26/10/2025
Such a wonderful spot to escape into the wilderness😊
Beneath the Illawarra Escarpment canopy at Stanwell Park creek along the Wodi Wodi track.
The Illawarra Escarpment has many ancient Aboriginal tracks that connect the Illawarra plains with areas to the west, north and south. The Wodi Wodi track in the Northern Illawarra is one example, with a long and very obvious history dating back many thousands of years. Many of our modern roads, such as Macquarie Pass, still follow the original routes used by the Dharawal people, to traverse our very steep escarpment terrain.
One of the first tracks cut on the Illawarra Escarpment range was by Dr Charles Throsby in 1815. He was in search of greener pastures for cattle and was told by indigenous people that the Illawarra plains were rich and fertile and had plenty of water, and they were absolutely correct. They drove the cattle down the mountain at Bulli and then to the beach and along to Wollongong Harbour.
He travelled with two Europeans and was guided to the region by two indigenous men. The track he cut was called the Throsby track, which was used between 1815 and 1844 and it is estimated to have been about 1km south of Bulli Pass.
Mt Keira Road was built between 1835 and 1836 by convict labour. It was built remarkably fast, given that it was constructed by manual labour, through dense forest and on very steep terrain. It was noted that the route had almost no rocks in the way, which helped. This was the main road to Wollongong via Broughton Pass prior to Bulli Pass.
The Bulli Pass route was discovered in 1844 by Captain Westmacott. A rough track called Westmacotts Pass was initially cut in 1844, but it wasn't until 1867 that Bulli Pass was officially constructed.
The Lower Coast road, now Lawrence Hargrave Drive route, was constructed in the 1870's.
Macquarie Pass follows a route the Dharawal people used. It opened in 1898 linking the Illawarra with the Southern Highlands. I was reading that there is a proposal to create a multi-lane freeway from Albion Park to the Highlands. I hope that isn't true as the Macquarie Pass National Park is amongst the best rainforest I have seen.
Mount Ousley Road is the main route in and out of the Gong today and handles a lot of trucks. You can now drive from Heathcote to Nowra via Mt Ousley without seeing a traffic light. I still call the freeway the F6, but it changed to the M1 in 2013. Mount Ousley road was constructed in 1942 as an alternative route west in case of a Japanese invasion.
There are other roads I'll touch on later, such as Rixon's Pass, O'Briens Pass and B**g B**g Pass, but all in all, we don't have many routes out of the beautiful Illawarra. In my time, I remember the issues this caused with the 1998 floods and the 2001 Christmas Bushfires which cut off many of these routes.
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