DALMENY

William Edye Mort, the second son of T.S. Mort of the Bodalla Estate, established the Dalmeny Estate in 1880 as a dairy farm. He named it ‘Dalmeny’ after Lord Dalmeny who had been an Eton College school friend. (The town’s proper pronunciation is, therefore, Dal-men-ee).

In 1926 the area that is now Dalmeny was purchased by George and Emma Noble who discovered increasing number of campers wanting to access their land. One of these visitors was a John Cresswick from Sydney who, with George Noble, started to subdivide the property.

They also made facilities available to visitors. Noble supplied holidaymakers with fresh milk and cream, butter, eggs and vegetables, along with general grocery supplies, from his back verandah. He also arranged for bread and meat to be delivered from Narooma. In 1927 they even produced a pamphlet that promoted Dalmeny as ‘Australia’s Tourists Paradise and Big Game Fishing Resort’.

In 1949 there were 12 houses in Dalmeny. By 1986 this had grown to 800, undoubtedly the result of upgrades to the Princes Highway in the 1950s that made the town more accessible, and the opening of a general store in the town in 1960. In 2021 there were almost 1,200 dwellings in Dalmeny, which is now commonly described as ‘a tranquil seaside town’.

South of Dalmeny is the residential area of Kianga.

From the early twentieth century the name ‘Kianga’ seems to have been applied to the locality north of Wagonga Inlet.

In 1908 Mitchell’s Mill (located near where the wooden boardwalk is now) wanted to establish a post office at the mill and they suggested calling it Kianga Post Office. Their recommendation was rejected because of a possible confusion with Kiandra. Instead, it was designated North Narooma Post Office.

The subdivision of Kianga dates from the 1960s. Kianga was linked to Dalmeny by road in 1968.