Racecourse Road

Named after the old Boolaroo Racecourse, which in spite of its name was in Teralba. Kingsford Smith landed here in 1927. The racecourse had its own railway platform, named Boolaroo. The platform was built out of old railway sleepers. Trains only stopped on race days or for miners working at Stockton Borehole colliery. In 1884 Teralba's first school (which was incongruously called Hillsborough School) was erected on this site for the children of construction workers building the rail bridge over Cockle Creek and extending the line. Eventually the workers camps moved and the school building was transported by rail to the township on Billy Goat Hill. During WW2 most boats were removed from the lake under wartime security regulations. Large boats and ferries were impounded in Cockle Creek near the railway bridge. One of the sites of Teralba's clandestine two-up schools was rumoured to be in the scrub behind the Chinese market gardens. The market gardens were located on the flats alongside of the railway line near Cockle Creek. Wearing their traditional cone-shaped hats the workers always exchanged waves with the passengers on the passing trains. Racecourse Road was gazetted on 25 June 1982. Prior to this, part of the road had been called Boolaroo Road.

This work by Lake Macquarie City Library is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License