Tomaree Head Fortifications

Tomaree Head was one of the first sites selected in an air force project to protect Australia with a ring of radar stations around the continent. The threat of war from Japan was looming, but only three radar sets were available: the project was launched with a special survey to select three sites. Many more radar sets were needed, long range radar, for which the authorities expected a long delay, so it was essential to put the three available radar sets to work in the parts of Australia requiring them most urgently.[1]

The available radar sets were "on loan" from a CSIR facility called the Radiophysics Laboratory, British sets sent for research. The survey was led by two very senior officers: Dr David Martyn, chief of the Laboratory, and Squadron Leader A. G. Pither, the Royal Australian Air Force radar specialist. They flew over the coast from Port Kembla to Forster, selecting sites near Port Kembla, near Terrigal, and at Tomaree Head.[1]

The recommendation by the Services was to locate the "available" radar sets to protect "the vital Newcastle-Sydney-Port Kembla industrial region", which was accepted by the highest authority. Applying this priority, the survey officers used Newcastle steel works as their point of reference when deciding on Tomaree Head.[1]

Japan burst into the war before the radar building was started. The British radar set was hastily placed in a vacant bunker in Newcastle. By the time the radar building was completed on Tomaree Head, an Australian radar known as AW was available from the factory. The British set could now be removed and was sent to the place near Terrigal.[1]

The AW radar was made possible by a surprise break-through at the Radiophysics Laboratory. Dr J. H. Piddington adapted the design of a short range radar, a familiar design, producing the range necessary for air warning, no special components needed. A version called LW/AW (light weight/air warning) was acclaimed as the backbone of the RAAF radar network in the island warfare of World War 2, represented by a replica at the Australian War Memorial.[1]

The first factory set was ready on 5 April 1942. RAAF radar men took the piano-sized cabinets to Tomaree Head and yanked them up to the summit. The station was on the air by 12 April 1942 and was reporting the positions of aircraft. Tomaree radar was also able to detect ships; the station reported the location of the Japanese submarine that shelled Newcastle on 8 June 1942.[1]

The WWII gun emplacements and related structures on Tomaree Head were established from 1941 as part of a system for the defence of the east coast of Australia. The sites are remnants of a system of defence for the protection of Newcastle and Port Stephens - important enough to warrant its establishment as a separate fire command. It includes sites that were developed for heavy gun emplacements, light weapons and machine gun pits, torpedo tubes, search light stations, No. 20 Radar Station RAAF, barbed wire and stake defence, a command post and barracks and other miscellaneous buildings.[1]

Parts of the headland were cleared. Services such as power and water were provided. Many of the sites have become overgrown. In 1989 the doors of the heavy gun emplacements were welded shut. Before 1939 the Fort Tomaree site was virtually in its natural state and the area had no water and no power or major services of any description, until installed by the RAAF, AIF and RAN, for their own, and US Army and US Navy, use. The population expanded to many hundreds in the space of a few years. The entire Fort Tomaree headland has, in the main, been an undisturbed and relatively protected area because of its occupation by the NSW Government Health Department. This Government protection has ensured that only relatively little serious damage has been done to these fortifications since the end of World War 2.[1]

The coastal defences comprised:[1]

1. Australian Army seafront and beach front installation including observation posts, radar installations, command and control areas including plotting room data coordination, machine gun emplacements, anti-aircraft emplacements, mortars emplacements and three-man weapons pits;
2. RAN seawards defences including minefield observation systems, anti-torpedo nets, hydrophones and torpedo tubes. These were, in general, controlled from the Port War Signal Station situated on Nelson Head[2]
3. RAAF radar station at the peak of the Tomaree Headland reported its plots of aircraft to No. 2 Fighter Sector in Newcastle. Any necessary commands would then be given to RAAF Base Williamtown. The Sector was a link in the chain providing early warning of enemy approach.[1]

The RAAF provided an 11 kW, 415 V electricity service to the area which was used to power the rotating antenna and this was transformed for the use of the other services. Most listed fortress equipment was sited directly on Tomaree Headland except the head battery and the RAN mine and loop control post which were sited at the western end of Shoal Bay Beach and on Nelson Head.[1]

Tomaree Headland itself contains the remains of no less than eighteen fortifications, eighty buildings and many artefacts in various states of preservation.[1]

It is estimated that each month 2,000 men, AIF or US servicemen, passed through this Amphibious Training Centre, (20,000 in total), learning embarkation and debarkation with the RAN landing ships infantry, HMAS Westralia, HMAS Manoora, HMAS Kanimbla and USS Henry T Allen. The exercises involved actually landing under simulated invasion conditions on Zenith, Wreck and Box Beaches. The Amphibious Landing Training Establishment was commissioned as HMAS Assault.[1]

Later, as the war progressed, similar training establishments were established closer to the fast moving front. It was here that the RAN trained its landing craft and crews involved in amphibious invasions of Dutch New Guinea, Tarakan and Balikpapan, as well as the Leyte and Lingayen invasions in the Philippines. Of the 141 ships and landing craft (thirteen Australian built) based at Port Stephens in October 1943, thirty-six were controlled by HMAS Assault and 105 by the US Navy. The Tomaree seawards and seafront defences were progressively strengthened, as their strategic importance increased, to create Fort Tomaree which protected the first Allied Combined Operations, Landing Training Centre in the south-west Pacific theatre, for the invasion of the Japanese held islands in the Pacific.[3][1]

In March 1943 a Naval Control Observation Bunker ("Head Battery") was constructed below the Nelson Head Light (Inner Light) for use in detecting submarines and, in conjunction with Fort Tomaree, provide surveillance over Providence Bay. An access road was built to the lighthouse where previously only a rough track existed up a steep climb from Little Beach. Prior to the war, all supplies were taken up on a sled pulled by a horse. The Nelson head Battery was abandoned in August 1943 and dismantled. Only the Control building remains. The exterior of the control observation bunker was inspected but the remains of the gun emplacement(s) were not inspected and so the claim that the emplacements no longer remained could not be verified.[1]

With Japan's invasion of South-East Asia and occupation of the Pacific islands to Australia's north in 1942 it became necessary to establish training camps with the object of training personnel from all three armed services (navy, army and air force) in joint operations to retake the captured islands. In June 1942 a Royal Marine officer, Commander, F. N. Cook, and Lieut-Colonel Hope inspected sites on the east coast to establish a School of Combined Operations. Port Stephens was selected because of its defendable port, safe anchorage away from Japanese submarines and sparse population.[4][1]

The military installations commenced in September 1942 were Fort Tomaree on Tomaree and Nelson Heads, HMAS Assault I at Fly Point and along the shores of Nelson Bay. Work on the RAAF radar station on the peak of Tomaree had begun in February 1942 . These installations joined the 1941 Gan Gan Army Combined Training Centre located inland from Salamander Bay.[1]

In October 1943 the Amphibious Training Centre was closed and only boat crews continued to be trained at HMAS Assault. By August 1944 the base at Port Stephens had been put into care and maintenance. In 1943, along with the closure of the (Nelson) Head Battery and the Amphibious Training Centre at HMAS Assault, the lower camp at Tomaree (the infantry camp) was also closed and turned over to the Volunteer Defence Corps for training.[1]

In 1947 the infantry camp at Tomaree was transferred from the Commonwealth Department of Defence to the NSW Department of Public Health. In 1950 the whole of Tomaree headland was transferred for hospital purposes. From 1960 until 1985 the former infantry base at Tomaree was used as a holiday and recuperation camp and from 1985 onwards it was used exclusively for permanent mental patients, associated with Tomaree Lodge. Tomaree Headland comprises about 35,616ha of previously typical natural coastal environment, zoned as Environmental Protection Coastal Lands.[5][1]

In 1993 the Royal Australian Air Force removed the radar tower.[1]

In 2018, the site is part of Tomaree National Park, in which the Fort Tomaree Walk takes visitors to the remains of the fortifications.[6]

There are three precincts related to the operation of Fort Tomaree on the Tomaree Headland:

• Batteries and Battery (or Upper) Camp
• Infantry (or Lower) Camp
• Surf Batteries and torpedo tube
• RAAF radar station.

A number of buildings as well as site features including fortifications and installations, roads, gun placements, random rubble walled battery and associated features. On the headland's rock platform are random rubble terracing, drains, roadway and sea walls.[1]

Tomaree Head was developed as a World War 2 military base by a joint Australian Army-United States Navy defence venture. Used as part of coastal defence system. It was the focus of first Australian-United States combined training operations for the South-West Pacific sector.[1]

The Tomaree Hostel occupies buildings of the former infantry camp of Fort Tomaree. The infantry camp was on the landward side of the fortifications of the Fort and provided defence for the landward approaches to the Fort.[1]

The hostel is a collection of timber-framed and timber and asbestos cement-clad barracks buildings along the foreshore at the end of Shoal Bay Road. E. Martin states that the buildings were original buildings rebuilt in their current locations. However, examination of the original plans indicates that the remaining timber buildings are located in the same locations as the original buildings of the infantry camp. Some of the buildings away from the waterfront have been demolished and replaced with brick buildings.[1]

• Compiled by Michael Smith; research by Graeme Steinbeck (1994). The guns of Tomaree.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Eric Martin & Associates, Architects (2002). Tomaree Head Conservation Management Plan, vols I & II.

This Wikipedia article was originally based on Tomaree Head Fortifications, entry number 01821 in the New South Wales State Heritage Register published by the State of New South Wales and Office of Environment and Heritage 2018 under CC-BY 4.0 licence, accessed on 2 June 2018.