Coomee Nulunga was a Murramarang woman, born on Yuin country on the South Coast of NSW in the late 1820s. She remembered how her grandmother talked of seeing the ‘great white birds’ arrive decades earlier, a description of what Lieutenant James Cook’s ship would have looked like from the shore as he sailed up the eastern coast in 1770.
Coomee witnessed the arrival of British settlers in the 1830s and 40s
Coastal shipping was the lifeblood of small towns like Ulladulla in the late 19th century but it was also a dangerous business. Beneath the blue waters off the South Coast lie dozens of shipwrecks, often driven onto reefs during an East Coast Low, like the Walter Hood on 26 April 1870 in Wreck Bay, 12km north of Ulladulla.
Originally erected on the stone pier on the south side of Ulladulla Harbour in 1869-1872
Milton Ulladulla Historical Society has been part of an exciting new project, funded by Create NSW and managed by Shoalhaven City Council to create digital records of our collection. Local and regional collections have such a wealth of place-unique historical information, and it’s important that everyone everywhere can access that information. By digitising our documents, photographs and objects as part of a new online catalogue, we can open up our resources to all.
Some 500m distance from the Anglican Church of St Peter and Paul in Milton is its long-forgotten historic cemetery at 10 Croobyar Rd. Although there are no longer any visible headstones, the people buried there are an important record of Milton’s early years.
If you love a good horror story, did you know that Milton-Ulladulla has one its very own? Here are your clues – a man’s heart-stopping dream predicting nearby disaster, widespread floods, desperate cries for help, the killing and eating of a small dog, the grisly discovery of a severed arm, and maybe even a mutinous murder.