Our Story

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

~ Mary Oliver

We first laid eyes on the property that was to become Warialda during a camping trip at the nearby Treachery Camp at Seal Rocks. As two working professionals with 1 & 2 year old daughters, we were craving a private sanctuary, where we could disconnect from everyday life and spend more time outdoors in nature as a family.

We could see the positive impact spending time in the outdoors had on our daughters and we wanted to encourage more of a connection to the world around them.

We knew we loved the area because of its natural beauty and close proximity to the local lakes, forests and stunning beaches. But we could also see there was so much opportunity to restore the diverse and once-thriving ecosystems on the property and perhaps create our own little wildlife sanctuary of sorts.

Warialda is our special place and we’re so glad to be able to share this with other like-minded families, holiday-makers and adventurers.

Warialda is an aboriginal name for ‘the place of wild honey’. Part of our commitment to restoring the balance of nature on the property is to create a thriving habitat for both solitary and social native bees. Australia’s native bees are some of the best pollinators in the world so they form a crucial element of our plan and it is our hope to have our own stingless bee hive onsite producing native honey.

Warialda also happens to be the name of the town in the New England region of NSW where my German ancestors settled in in the late 1800s and my grandfather was born there.

So it is a wonderful coming together of past and future.

The property is amongst a landscape that is part of the identity, spirituality, connection and resource base for the Aboriginal people of the Worimi Nation. The Worimi Nation was made up of several nurras (clan groups) who spoke the Kattang language.

The arrival of Europeans in the area resulted in progressive, and substantial, impacts on the Aboriginal traditional way of living. Sadly, in these early years of European settlement, little effort was made to record information about the traditions or language of the Aboriginal people, so comparatively little is known about the Worimi tradition and culture in the local area.

However, Wallingat National Park and the surrounding area was likely to be significant to these groups and the Worimi people were known to congregate around the Bungwahl area.

In 1824 the Australian Agriculture Company was formed and granted one million acres “to ‘extend and improve the flocks of Merino sheep’ in New South Wales”. However, the land around Bungwahl and what is now Wallingat National Park proved unsuitable for pastoral development. According to the Forestry Commission of NSW (FCNSW, 1960) exploitation of Wallingat’s timber resource appears to have commenced sometime in the 1860s. Sawmills located at Bungwahl, Neranie, Boolambayte and Forster-Tuncurry were all serviced by timber sourced from the park area. Logging continued as the main use of the area through until 1 January 1999 when the area was gazetted as Wallingat National Park and logging operations ceased. Aside from logging, the area was also widely used for grazing of stock and bee keeping.