Tourism had its humble beginnings in the early 1900s when the Butson family first ran a simple camping area on the northern side of Lake Burrill in 1924. As roads slowly extended south of the Shoalhaven River passenger services (mail car) expanded and more adventurous tourists braved the difficult roads.
270 million years ago mud, silt and sand was eroded from mountains along the east coast of the supercontinent, Gondwana, and deposited here in horizontal layers by ocean currents in a shallow sea. Gondwana had drifted down to the Antarctic Circle so, further south, glaciers carried rock debris from the mountains to the coast. There, icebergs floated north and, as they melted in the shallow waters here, dropped their loads including boulders weighing 10 tonne into the mud and silt.
