Greta

Postcode: 2334

Greta is a small town in the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales, Australia in Cessnock City Council. It is largely a commuter town located midway between Cessnock, Singleton and Maitland. The town is often linked to nearby Branxton.

Greta is located on the New England Highway 167 kilometres north of Sydney. It has a station, opened in 1869 on CityRail's Hunter line. It is close to major grape-growing areas.

The founding community developed round Anvil Creek in the 1830s, but it wasn't until a mine tapped into the huge coal seam which stretched south to Wollombi that the town developed.

At its peak, around the turn of the 20th century, the Greta Main Colliery employed 165 men and 100 horses.

For so long a blinkered, Hunter coal town, the transformation of Greta began with the outbreak of World War II when two large boot camps were established to prepare Aussie soldiers for battle.

Many of those migrants elected to settle in Greta and the surrounding district to forge one of the nation’s first multicultural communities.

The coal, unfortunately, ran out in the early 1950s.

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