If you hear the sound of canons and musket shots in Raymond Terrace on Saturday don't panic - it's just the Step Back into King Street Heritage Festival in full swing.
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The in-costume 40th Regiment of Foot will safely fire a canon and musket volleys throughout the festival while a replica of Australia's first steam powered ocean-going paddlewheel ship, William the Fourth, a vessel significant to Raymond Terrace, will be cruising along the river.
Raymond Terrace Rotary Club, which has taken over the organisation of the festival, has pulled together a full program for the May 15 event which celebrates the history and heritage of King Street - the epicentre of the town in the 1800 and 1900s.
Program highlights include performances by the Raymond Terrace Men's Shed Band, Irrawang High School Drum Corps, Maitland Pipes and Drums Band, Port Stephens Community Band and the Voyage of Irish Dance, Town Crier Ben Tranter in action, traditional games and a variety of stalls to visit.
"There will be many stalls and plenty of food from the Raymond Terrace Lions Club and Raymond Terrace Rotary Club, along with Terrace Meats and other food vendors," festival organiser and Rotarian Sharon Chambers said.
Festival attendees are being encouraged to dress up. There will be prizes for best hat or bonnet and best dressed adult and child with prizes supplied by MarketPlace Raymond Terrace.
King Street will be blocked off to traffic throughout Saturday. The festival runs 10am to 3pm.
An official party will be escorted by soldiers to the Marriage Trees where an opening, plus welcome to country, will be held at 10.10am. Another program highlight is a simulated wedding under the trees.
The two large fig trees on the river side of the street were used for the earliest weddings in the district, before churches were built in the 1840's. A couple were really married under the trees at the 2015 festival.
The 2021 festival program
William The Fourth
In 1831, when the Australian Agricultural Company began to have a profound impact on Newcastle, a shipyard was established at Clarence Town where the original William the Fourth was constructed to operate between Sydney and Morpeth.
The replica William the Fourth that will be operating during the festival was a Port Stephens Bicentenary Project, built in Raymond Terrace, at a cost of $1.5 million. It was launched in Raymond Terrace in 1987.
The replica operated commercial cruises on the Newcastle Harbour and Hunter River until a boiler leak put it out of service in 2001. The vessel was fully restored in 2008 and now operates charters out of Newcastle.
The replica will be cruising along the Hunter and Williams rivers on Saturday, and docking at the Raymond Terrace wharf. Charters on the William The Fourth during the festival have reached capacity.
Festival to help End Polio campaign
An iron lung, or polio respirator, will be on display at the Step Back into King Street festival as Raymond Terrace Rotary Club sells raffle tickets to raise funds for End Polio.
Polly the Iron Lung is a respirator that been restored and mounted on the trailer with the intention of taking it around Australia to raise funds for polio eradication.
Polio is a contagious disease, spread by close contact with an infected person and is prevented with vaccination. In Australia there were major polio epidemics in the late 1930s, early 1940s and 1950s.
The last epidemic was in 1956 and the last case in Australia in 1972. People with polio lived iron lungs to stay alive. Rotary has been working to eradicate polio for more than 35 years.
Raymond Terrace Rotary Club will be showing Polly the Iron Lung and selling raffle tickets in MarketPlace Raymond Terrace on May 12, 13 and 14 before it is on show at the May 15 festival.
About King Street
King Street is still a living piece of Port Stephens history.
For about 110 years from when Raymond Terrace was gazetted in 1837 King Street was the thriving business centre of the town, important mainly because it ran parallel with the Hunter River.
Food, produce and other materials could be loaded and off-loaded from the rear of the businesses in King Street. The Hunter River was the major transport means before decent roads linked the town with Newcastle.
Raymond Terrace became an important shipping centre in the 1840s for wool carted by road from New England. Shipping continued into the 1920s but the town had long been in decline by then as traffic was diverted to New England when the Hunter River began silting up.
But it was the big floods of 1955 which sounded the death knell for King Street as a viable commercial centre and businesses gradually moved away from the flood-prone street.
Today most of the buildings in King Street still date from the 1890s and the street was named in honour of James King, from Irrawang.
The historic marriage trees that still stand in King Street were used to wed people in the absence of churches prior to 1840.
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