South Coast NSW History Stories

Bernice Smith was born in Bega in 1903. Her father, Walter Smith, was Editor of the Bega newspaper for 47 years...

Dagmar Berne was born in Bega in 1865 and lived with her family in Denmark House (named by her father, Frederic, after the land of his birth) at the lower end of Auckland Street, down from the Bega Primary School.
When Dagmar was about ten years old, her father drowned. He was an auctioneer who was washed from his horse near Frogs Hollow whilst riding back from a land sale at Candelo. Her mother subsequently remarried...

Dr Grace Cuthbert and Dr Marie Wing both become highly respected Australian specialists in their two different fields of medicine after having been Pambula G.P.s....

Jane Duren (1867 – 1947) was an Aboriginal Yuin woman from Moruya.
She came to prominence as a member of the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAPA), an early and united Aboriginal activist group, for two very significant reasons: in 1926 she wrote to King George V alerting him of plans to move the Batemans Bay Aboriginal community from its reserve in the town and advising him that Aboriginal children were being excluded from the local primary school, and then in 1927 for her advocacy for the repeal of the existing Aborigines Act and for its replacement by another Act that was more acceptable to Aboriginals and which would make no distinction between Australian Aboriginals and whites.
Jane Duren, therefore, was a significant local pioneer campaigner for Australian Aboriginal civil-rights...

Olive Constable (1876 – 1939) defied the norms of her era to become a successful journalist, editor and businesswoman. Her reportage leaves an enduring legacy.
Olive served as editor of the Moruya Examiner for over a quarter of a century, from 1913 until her death in 1939...

Academic, adult educator, economist, feminist, public servant and socialist, Persia Campbell (1898 – 1974) has, arguably, made more of an impact on the international scene than has any other individual from the South Coast...

Charmian Clift – a legendary Australian writer and a newspaper columnist, and a rebel who cared nothing for convention – was a Kiama girl.
She was born in Kiama in 1923. Her father was a supervisor at the Bombo Headland Quarry and she grew up in a modest quarry workers’ cottage at the southern end of Hothersall Street. Her childhood home is still there and a nearby reserve is named in her honour...

Like Charmian Clift from Kiama, Olga Masters from Cobargo was another extremely successful author whose works drew heavily on childhood experiences of living on the NSW South Coast.
Olga Lawler was born in Pambula in May 1919. Her father, Leo, was a labourer and the family was constantly on the move as he sought work. Eventually they settled in the Cobargo area, and until age 15, Olga attended Cobargo Public School...

Mare Carter was a journalist, author, script writer and ‘model’ who, established a wildlife sanctuary and tourist attraction at Foxground, near Berry...

Mary Braidwood Mowle (1827 – 1857) is probably best known for having kept diaries describing mid-nineteenth century life in rural NSW. Her first set of diaries, kept from 1850 to 1852, relate to her time living on properties around what is now Canberra. Then, from 1853 to 1855, she kept diaries whilst living in Eden where her husband was the sub-collector of customs.
Her Eden diaries have been described as ‘providing the most intimate glimpse that has survived of life in the mid-nineteenth century in a small but important seaport (Eden). She detailed ships' movements, the arrival and departure of south coast and Monaro families, and whaling operations at Twofold Bay, as well as the day-to-day work involved in raising and educating a young family, the hazards of childbirth and childhood illnesses, and the social interchanges in a small community.’...

Women have made a great contribution to the conservation of the flora and fauna and natural places on the far south coast.
Three local women prominent in the conservation movement on the far south coast were Jean Greenland, Doreen De Oleveira and Hazel Meadham...

Not every South Coast author was to receive national or international recognition, but many became well-known locally. ‘Kate O’Connor’, as an example, was one of these, achieving her ‘fame’ in the Bega area...

Having read this ‘autobiography’ of author Jackie French on her website, we concluded that anything we attempted would be second-rate:
‘Jackie French AM is an Australian author, historian, ecologist and honorary wombat (part time); 2014–15 Australian Children' Laureate; and 2015 Senior Australian of the Year...

Eva Theresa Mylott (1875 – 1920), ‘The Moruya Nightingale’, was a world-renowned contralto and opera singer...

Eva Mylott and Marie Narelle were cousins. Both became world-renowned singers – Eva as a contralto, Marie as a soprano. They occasionally performed together...

Deborah Cheetham Fraillon ‘is the single most outstanding Indigenous classical music artist that Australia has produced’ and is the Chair of Vocal Studies at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. She was born in 1964 in Nowra. Her mother was a Yorta Yorta woman (from lands along the Murray River). At 3 weeks old she became...

In January 1970, The Australian Women’s Weekly ran a double-page spread article about Betty Long, Narooma’s ‘The Kelp Lady’. The article described how Betty and her daughter, then age 17, and son, then age 15, would collect kelp that had been washed up on Narooma’s beaches and painstakingly process it into an...

‘One person can make a difference’ is a quote that has been attributed to many, including John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa and Albert Schweitzer. And if this saying appropriately describes any one person from the NSW South Coast, then Alexandra Seddon surely must be that individual. Alexandra is a wildlife carer who, over several decades, acquired a number of significant South Coast properties that she transformed into conservation areas...

Sleeper cutting was physically an extremely hard job for men. And, therefore, it was not a vocation usually associated with the ‘gentler sex’, ‘the fairer sex’. Irene King, however, was born a sleeper cutter, became a very successful sleeper cutter, and is reputed to be the only woman in N.S.W. to have held a sleeper cutter’s licence.
Irene was born in 1905 in Gippsland, Victoria. Her Dad was a sleeper cutter...

Mary Harriet Bate was a noted collector of botanical specimens for Australian botanists in the 1880s. Her significant contributions to Australian botany are perpetuated and recognisable in the names of several species that she first gathered from the Bermagui River-Mt Dromedary-Tilba area. Mary was born in Sydney in October 1855. She was one of nine children born to Henry Jefferson Bate and Elizabeth Kendall Bate. From the age of 14 until she married at the age of 30, Mary lived on the family property "Mountain View" at Tilba Tilba...

Sarah Porter was born near Wolumla in October 1860, was raised on her parent’s dairy farm, and was educated locally. A childhood accident had left her blind in one eye but, nevertheless, she became a competent horsewoman. In 1886, she married Ernest Alfred Maddock, a solicitor's clerk. By 1890 they had a son and three daughters. Encouraged by her husband, who had begun cycling in England before migrating to Australia, Sarah Maddock began riding a bicycle in 1893....

‘I like people, I like serving them’ was Mrs Mac’s business credo.
And serve the Pambula community and visitors to Pambula she did – for almost 50 years, and up until she had turned 102 years old...

There is something decidedly romantic about lighthouses. Perhaps it’s the function they serve – helping to keep seafarers safe. Perhaps it’s their design – everything from squat little buildings to towering edifices to modern skeletal towers, no two ever being exactly the same. Perhaps it’s their location – usually remote, often at the very edge of a perpetually storm-battered cliff...

NSW coastal shipping was once described as ‘a scheme for manufacturing widows and orphans’.

Something like 300 vessels have been lost – were wrecked or sank – in the area between Sydney and the Victorian border since 1788. Why so many?

There are multiple reasons

First, the weather conditions in the area can be very rough, even very dangerous. And weather conditions can change very quickly, often placing unsuspecting crews of vessels in precarious positions. For example, many of the vessels that came to grief in the aptly named Wreck Bay were victims of the weather: the ‘Nancy’ which ran aground in 1805 when ‘in the evening a dreadful hurricane set in accompanied with very vivid lightning, and awful peals of thunder that rolled without intermission, together with an incessant torrent of rain’; ‘in the night it blew pretty fierce and a dense fog came in’ just before the ‘Hive’ was wrecked in 1835; ‘There were heavy squalls from the south east and east’ when the ‘Juniper’ ran aground in 1850; the ‘Mynora’ ‘became enveloped in a thick fog, unable to make out her position,’ before hitting a reef in 1865…(at least 26 ships were lost in and around Wreck Bay between 1805 and 1928.)

Second, there is a strong Eastern Australian Current that extends from North Queensland down to near Tasmania and which runs just offshore along the NSW South Coast. This current is not as strong close to the shore, so ships’ masters were often tempted to hug the shore when heading north to minimise the power of the current…all too often with tragic results.

Then, the vessels that operated up and down the coast were small – very small (the largest were about the size of the Manly Ferries (such as the ‘South Steyne’) that operated up until the 1970s) – and they were either sailing vessels or (by today’s standards) very underpowered steam vessels. These had limited capabilities of rapidly responding to impending dangers.

The skills and dedication of crews varied considerably and were sometimes questionable. Many reports of shipping tragedies along the NSW South Coast contain suggestions that the ships’ captains were drunk or neglecting their duties when their ship came to grief. And ships’ masters of the steamers that regularly serviced the Coast were often attempting to keep to tight timetables so were, at times, less cautious than they perhaps should have been.

And there are few ‘safe havens’ along the South Coast. Jervis Bay is one, Twofold Bay is perhaps a second. Reaching many ‘ports’ (remembering, for example, that at various times the Illawarra and South Coast Steam Navigation Company’s vessels regularly visited Wollongong, Port Kembla, Shellharbour, Kiama, Gerringong, Berry, Nowra, Jerrara, Huskisson, Ulladulla, Bawley Point, Pebbly Beach, Batemans Bay, Nelligen, Broulee, Moruya, Tuross Head, Potato Point, Narooma, Bermagui, Tathra, Merimbula and Eden) also involved (as at Moruya) crossing a dangerous bar at a river mouth, or (as at Ulladulla) avoiding other natural hazards.

Maps – at least in the early days – were either non-existent or rudimentary and there were no aids to navigation. Light stations (intended to provide ‘a highway of light’ to shipping along the coast – see Recollections 42) were constructed in an attempt to reduce the number of shipping losses. They were not always effective (as the story of the ‘Ly-ee-Moon’ illustrates).

Surely, everyone has a favourite South Coast shipwreck story. A small selection appear below. But what others also deserve to be included here? Please share them with us by emailing southcoasthistory@yahoo.com

On 2nd March 1797 a longboat carrying 17 crew from a merchant vessel, the ‘Sydney Cove’, was wrecked on the northern end of Ninety Mile Beach.

Historically, this wreck was one of the first (if not the first) shipwrecks on the eastern seaboard of the Australian mainland and was the first after the founding of the colony in Sydney...

Whilst on a voyage on 18th April 1805, the 'Nancy' encountered foul weather just south of the entrance to Jervis Bay. At about two in the morning, the man at the helm noticed land to leeward - discernible by the lightning. The vessel ran aground on Steamers Beach and soon broke up...

In late January or early February 1806, ‘George’ was swept onto rocks by a strong current in Twofold Bay. She was refloated but was found to be so badly damaged that she was immediately beached.

Aboriginals, throwing spears and burning grass, attacked the crew. The ship’s captain and the crew responded...

The 21-ton 'Hawkesbury Packet' was wrecked on reef somewhere near Kiama in August 1817. It was on a voyage from Sydney to the Shoalhaven to pick up a load of cedar...

Thomas Kendall (the grandfather of Australian author and bush poet Henry Kendall) was a missionary who obtained a land grant and settled near Ulladulla in 1827. He became a cedar cutter. He owned a small 16-ton cutter that transported timber and other goods from Ulladulla to Sydney. It disappeared in August 1832...

The ‘Hive’ which ran aground on 10th December 1835 in what is now known as Wreck Bay – becoming the only ship that was carrying convicts to be wrecked on the Australian mainland...

The 'Rover' was headed to Gabo Island with eleven convicts on board to build a lighthouse. A gale forced it back from Twofold Bay to Broulee, where it sought shelter. However, the vessel was driven onto the beach. 11 of those on board were saved thanks to the efforts of local settlers and local Aboriginals. 12 others perished...

The ‘Perseverance’ was apparently a wooden vessel that was wrecked somewhere in the Illawarra region in January 1842 (or maybe on 31st December 1841). All hands aboard were lost...

The "Swallow' was wrecked either entering or leaving Gerringong Harbour on 15th March 1842. The cause was the breaking of a warp (a light hawser used to manoeuvre a ship, usually when docking). The two people on board – an unnamed a man and an unnamed boy were drowned...

The 340-ton wooden barque ‘Juniper’ left Liverpool in England in February 1850 and travelled to Oporto in Portugal where it was loaded with ‘a full cargo of wines in casks and cases’. It was headed for Sydney. Rounding the south-eastern tip of Tasmania it started to encounter ‘very thick weather and variable winds’.

On September 1st, the ship was just south of Jervis Bay where there were ‘heavy squalls from the south-east and east…the ship labouring very much’. Unfortunately, the ‘Juniper’ had sailed into Wreck Bay...

The breeze dropped soon after 'Twin Sisters' left Kiama harbour bound for Sydney and 'the fated vessel was irresistibly drifted by the force of the current and heavy swell on to the rocks, where she became a total wreck'...

Whilst on a voyage from Liverpool, the ‘Lawrence Frost’ arrived off Port Phillip Heads in
Victoria with a general cargo on the 17th August, 1856. It was planned that it be anchored just inside the heads until unfavourable winds abated. However, in attempting to anchor, one anchor was lost and a second anchor dragged. The ship ran ashore near the Port Phillip Quarantine Station and the hull was severely damaged.

After much of the 2,000 tons of cargo was offloaded, the ship was floated off and taken to Hobson’s Bay (the northernmost part of Port Phillip Bay) for repairs. She then sailed to Sydney to await additional repairs.

Two or three days later, the ‘Lawrence Frost’ was sighted north of Twofold Bay by the steamer ‘City of Sydney’. She was heading south to Twofold Bay – and was sinking!...

In April 1855 the 'Martha & Elizabeth' left Melbourne to sail to Newcastle. At 5.30pm on April 26th, Cape St George (the southern peninsula to Jervis Bay) was sighted. At that time it was windy with heavy showers of rain and it seems a heavy swell was running that pushed the vessel towards Point Perpendicular (the northern peninsula to Jervis Bay).

Around 8.50pm the wind dropped but the ship was driven by the heavy swell towards land. About 9.30pm the vessel hit rocks and was driven by the swell into a small gully. There ‘the vessel struck instantly, the sea breaking furiously over her’...

The 'Oliver Frost' left Sydney on 3rd October 1856 and, during the next evening whilst travelling south, her skipper ‘fancied the schooner was going out of her proper course, but owing to the darkness of the night he could discover nothing wrong’.

Four hours later ‘he discovered she had lost her rudder. Breakers were then just ahead, and she shortly afterwards struck on a rocky reef, about half a mile from the shore’...

The 'Neptune', a small 15-ton ketch, 'parted from her anchors, and was driven against the rocks close to the jetty. Despite every effort to save her, she has become a total wreck.’...

The brigantine 'Retriever' was lost at sea in April 1857 whils sailing from Newcastle to Bluff in New Zealand. Some reports suggested ‘she was caught in a sudden squall off Cape Howe…all hands lost.’ However...