Belmont is a town (suburb) of Lake Macquarie City in the state of New South Wales and is located about 20 km south of Newcastle city center on a headland between Lake Macquarie and the Pacific. 6,476 people live in Belmont.
As early as 1825 a mission was established in the Belmont area in the area of the Aboriginal tribe Old Jacky's , but after four years they moved to the west side of Lake Macquarie in the Toronto area. It was not until the 1860s that settlements began to emerge again; in addition to agriculture and forestry, coal mining drew people to the area. In 1866 Thomas Williamson and Robert Kirkaldy opened Belmont House, a guest house that was probably named after Williamson's birthplace on the Scottish Shetland Islands and later gave the name to the whole town. In the middle of the 1870s there was a hotel, school, church and post office as well as a shipbuilding company in the center of the settlement, and in the 1880s the number of residents exceeded 100.
Until 1916, the traffic routes to Belmont led across Lake Macquarie or via roads north towards Newcastle. On December 23, 1916, the rail link opened via the northeastern Redhead to Newcastle, which was in operation until 1971. There has been a public bus route to Newcastle since 1937.
During that time, the population also grew by leaps and bounds from around 500 in the 1920s to 2,000 in the mid-1930s to over 4,800 in 1947. Since larger areas of Belmont are privately owned, there was never a city of Belmont, but rather a larger settlement area to several suburbs, of which the central one is called Belmont. Neighboring suburbs are North Belmont, South Belmont, Redhead, and Valentine.
Infrastructure
Belmont Hospital was founded in 1968, the only public hospital in the Lake Macquarie area. Belmont also has a Hunter Institute of Technology campus. Although coal mining in the region was discontinued in the 1980s, numerous companies have taken their place, and the tourism industry on Lake Macquarie is an important economic factor.
About four kilometers south of the center of Belmont is Belmont Airport, an airfield that was rebuilt in 2007 and will again provide a connection to the metropolis of Sydney , about 130 km south, from 2008 .
