Malua Bay area including Surf Beach and Lilli Pilli
MALUA BAY covers a wider area that just around the main Malua Bay beach.
To its north is Mosquito Bay where you will find a public-access boat launching ramp giving great access to the snorkeling and fishing this area has to offer. Garden Bay is also a must to explore. From here the coastline continues northward to the stunning secluded beach of Lilli Pilli. To the south are the coves of Pretty Point Bay and a local favourite surfing spot called McKenzies Beach. Further to the south is Rosedale and Guerilla Bay
Recreational fishing is popular from the rocks and sea ledges at the heads of many of these beaches.
Malua Bay has a shopping area that accommodates general needs and the local Malua Bay beach is patrolled in summer that brings many families to the beach.
Care should be taken when swimming at other spots as rips and currents are always present.
Lilli Pilli, the Mosquito Bay and Garden Bay areas, and Malua Bay are more or less continuous urban areas in a relatively narrow band of open space and bushland that fringes the foreshore and headlands.
Some History:
The area retains a continuing cultural significance to local Aboriginal people , mostly in the Grandfathers Gully to Lilli Pilli area where the foreshore traditionally provided, and continues to be used for, food and other natural resources.
Lilli Pilli and Circuit Beaches, and their tidal zones, are still valued food resource areas as they have been since pre-contact times. “Garara sticks”, for making spears, are also found in the Circuit Beach area.
Grandfathers Gully to the narrow tidal beach to the south, have also been more recently used as a resources gathering area, meeting place and living/camping place (perhaps as other beach areas became more developed and less appealing).
The beach at the mouth of Grandfathers Gully Creek is known by many local Aboriginal people as the “Chapman’s Beach” after Henry Chapman who was born at Moruya in the late 1800s.
It was a popular camping, diving and food gathering place in the 1960s and 70s with lobsters, “muttonfish” (abalone) and “conk” (the shellfish Anadara trapezia) collected at low tide with the latter two usually cooked and eaten on the beach. “Bush cherries” and won-dharma vine were also gathered from the surrounding bushland.
An ochre “pit” in the cliff face, immediately below Denise Drive at Lilli Pilli (visible from Chapman Beach at low tide), is understood to have been used since pre-contact times and into the present day. This collection of places are all interlinked as resource harvesting, camping, and meeting as well as sites for teaching Aboriginal cultural and resource practices.