coastline we now know as Lake Macquarie called the lake for thousands of years by the name Awaba, which is said to translate to “a plain surface”. The lake is often just that, a plain blue surface of sparkling water surrounded by small and large communities and stretches of bush. The first European contact with the Lake Macquarie area was in 1800, when a man named Captain William Reid took a wrong turn on his way from Sydney to Newcastle and found himself in a lake rather than the river he had been expecting further north. It is said that the trip was to retrieve a load of coal. Instead his wrong turn gave the Lake Macquarie area a new name between 1800 and 1826, as Indigenous names in NSW were swept aside in the push for European settlement. The land of the Awabakal nation became known as Reid’s Mistake, until a colony that wanted to acknowledge Governor Macquarie named the area after him instead. For a long time L...