Something angsty.

The life of Newcastle drains out after dark. At sunset, lines of cars wink down Hunter Street towards the highways or disappear over The Hill. The city, barely busy at nine, has washed out completely twelve hours later.

Stand on foreshore though, and you can watch the massive, silent hulks of container ships lumber and purge through the night. They are the one constant in what – seen by the departure of BHP – can be an uncertain place. Even now they remain the metal heart and lungs of an industrial town.

But to stand by the foreshore of Newcastle at dusk can be a lonely activity. This is not my town. At early evening its crust of terraces and knotted industrial trees remind me of the bigger city further down the coast. I look for traces of it fixed in odd shadows; it is my only, my daily escape from the fickle ebb and flow of this evening tide.

You can’t set the turn of water here, but you can decide whether or not to follow it. The doyennes of civility have long fought a losing battle when it comes to adding pretension to this grand, but essentially gruntingly working class city. In 1887 the Newcastle Morning Herald proclaimed that one of the “dullest spots by way of amusement in the colony” was to finally strut into the new century. One can only wonder if the brand new Continental Café it was introducing - another building with all the best connotations of wicker, potted palms and ladies in white - ever was any match for the sweltering practicality demanded by a North Coast coal city. As long as foggy black soot found its layered way to doors of a morning, this would always be a pub town.

But perhaps the tide, at long last, is finally turning. The region with the second highest concentration of pubs (and, one would assume, its fair share of $5 steaks and schnitzels) was visited by Gourmet Traveler this year. Stand alone amidst that achingly industrial beauty of the harbour and the sparkling but quiet aluminum and glass apartments behind you carry million dollar price tags.

“This is the yuppie part of Newcastle, so you’ll find it’s really safe at night,” says Kate. She is standing with me and Jdango opposite Merewether Baths – beautifully art deco sea pools singled out by the camera of Gourmet Traveler’s photographer. Like most of the city’s architecture, they were carefully planned and generously public, but the nearby change rooms lie derelict behind a rusty fence.“One day local government will realize this is not just a working class town,” says Jdango.

Indeed. This is why I am here. So say the faces of shopkeepers and neighbours and co-workers. “Merewether, but Sydney,” I hear at the back of the office; two café girls talk of ‘townies’ and ‘carros’ and I nod into my coffee. Compliments at the surprising beauty of the city are taken in two spirits; of course it is. It always has been.

Newcastle never really bothered with the shiny new things that its whoring southern sister always seemed to scramble for. Maybe that’s why people don’t seem so much to move here as move back here. But I am a bastard blow in from Sydney, not a treasured prodigal son. I have my morning coffee overlooking the beach and its horizon of tankers, but all it does is make me thirsty.