Storylines: South Coast

Many of you will already know of the great beauty of Jervis Bay. Those of you who enjoy an Encounter The South Coast Weekend Break with us will gain personal experience of its natural charms and attractions.

What is less well known is that it is merely a matter of chance – and some hard work by people dedicated to protecting this beautiful area – that Jervis Bay has been preserved more or less intact and not forever altered by large-scale development.

There have been four or five phases in the modern history of Jervis Bay which, if they had played out differently, might have resulted in massive developments and ineradicable changes to the pristine environment of the region.

Of course, for the original inhabitants of the region, the coming of Europeans changed their homeland completely and forever.

Aboriginal people of Jervis Bay enjoy a variety of backgrounds and family affiliations but in the main are traditionally drawn from the Dharawal language group (Botany Bay-Shoalhaven district), with many of them identifying with the Wandandian people (Shoalhaven River to Ulladulla).

Since the time of creation the Jervis Bay and Wreck Bay area has been a focal point for Aborigines on the South Coast and the region is noted for its spiritual and ceremonial significance. Aboriginal people with traditional links to the area say that Jervis Bay – and in particular the Beecroft Peninsula – is the birthplace of the thirteen tribes of the south coast.

Archaeological studies have so far uncovered evidence of continuous occupation of the Illawarra/Shoalhaven region going back 20,000 years. That includes the last big Ice Age (18,-20,000 years ago) when what we know as Jervis Bay would have been somewhat remote from the coastline; and the subsequent rise in sea levels to their current status (6-10,000 years ago). So Jervis Bay’s Aboriginal people have witnessed some pretty major changes to their environment – although it did not necessarily prepare them for the major upheaval that occurred so quickly from the early years of the 19th century.

In 1821 Alexander Berry, an English pastoralist, was granted 10,000 acres of land on the northern bank of the Shoalhaven River, near the river mouth. In 1836, he acquired another 155 acres at Crookhaven Heads, on the southern bank of the Shoalhaven River. This property was used to relocate his ‘native labourers’. These people are thought to have intermingled with other local indigenous people, making up what are known today as the Jerringa people, associated with the Beecroft Peninsula and their community at Orient Point.

European settlement had a devastating impact on Aboriginal people on the south coast through disease, massacres (there is a massacre site on the northern side of Orient Point), relocation, clearance of vegetation and destruction of traditional resources. Diseases including influenza and smallpox were thought to have decimated at least 50% of the local indigenous population.

From the late 1880’s, a protectionism policy was adopted by the government of the day and implemented through the Aboriginal Protection Board. This led to the forced relocation of Aboriginal people into Aboriginal missions and reserves. These included reserves and mission homes at Orient Point (Roseby Park) and Bomaderry (United Aboriginal Mission – ‘Bomaderry Homes’).

From the early 1900’s, Aboriginal people lived and fished in the Wreck Bay area on a non-permanent basis. Later, a permanent settlement was established and a “Mission Manager” was appointed by the Aboriginal Protection Board to oversee the administration of the settlement and to issue rations of food and supplies. His status was virtually that of a police officer, controlling visitors entering and leaving the reserve, issuing rations to residents and administrating the day to day affairs of the community. In 1966, Wreck Bay was declared an Aboriginal Reserve, which remained its official status until the early 1970s.

The Wreck Bay School was built in 1928. The school was under the control of the “Mission Manager” and his wife until a full time teacher was appointed in the early 1950’s. The school closed in 1964 the children then attended integrated classes at Jervis Bay School.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s political activists fought for the rights of Aboriginal people, including land rights. Many of the Aboriginal activists came from Illawarra and Shoalhaven communities, as well as the Redfern and La Perouse communities in Sydney.

Today a little over 2,500 indigenous people live in the Shoalhaven Local Government Area and the Jervis Bay Territory – around 3.5% of the total population.

In 1987, 405 hectares of Jervis Bay Territory were granted to the Wreck Bay Aboriginal community. In 1995, land titles to Jervis Bay National Park and Botanical Gardens were handed over to the Aboriginal people of Wreck Bay under the amended Aboriginal Land Grant Act. In 1997, Jervis Bay National Park was renamed ‘Booderee’, which is an Aboriginal word meaning ‘Bay of Plenty’.

Wreck Bay people favour the area because of strong traditional and cultural ties, its closeness to both the bush and sea for collection of food and other resources and its distance from non-Aboriginal settlements.

It is important to the Wreck Bay Community that their children maintain the knowledge of their ancestors. Youngsters learn about uses of native vegetation for food and medicine, as well as how to collect seafood from rock platforms. They are determined that this knowledge will be passed down from one generation to another.

The first vision for Jervis Bay arose during the 1840s, when the newly completed Wool Road, which ran from the Southern Tablelands to South Huskisson (Vincentia), had reduced the overland distance for wool drays from the Southern Tablelands to Sydney. In anticipation of a real estate boom on the Bay, several proposals for new urban developments were proposed and, if they had of been successful, would have had resulted in a “port to rival Sydney”.

the Sydney merchants, seeing their livelihood threatened, ran a campaign against the developments in South Huskisson
wool production was severely affected by a drought in 1843, when the price of sheep fell so low that the sheep carcasses became more valuable, which drastically depleted flock numbers
the development of Nowra at Terrara saw the road redirected to the Shoalhaven River, bypassing Jervis Bay
produce and supplies to and from other places on the south coast were well served by harbours and wharves at Wollongong/Shellharbour, Boatharbour (Ulladulla), Kiama and Moruya/Batemans Bay.

Following Australian Federation in 1901 and the selection of Canberra as the nation’s capital, a stipulation in the Seat of Government Act 1908 stated that Canberra must have a sea port and Bherwerre Peninsula on Jervis Bay was acquired from the New South Wales Government and made a Commonwealth Territory.

Naturally enough, particularly in the days before air transport, a sea port was seen as vital and a direct rail connection between Canberra and its port was assumed. A rail line route was surveyed in expectation of the development of commercial wharfs, naval dockyards and other industries on Jervis Bay. The length of the Canberra-Jervis Bay line was 225km, with 1.6km of bridges and 1.2kms of tunnels, and construction of the line was estimated to cost £1,747,670.

Following from this, a grand urban vision was proposed by Henry F. Halloran, surveyor and speculator in real estate development. Halloran had already developed the Sydney suburb of Seaforth and a major development at Tanilba Bay on Port Stephens, among other places. In 1915 he had plans drawn up for two major cities, “Pacific City” and “St Vincent City” on Jervis Bay. In 1917 Halloran advertised a second tranche of land for sale in St Vincent City in the area called “Jervis Bay City” (Callala), with one suburb of this proposed “City” actually planned by Walter Burley Griffin.

The successful development of these cities relied on railway connections to Canberra and Sydney. Despite periodic agitation for construction of the Canberra line, in October 1921 the Commonwealth Surveyor-General reported:

‘I do not think there is the slightest hope of any development work being undertaken for a long time’.

The alternative, an extension to Jervis Bay of the line from Sydney to Nowra (Bomaderry) was briefly flirted with but an assessment in 1916 from the Commonwealth Department of Home Affairs reported that:

That is still the present situation. In essence Halloran’s plans remained “paper subdivisions” with relatively little actual development.

In 1969 the American Rolling Mill Company (ARMCO) proposed to build a massive steel mill at Jervis Bay and a steel town around Nowra Hill to service employees. The NSW Department of Decentralisation and Development looked favourably on the proposal and commissioned a secret report which included plans for the steel mill, a woodchip mill, a coal fired power station and a village of 10,000 people.

The Government had already begun negotiations with landowners and private developers for the purchase of the necessary land and had offered to extend the railway line 32kms from Nowra (Bomaderry) to Jervis Bay if ARMCO constructed the steelworks with a reputed investment of $300 million.

The report was leaked, however, and there was a public outcry. The Shire President John Hatton, later an independent Member of Parliament, although initially supportive of the proposal, became an effective opponent and the plan got bogged down in an “interdepartmental committee”. Whether because of this or because the numbers did not stack up in the end, the proposal never went anywhere.

At the same time the Federal Government under the leadership of Prime Minister John Gorton was planning the development of a 500 megawatt nuclear power station at Murrays Beach. Although the power station was announced by Gorton as a policy commitment at the 1969 Federal election, which the Government won, subsequent planning became shrouded in secrecy – a hallmark of the project’s principal proponent, the Australian Atomic Energy Commission (AAEC, later renamed ANSTO) under the leadership of Sir Philip Baxter.

This secrecy alarmed the environmental movement and some of the members of the Shoalhaven Shire Council, still led by John Hatton, and accelerated the emergence of the protest movement which in 1971 formed the Jervis Bay Planning and Protection Committee.

The project’s progress was also handicapped by suspicions that the real intent of the power station was the production of fuel for atomic weapons rather than production of electrical power. Certainly, Baxter and Gorton and others engaged in the project had never hidden their support for the principal of atomic weapons and the potential for Australia to develop them at some stage and another plank of Gorton’s election policy was a declared refusal to ratify the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Although they never admitted weapons development was the intent behind the Jervis Bay plant, all these factors undoubtedly fuelled opposition to the proposal.

This may have been unintentionally reinforced by the fact that the Australian Constitution places the responsibility for power generation in the hands of the States rather than the Commonwealth and even the ground-breaking, nationally-important Snowy Hydro Scheme was a Commonwealth-State partnership. So it might have been seen as curious that the Commonwealth was suddenly interested in power generation as the sole purpose of the Jervis Bay station.

In any case, it all became academic when Gorton was replaced in 1971 as Prime Minister by William McMahon, who supported neither the power station nor atomic weapons development, bolstered by arguments from Treasury against the economics of the plan, which was repeatedly delayed and finally scuppered by the incoming Whitlam Labour Government in 1972.

In the meantime, however, preliminary work on the project had resulted in a very good sealed road extending from the naval base to Murrays Beach, extensive clearing, excavations and concrete footings and pads in what is now the Murrays Beach car park, and seismic explosions in the foreshores which resulted in large holes in the seagrass beds which have not regenerated 30 years later and can still be seen as large circular patches of bare sand.

In 1985 the Navy developed plans to massively increase its presence and activities in Jervis Bay. Two proposals were developed to move the Newington Armaments Depot from Sydney and to build a wharf to transfer weapons on and off warships.

The first proposal in 1985 was for a wharf and supporting infrastructure to be built on Green Point. When the plans for the Navy armaments depot were released to the public in 1986 there was strong and well organised opposition from the local community and the green movement.

Around the same time, the Navy floated plans for relocating its fleet base away from Garden Island in Sydney. Three options were canvassed, each requiring extensive work which included dredging and the building of long breakwaters. The Navy favoured the land between Murrays Beach and Bristol Point, with the shallow waters between Hole in the Wall and Bristol Point to be reclaimed for water front buildings and wharves.

The Navy developments were strongly endorsed by a majority of the local councillors who campaigned to sway the ‘silent majority’ to counter the growing opposition of an effective citizens’ action group – a vigorous campaign to “Save the Bay” had been launched and the Jervis Bay Protection Committee was formed to oppose the proposals, with three main objectives:

to establish a marine park in Jervis Bay
to oppose the development of large scale heavy industry
to oppose the development of large scale scallop drudging on the marine environment.

The cost of relocating the fleet was commonly estimated at more than $1 billion. As much as for this reason, presumably, as for the environmental and development misgivings, the proposal was publicly rejected by Prime Minister Bob Hawke when he opened the Australian Conservation Foundations’s new headquarters in 1989.

However, the Defence Department still cherished hopes of replacing the Sydney armaments pipeline and depot with an East Coast Armaments Complex (ECAC) at Jervis Bay, an option which would make maintenance operations of the fleet in Sydney a great deal easier and cheaper than alternative locations.

Their second proposal in 1993 was for a wharf off Cabbage Tree, to free up the Newington site for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games developments at Homebush Bay. Jervis Bay escaped once again in 1994 when the Government nominated Point Wilson in Victoria as the new site for the relocated armaments complex.

Every attractive coastal destination faces its own challenges in terms of sustainable communities, environmental protections and the lure of real estate development, and Jervis Bay and its townships will continue to face those challenges for as long as the desire to live in a nice place and the desire to make money are present within us – that is, for eternity.

Jervis Bay has some unique additional threats and challenges, however, which in part are a result of the very trends and achievements that have so far kept it relatively free from large scale development.

The earlier history of the region has left it with large tracts of land in the hands of a small number of owners – among them descendants of developers/promoters of earlier land schemes that were never realised and some of whom are active and successful real estate developers and speculators in their own right.

Few of them wish to see their holdings remain idle and their assets unrealised. Some of their holdings have been sold to or resumed by the State Government for inclusion in the Jervis Bay NSW National Park yet they continue to hold large and ostensibly attractive, lucrative locations, a couple of which are in fact “paper subdivisions” with deposited plans for significant residential communities in the days before controlled planning arose in the 1960s.

In one case one of these earlier "subdivisions" was sold off to hundreds of small holders in the 1980s and 1990s prior to planning approvals, leaving owners with land they could not build on, could not effectively maintain, but on which they were required to pay council rates nevertheless.

It seems inevitable and, in the opinion of some, only fair that property owners are able to develop or dispose of their holdings in one of two ways – resumption into public ownership for the purposes of public recreation and conservation (with appropriate compensation), or subdivision/development/disposal for occupation or profit.

Resolution of this question is not easy and has been an ongoing issue for Jervis Bay for at least 25 years. It would appear, on the whole, that the argument is falling on the side of conservation: several thousand hectares have been resumed for national park and the two most recent major subdivision proposals – Heritage Estates near Vincentia and Long Bow Village near Lake Wollumboola – have been rejected by the planning authorities and the government. In addition, a major development at Crossroads in Vincentia has been apparently split and sold off in a manner that suggests it may end up being restricted to its retail element (already approved) without the accompanying major residential subdivision development which was originally proposed and is still to be approved.

The Wreck Bay area was designated a reserve in 1928 but by the time it was gazetted in 1952 the extent of the reserve had shrunk considerably. In 1971 two-thirds of the territory (4,470 hectares) was declared a natural reserve. Five years later it was classified by the National Trust of Australia in recognition of its conservation, scenic, scientific, historical and recreational value.

In 1992 Jervis Bay National Park was declared over the Bherwerre Peninsula in the Jervis Bay Territory. The area of Jervis Bay was entered on the Register of the National Estate in 1993 in recognition of its outstanding landscape features, its diversity of flora, fauna and archaeological sites and its value to past and present communities for recreational activities.

In 1995 the Park was handed over to the Wreck Bay Aboriginal community as part of the reconciliation process. The agreement saw the land leased back to the Federal Government for 99 years in return for a share of the income the park generates and a majority presence on the management board.

The current occupants are all descended from or related to the original inhabitants. Many of the sites are of great significance to them, especially the Reserve Cemetery, fishing spots at Summercloud Bay and Mary Bay, as well as traditional lookouts, meeting places and camping areas. As part of the process the name of the reserve has been changed from Jervis Bay National Park to Booderee National Park. ‘Booderee’ means ‘bay of plenty’ in the Dhurga language.

Jervis Bay NSW National Park was created in 1995 and covers some 4,800 hectares on the northern and western sides of the Bay and St Georges Basin – including much unspoiled land formerly promoted for residential or industrial development.

In 1998 Jervis Bay Marine Park was declared over the water of the Bay, protecting the Bay itself and over 100kms of coastline, home to a unique mix of tropical and temperate species including the weedy sea-dragon, eastern blue devil fish, whale, bottlenose dolphin, little penguin, fur seal and the endangered grey nurse shark

The marine park caters for recreational and commercial activities while conserving marine biodiversity. The park has a zoning plan that establishes sanctuary, habitat protection, general use and special purpose zones and sets out the activities permitted in each zone. The zoning plan is a key management tool.

In 2002 sewage disposal into the Bay ceased with the Shoalhaven City Council instead piping effluent for treatment, storage and use on local dairy farms. In 2003 Huskisson became the first mainland town and the largest community in Australia to be declared “plastic bag free”, thereby removing not only a major source of litter and landfill but also a significant threat to marine species.