Huskisson

Jervis Bay and the land around it are the country of the Yuin peoples, whose sub-groups include the Jerrinja and the Wandandian, and whose descendants include the Wreck Bay community on the bay's southern shore; middens and campsites around the shoreline record thousands of years of fishing and gathering. British ships charted the inlet in the 1790s and named it after Admiral Sir John Jervis.

Town allotments were sold here in the early 1840s, but Huskisson only began to grow when shipbuilding started on Currambene Creek in the 1860s, and for more than a century it lived on timber and boats. Timber cut from the forests behind the bay was shipped out through the creek, and at least 131 wooden vessels were built in the yards along it between 1864 and 1977 — among them the wooden Sydney Harbour ferry Lady Denman, launched at Huskisson in 1911 and now the centrepiece of the town's maritime museum. The village took its name from William Huskisson, the British politician killed at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830.

Grander plans repeatedly passed the town by. New South Wales handed the southern shore of the bay to the Commonwealth in 1915 so that the new federal capital would have access to the sea, and the naval college opened there the same year, but the port city that was imagined never followed. A nuclear power station proposed near Murrays Beach in 1969 got as far as an access road and a levelled site before it was cancelled in 1971. Holidaymakers proved the more lasting industry, and protection came late: the marine park was declared in 1998, and the park on the southern shore was transferred to the Wreck Bay Aboriginal Community in 1995 and renamed Booderee.

Huskisson is a holiday town with a working past, and both sides show. Currambene Creek still serves as an anchorage and fishing port, the museum keeps the shipwright trade in public view, and the fishing fleet is small but real. Alongside it runs the culture of the Australian coastal summer: surf life-saving club patrols, cricket on the sand, boats towed behind cars, and families who have taken the same house for the same fortnight in January for decades.

The bay itself shapes local identity. Cruises, whale watching and diving are the town's best-known business, and the clear water draws divers, kayakers and anglers from Sydney and Canberra. Conservation arguments have been part of local life for two generations, from the abandoned power station to the creation of the marine park, and residents follow questions about boat numbers, fishing zones and coastal development closely.

Aboriginal culture is present rather than historical. The Wreck Bay community owns Booderee and manages it jointly with the Australian government, and chose its name, a Dhurga word usually translated as bay of plenty. Winter is the quiet season, when the population falls back to its residents, the sporting clubs and the pub take over the social calendar, and the beaches belong to dog walkers and fishers.

About 840 people live in Huskisson itself, part of a ring of settlements around the bay — Vincentia, Hyams Beach, Callala Bay and Woollamia among them — that together hold several thousand residents and many more in the holidays. All lie within the City of Shoalhaven, a large coastal council of roughly 110,000 people administered from Nowra, where the hospital, the high schools and the big shops are.

Tourism, hospitality, building trades and aged care provide most of the work, along with commercial fishing and oyster farming in the nearby estuaries. Two defence establishments are significant employers: the naval college on the bay and the navy's air station at Nowra. The population is older than the state average, with many retirees and long-distance commuters, and it swells sharply between Boxing Day and the end of January, when the resident population is outnumbered several times over.

The rhythm of the day is early. Boats and tradesmen start at first light, the cafés fill by eight, and the town is quiet by mid-evening outside the main season. The pressing local issues are housing — holiday letting has pushed rents and prices beyond what seasonal wages can carry — the reliability of water and roads, bushfire preparation each summer after the 2019–20 fires, and the balance between visitor numbers and the beaches and bay that attract them.

Seafood comes first. Sydney rock oysters, a small native oyster farmed in the estuaries along this coast, are farmed in the estuaries just north of the bay, sold beside the water at villages such as Greenwell Point, and appear on menus all over town. Flathead, snapper, whiting and prawns are the everyday catch, usually fried in batter and eaten on the grass above Huskisson Beach, and hot chips with a wooden fork and a paper wrapper are as much a part of the town as the boats.

Beyond fish, the food is that of a small Australian coastal town: meat pies and sausage rolls from the bakery, steak and schnitzel at the pub, the chicken parma that appears on counter menus across the country, and a barbecue in the reserve on a summer evening. Cafés along Owen Street take coffee seriously in the Australian way, with flat whites and long blacks made on espresso machines, and serve brunch dishes such as smashed avocado on toast.

The wider Shoalhaven supplies dairy from the river flats, beef from the escarpment farms, and berries and stone fruit sold at roadside stalls in summer. Vineyards of the Shoalhaven Coast wine region lie around the bay and the Shoalhaven River, and the district is best known for Chambourcin, a red grape first planted in the region at Coolangatta Estate's older vineyards. Bush foods, including native fruits and seeds used by the Yuin, appear in local dishes and preserves.