Forts for enemies, imagined and real

This fort was built on the eastern edge of Newcastle city in New South Wales in 1882, for a feared Russian invasion! That never came, but it did prove useful against a completely different enemy in 1942…

As one of the first coal mine sites in Australia, Flagstaff Hill was appropriated by the military in 1843, but nothing was really done with the land until the 1870s, when fears rose of a Russian attack at the time! A fort was commissioned and designed by Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Scratchley, whose expertise can be seen in forts all over Australia. But as the Russian threat subsided, it was kept as a general fortress for protection, with three 9-in Rifle Muzzle Loader (RML) guns and a casemated battery of four 80 pounders. In 1889 three 6-inch BL and one 8-in BL disappearing gun were added to the location.

The fort saw no action though until 1942, during the period of WWII when Japanese Imperial forces threatened Australia on multiple occasions, most seriously with the bombing of Darwin and the shelling of Sydney by midget submarines. The day after the attack on Sydney, Newcastle was shelled and the guns at Fort Scratchley were fired in anger for the first and only time.

It was decommissioned as a military base in 1972 and finally became a full museum in 2009.