HUSKISSON and VINCENTIA

On 24th April 1770, Captain James Cook was well off the NSW South Coast when he sighted the southern headland to Jervis Bay. He wrote in his diary ‘A point of land which I named Cape St George we having discover’d it on that Saints day, bore West distant 19 Miles.’ The next day he noted ‘About 2 leagues to the northward of Cape St George the Shore seems to form a bay which appeard to be shelterd from the NE winds but as we had the wind it was not in my power to look into it…The north point of this bay on account of its figure I named Long Nose.’ Long Nose later was named Point Perpendicular.

In 1791 Lieutenant Richard Bowen sailed the transport ship 'Atlantic' into Jervis Bay and named the area Port Jervis after a naval officer and, later, admiral of the British fleet, Sir John Jervis under whom Bowen had served. (The correct pronunciation for the Bay is therefore ‘jarvis’ as in jam jar, not ‘jervis’ as in Jersey cow.) He described the area as having good anchoring ground with a fine depth of water and during his short stay in the area he recorded that he saw two kangaroos and many traces of inhabitants.

Fast forward to the late 1830s. The Southern Tablelands and Goulburn Plains had become successful wool growing areas and wool from there was commanding high prices. The ‘road’ to Sydney, however, was so bad that it was felt that transporting the wool to Jervis Bay and then shipping it to Sydney would be more efficient. So the Governor, Sir George Gipps, directed 70 convicts to cut a track - which became known as The Wool Road - from Braidwood to Jervis Bay.

At the time there was no township at Jervis Bay, so Deputy Surveyor-General Captain Samuel Perry was instructed to lay out a town on the bay. He concluded the area on the south side of Mooney Mooney Creek would be the best for the configuration of streets and the construction of wharves.

The location, however, was in private ownership. So, the land between Mooney Mooney Creek and Jervis Bay River (Currambene Creek), which was still Government reserve, was selected for a new town. This is now the site of Huskisson, named by Governor Gipps after William Huskisson, Secretary of the Colonies and leader of the House of Commons from 1827-28. (Huskisson later had the misfortune to be run over by a locomotive while talking to the Duke of Wellington at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway in 1830.)

The privately owned land that Perry had wanted to become the Jervis Bay township (now Vincentia) became South Huskisson. Blocks were offered for sale there from 1841 – two years before blocks were offered for sale in Huskisson.

Neither town became a success and town allotments in both Huskisson and South Huskisson were essentially worthless by the mid-1850s.

Sydney businessmen had also become concerned that development of a port at Huskisson or South Huskisson might impact on their profits, so lobbied the government to extend the railway from Sydney to Goulburn. They were successful in doing so, and the line to Goulburn opened in 1869. This spelled the end to transport of wool from the Goulburn area to Jervis Bay via The Wool Road.
Huskisson then only began to grow when it became the site of shipbuilding in the early 1860s. From 1864 to 1977, at least 130 large wooden-hulled vessels were built in Huskisson in shipyards along Currumbene Creek. Among these were two Sydney harbour passenger ferries, the ‘Lady Denman’ built in 1911 and the ‘Lady Scott’ which was built in 1914. During the Second World War, Huskisson shipyards built four wooden-hulled vessels for the American Army which were used during the New Guinea campaign.

Some whaling activity was conducted in Jervis Bay. A whaling station operating at Montagu Point, on the northern side of Jervis Bay, was reported in ‘The Sydney Morning Herald’ in January 1859 as having 14 men working there. And in the early 1870s numerous whalers are recorded as having visited the bay – in 1870, for example, the barquentine ‘Alladin’ towed two sperm whales into Jervis Bay to be boiled down and in 1872 another barquentine, the ‘Sea Shell’ towed two sperm whales into the bay for processing that had been caught thirty miles offshore. And around 1912, with the full support of the NSW government, a Norwegian factory ship, the ‘Loch Tay’, processed 537 whales in two seasons in the bay, but was eventually forced to stop its activities because of a strong resulting odour that reached the Royal Australian Naval College (HMAS Creswell) and Huskisson, and because offal was being released into the bay that attracted sharks and impacted naval training in the area.

From the 1890s, Huskisson began to emerge as a holiday destination. The Dent family, who had shipbuilding and timber interests in the area, opened the Jervis Bay Hotel in 1893 and operated guesthouses on the beachfront.

In 1909, ownership of a parcel of Crown land at Jervis Bay area was transferred from the NSW government to the federal government, coinciding with ownership of the site of Canberra and the surrounding area also being transferred to the federal government. To reduce the practical difficulties presented by the physical separation of its two territories, the government of NSW also agreed, in principle, that the federal government could build and take full control of a rail corridor between Canberra and Jervis Bay. That in-principle proposal never progressed beyond that.

In 1911 the Commonwealth Government selected a site at Captain's Point for the erection of a Royal Australian Naval College to provide initial officer training for the Royal Australian Navy. Building was completed in time for the first intake of students in January 1915.

In the 1920s the College was deemed too costly to maintain, so its operations were moved to HMAS Cerberus in Victoria. From 1930 to 1958, at a time when tourism was developing as a major activity in the Jervis Bay region, many of the buildings on the College site were leased out as holiday accommodation. In the early 1950s, however, a decision was made to return the Royal Australian Naval College to Jervis Bay and on 20th January 1958 it was reopened and commissioned HMAS Creswell, named after Vice Admiral Sir William Creswell who had been the first naval member of the Australian Naval Board from 1911 to 1919.

In the late 1950s the Commonwealth Government decided to erect a nuclear power station, a steelworks, a petrochemical plant and an oil refinery at Murray’s Beach but these projects never progressed beyond the construction of a high quality road and site excavation.