Gosford - Culture and History

The Darkinjung Aborigines once occupied the land from the Hawkesbury River in the south to Lake Macquarie in the north and west to the Wollombi and McDonald Rivers. It is known that the tribe wore possum hair belts (in which they carried their few possessions) and, occasionally, possum skin clothing. The men carried spears, boomerangs, stone axes, boomerangs and shields and hunted large prey such as kangaroos and fish which they speared. The women, however, provided most of the food - fish (caught on fishing lines), shellfish, fruit, tubers, insect larvae, snakes, lizards and small mammals. The number of Aborigines occupying the land of the present Gosford and Wyong shires was probably never more than about 360.

Governor Phillip and a party of officers and seamen entered Broken Bay in a whaleboat in 1788, five weeks after establishing the settlement at Sydney Cove. They passed Lion Island at the mouth of Brisbane Water and sheltered from heavy rains behind the rocky headland of Green Point. Phillip observed 'the land is much higher than at Port Jackson, more rocky and equally covered with timber; large trees which grow on the summits of mountains'.

Friendly relations with the indigenous inhabitants got under way with camp fires and sing-songs. Apparently they were impressed with the fact that Phillip had a missing front tooth, as it was an initiation rite amongst them to knock out the front tooth of young men.

Bass and Flinders visited Broken Bay in the 1790s and recruited Bungary from the indigenous population. Bungary accompanied them on a number of journeys, including the circumnavigation of Australia.

The first land grant on the Central Coast was made to ex-marine of the First Fleet, William Nash, in 1811 but he did not settle there. The proximity of a penal colony at Newcastle discouraged settlement and the rugged terrain made the area a haven for smugglers, moonshiners, escapee convicts and ticket-of-leave men.

The first white settlers were drawn by the possibilities of exploiting the local supplies of cedar, forest oak, blue gum and other hardwoods. Boat building also began at this time and continued until World War I.

Small settlers took up land on the ocean shores, growing small plots of maize, onions, potatoes and hay. Others began dairying or gathered cockle shells which were loaded on to ketches and sent off for lime-burning. The gentry purchased the timbered areas along Erina and Narara Creeks.

A survey in 1829 listed about 100 persons (half of them convicts assisting the timbergetters) living along Brisbane Water, with 916 cattle, 7 horses and 205 acres under cultivation. A courthouse was built on the Gosford site as early as 1827. By 1833 there were 315 people.

A private township was established by Samuel Peek at what is now East Gosford in the 1830s but it was slow to develop. A government township was eventually surveyed and laid out in 1839 on and between Narara and Erina Creeks and an Anglican church erected between 1838 and 1843. It was called the Township at Point Frederick on the survey submission, in honour of Frederick Hely who had died in 1836, but Governor Gipps crossed this out and wrote in Gosford, in honour of Archibald Acheson, 2nd Earl of Gosford (1776-1849), who had served with Gipps as a commissioner in Canada from 1835 to 1837.