Nobbys Head — dual-named Whibayganba for the Awabakal people — is the distinctive headland at the southern entrance to Newcastle Harbour. Europeans first knew the outcrop as an island (also Coal Island); Governor Lachlan Macquarie laid the foundation stone for Macquarie Pier on 5 August 1818 to link it to the mainland and improve the harbour entrance. Convict and later free labour worked the pier for decades; it was completed in 1846 and later rebuilt as a stone breakwater. Sand accumulation along the wall created the isthmus and Nobbys Beach, so the former island now reads as a continuous headland.
In the 1850s the crown of the rock was lowered to form a platform for a lighthouse and signal station. Nobbys Head Light (designed under colonial Government Architect Alexander Dawson, with associations also to Edmund Blacket in Newcastle works of the period) was completed in 185758 — among the earliest permanent lights on the NSW coast after Macquarie Light (South Head) and contemporary with Hornby Light. The lighthouse appears in Newcastle’s civic imagery and coat of arms. Port Authority of NSW manages the heritage headland, which is periodically open to the public.
Views “from the Nobbys” look across the working coal port that grew from the early penal settlement into one of Australia’s great harbour cities.v>
