At Pearl Beach for 80 years
To celebrate 80 of continuous work by the Pearl Beach Progress Association, historian Ms Beverley Kingston of Pearl Beach has prepared a small book entitled Pearl Beach and Progress - the Story of a Community and an Ideal 1929 to 2009.
The book was researched and written with the help of a $5000 community grant from Gosford Council last year.
It is hoped the book will be launched as part of the 80 years of progress in Pearl Beach celebration across the weekend of October 9 to 11.
Ms Kingston has written a brief summary of the Pearl Beach story for Peninsula News readers:
Pearl Beach was one of several estates on the Woy Woy Peninsula developed after World War I by father and son CR and CJ Staples.
By 1921, they had consolidated the existing land holdings at what was then known at Green Point and were planning a new estate to be called Pearl Beach with its streets named after gemstones.
The first land sale was registered in 1927 and the first house built soon after.
But for some years, partly because of the depression of the early 1930s, sales were slow, few houses were built and Pearl Beach continued as a fishing camp, one of many up and down the coast of NSW.
According to legend (for there are no surviving records till the 1940s) the Pearl Beach Progress Association came into being in 1929, probably as William Steinbeck and his friends yarned round their camp fire after cooking the day's catch about the problem of fighting bush fires that threatened in the summer.
Soon there were other needs - a post office and a telephone service, better maintenance of the dangerous and inadequate cliff road round the base of Mt Ettymalong and the rock pool, both built by the developers to make the beach more attractive but increasingly a headache to maintain, and a bus that connected with the train at Woy Woy.
During the 1930s and 1940s Pearl Beach gradually became home to a few families who were able to make a living from the small farm blocks opened behind the village streets, some ex-servicemen who found its quiet remoteness preferable to city life, and an early conservationist, former Woy Woy postmistress, Minard Crommelin.
By the late 1940s the Progress Association had begun building a community hall, dedicated in 1950 as a war memorial to the sons of several local families who had died during World War II and in Korea.
Once basic needs for communications and maintenance were satisfied the idea of progress came to mean 'no progress' in Pearl Beach.
There were those who thought that the next steps should be in the direction of greater suburbanisation.
However, Pearl Beach preferred trees to curbs and gutters.
There was a growing awareness that the confined space of the valley, with its creeks and lagoon, its encircling national park and nature reserves, would not support a large population or too much modern development.
Progress in Pearl Beach came to mean the ability to sustain a bushland environment, a peaceful place to live, somewhere to get away from the excitements of modern life - though in time the Progress Association would also campaign for better mobile phone reception and access to fast broadband.
Email, 14 Sep 2009
Beverley Kingston, Pearl Beach