24/02/2026
📣📣 Here’s a story from our ‘South Murwillumbah Matters’ series.
Historian Jo Kijas is researching the environmental history of South Murwillumbah, bringing together stories of people, place and the river for our project Living Memory South Murwillumbah.
We’re sharing stories from this project through local Murwillumbah page It Takes a Town, throughout March and April.
But her research depends on more than archival material — it also needs to include knowledge held by locals themselves. Do you have connections to South Murwillumbah? Stories, memories or photos to share?
South Murwillumbah Matters: The River was the Road
Well into the nineteenth century, Europeans travelling into Tweed Bundjalung Country came winding up the river. The dense forest landscape that impeded their access was described by surveyor, John Uniacke, who rowed a few kilometres upriver with John Oxley in 1823. ‘The scenery here exceeded anything I have previously seen in Australia – extending miles along a deep rich valley clothed with magnificent trees, the beautiful uniformity of which was only interrupted by the turns and winding of the river…’ Oxley named it after the River Tweed in Scotland.
Bundjalung people and their visitors travelled across their country on the more sparsely covered ridges. They drank from the springs rather than the river, usually camping beyond its banks and above the mosquito and snakey resource-rich swamps.
A few cedar getters set up their first camp in 1844 at Terranora, moving further inland around Murwillumbah by the mid-1850s. Samuel Gray and his brother-in-law Joshua Bray took up pastoral leases in the early 1860s, and farmland slowly became available in the valley from 1866, carved out of the forests on the high banks of the river.
Murwillumbah was slow to develop, gazetted in 1879. The coming of the railway to South Murwillumbah in 1894 brought on housing and businesses, and a bridge across the river was opened in 1901, replacing the punt. Cane and dairying replaced the forests.
By 1901 Bray, who had recorded language and culture of the numerous First Nations people around Murwillumbah, stated that ‘the blacks have almost died out’. The ‘Great Australian Silence’ had started to descend on Bundjalung people of the Tweed Valley beyond the coast.
Changes made to the landscape and waterways by the newcomers, and in turn nature’s impact back onto settlement, will be explored in future posts.
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This post is part of a series about the interwoven history of people and place in South Murwillumbah. We're seeking your stories, images and memories—from last week and last century—about South Murwillumbah and your relationships with the river.
We'd love you to read, respond, share—and help us build this story of place. Direct message if you have a story to share, and we’ll be in touch. All references will be included in the final environmental history.
Learn more:
llnr.com.au/what-we-do/living-memory-south-murwillumbah
