Fred Wild’s fabulous photo of his mum climbing up a giant sand dune in preparation for some sand-sledding at Primbee during the 1970s. Photo: Shellharbour History in Photos.
This is one of the great Illawarra photos and older residents may still be able to remember the eastern side of this Primbee sand dune as being the place to get to, as by the 1970s the beach side was cleaner and smoother. And that’s where Fred Wild’s mother was likely heading.
So popular and so much fun (and exhausting too after your 10th climb back up the high dunes) it could be that birthday parties there in 1970s could still prove a pretty awesome day for kids.
Children would even ride their pushbikes from as far afield as Berkeley carrying thick cardboard to use as sleds.
Some say they loved Primbee’s sand hills even better than those at Warilla where, in the 1950s, you could actually almost slide down into what was then still relatively clear water – as can be seen in the photos below.
Some elderly Illawarra residents reputedly still retain the more sophisticated sleds their enterprising fathers constructed to make sand-sledding even more fun.
Despite living in Illawarra for the past 70 years, I suffered the tragedy of growing up surfing at McCauley’s Beach.
Here a UOW scientist once told me that the failure of that beach to provide a giant sand dune for even more fun when the surf wasn’t going off was that an ancient tsunami had wiped it out. And it still hadn’t yet had time to grow back before the Water Board’s sewerage scheme further flattened the re-emergent dune still struggling to grow back there in 1971.
So, of course, when writing the book Lake Illawarra: an ongoing history for the Lake Illawarra Authority back in 2005, I couldn’t help but be keen to deal with the controversy and the myths surrounding the once giant sand dunes located at Port Kembla Beach.
And although I certainly love a conspiracy theory as much as the next person, despite endless searching I was able to find zero documentary evidence about the story that the giant Port Kembla dunes had been shipped off to beautify the grandeur of Waikiki beach in Hawaii.
Some rudimentary sand-mining for rutile had apparently previously taken place at Port Kembla and other Illawarra beaches (including Thirroul) but I found no evidence that those damn Americans had stolen Port Kembla’s sand.
The other problem was that not all sand is alike. Illawarra’s is said to be silicate and Hawaii’s carbonate – and I have found no evidence of silicate sand being dumped at Waikiki.
Not wanting to give up on a conspiracy story, I even toyed with floating the idea it might be possible that Port Kembla’s sands were secretly shipped to Vietnam for American construction purposes during the Vietnam War and that the authorities had trickily listed the ships’ manifests as bound for Hawaii rather than Saigon.
The less exciting reality, however, appears to have been that material from those giant Port Kembla dunes seems to have been used for both the filling-in of the former wonderland of Tom Thumb Lagoon and also make it possible for the construction of the tin plate mill near today’s Springhill Road.
My wife has long contended that I sometimes try to win discussions with her by means of adopting “The Shifting Sands Method of Argumentative Discourse”. But when it comes to actual sand dunes there is little hope in trying to win by fighting nature.
The flattening of coastal sand dunes to help facilitate residential development has long been fraught with problems for, without a giant sand dune barrier, the sand particles soon make their way west in various wind, tide and storm events and thus can cover suburban streets in tons of sand.
So big became the problem that from 1946, the Soil Conservation Service had to establish sand-drift control measures on the surviving dunes to the south of Port Kembla where unstable high ridges with deep gullies between them had formed roughly at right angles to the beach.
In the early stages wooden palings were favoured as a means of trying to rebuild the foredunes but were abandoned when brush fences were thought to be more effective and cheaper.
Such structures were not an unmitigated success but fortunately two photos survive to give some idea of the efforts then being made to combat sand drift.
The East Corrimal and Bellambi beaches also once had impressive sand dunes but I have no personal memories of them – fortunately, Wollongong Library holds a few intriguing photos.
But what I consider are the two best photos of people enjoying what were once Illawarra’s remarkable sand dunes are held by individuals (the final two pictures in the gallery above).
