Catherine Hill Bay is a coastal bay and village on the southern peninsula forming Lake Macquarie

Lake Macquarie (New South Wales)

Lake Macquarie is Australia's largest coastal salt water lake, covering an area of in the Hunter Region of New South Wales with most of the City of Lake Macquarie's residents living near its shores. It is connected to the Tasman Sea by a short channel. Lake Macquarie is twice as large as Sydney...

, south of the Pacific Ocean

Pacific Ocean

The Pacific Ocean is the largest of the Earth's oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic in the north to the Southern Ocean in the south, bounded by Asia and Australia in the west, and the Americas in the east.At 165.2 million square kilometres in area, this largest division of the World...

 entrance channel at Swansea

Swansea, New South Wales

Swansea is a locality and commercial centre at the entrance to Lake Macquarie from the Pacific Ocean in New South Wales, Australia. It is part of the City of Lake Macquarie local government area....

 in New South Wales

New South Wales

New South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...

, Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

. It is part of the City of Lake Macquarie local government area

Local Government Areas of New South Wales

The local government areas of New South Wales, Australia have been subject to periodic bouts of restructuring and rationalisation by the State Government, involving voluntary and involuntary amalgamation of areas...

. The village is the oldest continuous settlement in the City of Lake Macquarie.

A surf club is sited overlooking the beach that is quite popular for recreation.

Mining

The settlement was first made after land was purchased on 1 April 1865. The town of Cowper was created, to serve as a base for coal

Coal

Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock usually occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure...

 mining by the New Wallsend Company in 1873 with the first shipment on 17 December of that year. The name Catherine Hill was adopted to commemorate the schooner

Schooner

A schooner is a type of sailing vessel characterized by the use of fore-and-aft sails on two or more masts with the forward mast being no taller than the rear masts....

 Catherine Hill that had run aground in 1867.

Later, the Wallarah Coal Company mined and shipped coal from the area including its nearby Crangan Bay mine. This was taken over by the Coal and Allied Group.

A railway originally was used to transport the coal to the wharf; later, trucks and automated loading belt systems were used.

Rutile

Rutile

Rutile is a mineral composed primarily of titanium dioxide, TiO2.Rutile is the most common natural form of TiO2. Two rarer polymorphs of TiO2 are known:...

was mined from the beach sands during the 1960s.

Development

Proposals for rezoning and redevelopment of the area for upmarket housing were opposed by residents, many of whom lived in older style and small miners' cottages, and by environmentalists, who contended that the heathlands around the village contained a large variety of wildflowers, some dwarfed into unusual forms from the exposed coastal conditions. On 1 September 2009, a court ruled the development agreement illegal.

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