Category - South Coast Industries

Alluvial gold was discovered in September 1851 in the Araluen Valley. Almost overnight, thousands of prospectors moved to the area.

Within a year an estimated 100,000 ozs of gold had been recovered, earning the area a reputation of being one of the richest goldfields in Australia...

Roads, railways and tramways in New South Wales - all being extended over long distances in the second half of the 18th century - required blue metal. Enormous quantities of it.

Basalt in the Bombo-Kiama area was abundant, could easily be quarried and crushed into blue metal, and could then be shipped with relative ease to major centres such as Sydney. So, from the 1880s, Bombo-Kiama became the primary source of supply of blue metal in NSW...

Munn's Maizena works became one of the most commercially important establishments on the NSW South Coast. It operated in Merimbula from 1867 to 1918...

The history of the South Coast timber industry is particularly interesting because of the of the changes that occurred to it over that time: it was an industry that was gradually transformed from a labour-intensive, manual industry to one that became highly mechanized; it changed from being based on small, family-led enterprises to one dominated and operated by large companies; a reliance on bullocks and horses disappeared as trucks and specialist mechanical timber-getting equipment were introduced; there were significant periods of ‘boom’ and ‘bust’; and the gathering and production of some timber products simply disappeared completely over this period...

A brief history of South Coast dairying:

Commercial fishing grew to become one of the South Coast’s major industries – but also has been an industry that has been typified by periods of significant boom and bust...

For a century, from 1828 to 1929, whaling in Twofold Bay was a significant industry...

In 1920, a syndicate of Sydney businessmen established the Austral Starch Company Limited to extract starch from the Burrawang plant. They acquired a ten-year lease over 31,000 acres of State Forest at Currowan (upstream from Nelligan) and a licence to ‘exploit the Burrawang industry in the Nelligen district’. They then erected a factory near the mouth of Currowan Creek along with a tramway that ran along Mimosa Street linking the factory to the town's wharf...