Whitebridge  New South Wales

You are never far from a beach in and around Newcastle, and the Charlestown-Whitebridge area is no exception. The 'local' in this northern fringe of Lake Macquarie City is Dudley Beach, which is framed by the magnificent bush of the Glenrock State Recreation Reserve.

The reserve is laced with bushwalks that take in the oceanfront, waterfalls, lagoon, picnic grounds and a permanent Scout Camp where visitors can also pitch a tent. All this natural beauty is within minutes of the city’s largest shopping centre in Charlestown.

The Burwood Colliery, which dominated life and work in the region for so long, closed in the early 1990s.

Whitebridge has easy access west to Dudley Beach, south to Belmont and Swansea, north to Newcastle and west to Warners Bay and the northern fringes of Lake Macquarie, one of the nation's great aquatic playgrounds and a salt water expanse four and a half times larger than Sydney Harbour.