Wollongong, the City of Innovation

A city on the move

Welcome to Wollongong, Australia’s ninth largest city with a population approaching 200,000.

Wollongong is located 80 kilometres south of Sydney on a narrow coastal strip bordered by the Royal National Park to the north, Lake Illawarra to the south, the Tasman Sea to the east and the Illawarra Escarpment to the west.

The primary city of the Illawarra region of New South Wales, Wollongong enjoys a magnificent natural environment ranging from rainforests to spectacular sea cliffs and unspoilt beaches.

If you’re a visitor, the Tourism Wollongong website will tell you everything you need to know about accommodation, restaurants, and other features of our city.

Visitors and residents alike can enjoy Wollongong’s great shopping facilities and the many recreational activities on offer, from our 17 patrolled beaches to our parks and cycleways. Throughout the year Wollongong also hosts a busy calendar of community events.

Brief history
The name Wollongong has been thought to be from "Wol-lon-yuh" meaning "sound of the sea" or from Woollungah which means a place where a marriage took place between the son of one great king and the daughter of another great king. Another suggestion is that it was actually pronounced "Nywoolyarngungh" and was an expression of surprise and fear uttered by the aborigines when they first saw a ship in full sail. Some other suggested meanings of the name Wollongong are hard ground near water; many snakes; five islands.

Archeological evidence indicates an Aboriginal presence here for at least 30,000 years.  Dharawal [also spelt as Tarawal or Thuruwal] was the name given to a tribe of Aboriginal people who lived around Sydney and in the Illawarra and Shoalhaven districts. The traditional language of this tribe was also known as Dharawal and this was spoken from Sydney in the north to as far south as Bega.

Another tribe, the Wodi Wodi, a sub-group of the Dharawal, includes the Aboriginal people of the coast from Wollongong to Shoalhaven. The term "Wodi Wodi" became accepted as the name of the Aboriginal people of Illawarra, and the name of their language.

The first European settlement came in 1815 when Dr Charles Throsby brought cattle from the Southern Highlands to a fresh water lagoon. The earliest reference to Wollongong was in 1826, in a report written by John Oxley about the local cedar industry. The area’s first school was established in 1833, and a year later the Surveyor-General arrived from Sydney to lay out the township of Wollongong.

In the early part of European settlement most employment was in timber-getting and land clearing for farming. The first coal mine opened in 1849, and in 1927 Charles Hoskins entered into an agreement with the state government to build a steelworks at Port Kembla.

With the economic downturn of the early 1980s, Wollongong began to diversify from its heavy industrial roots and is now a centre of higher education, technology and other leading-edge industries, and tourism.