Valentine - unchanged

In 1990 Valentine residents rallied to stop the suburb name changing from Valentine to Parklea

The Lake Macquarie suburb of Valentine was named in honour of the accountant and land owner Valentine Geary, who had once owned the land the suburb occupies.The Valentine Estate was subdivided and put on sale in 1916 by well known land developer and entrepreneur Henry F Halloran.

The original estate occupied the section between Tallawalla Road in the north, the waterfront to the west and Allambee Place and Werona Crescent to the south, containing what is today the shopping centre and school. Of course, as the estate grew the original boundaries blurred and the suburb overlapped with the adjacent suburb of Croudace Bay. The Croudace family home "Leighinmohr" was actually in the vicinity of the present-day Valentine Bowling Club, and the trees which were in its garden may still be seen in the park on the waterfront off Valentine Crescent, a row of big old camphor laurels and a very old Norfolk Island pine.

When suburbs were originally settled and named, the process was very informal and there was nothing to say where one suburb finished and the next one started. Over the years this led to confusion and disagreement as to where the boundaries actually were, and caused significant problems for postal services and government planning departments.

In 1966 the NSW State Government established the Geographical Names Board to administer place names within the state and set official boundaries to resolve these problems.

In 1990 the Board began a process to determine definitive suburb/locality boundaries, with the Lake Macquarie Council area being completed in 1991.

Most of the time, this process was very straight forward, with geographic features or major roads logically separating one suburb from another. At other times the process was more problematic, and the Valentine/Croudace Bay area was one of these cases. To resolve these boundary issues Lake Macquarie City Council considered renaming parts of Valentine.

At a public meeting on the 15th May 1990, residents of Valentine voted to keep the name. The Newcastle Herald reported:

"More than 300 people crammed into a small community Hall at Valentine last night to tell Lake Macquarie City Council not to change the name of their suburb. The residents showed their agitation throughout the 30 minute meeting , chaired by the Deputy Mayor Alderman Tsousis, at moves to rename part of the suburb Parklea or Valentine Heights."

Faced with this large opposition, the council altered their plans, and the suburb is still Valentine to this day.

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