Coasters Retreat, New South Wales

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A view of Palm Beach

Coasters Retreat is a suburb with the 2108 postcode located in Sydney.

[edit] Coasters Retreat

Coasters is located on the western shores of Pittwater looking northward to the Basin. Coasters is made up of fifty hoilday houses set in the forest and beside the beach. Two of them date from settlement in the 1920's. Coasters Retreat has no road or land access and is entirely dependent on transport via the Palm Beach Ferry Service. A rural fire brigade building stands on the foreshore, a reminder of sensitivity of the area which has been ravaged in 1967 and 1994 by fires.

[edit] History

John Hunter, Naval pioneer and colonial governor

In 1770 Captain Cook passed by the region, naming Broken Bay for its rugged terrain. The district was later explored in 1788 and 1789 by Governor Arthur Phillip and Captain John Hunter (Later Governor of NSW). It was from the visits of these two explorers that Pittwater was named for the British Prime Minister William Pitt.

Coasters was possible scene of a conflict between an aborigional leader named Grewin and the ship "William and Mary" in 1806. In 1842 Coasters Retreat was first granted to a former soldier in the NSW Army Corps by Governor Gipps, from whence came the name "Soldiers Point" for the western extremity of the south headland. It was during this decade that an "Old House" was constructed at Coasters. "The Basin" on the north side of Coasters Retreat was properly settled as a farm in 1881, when a weather board farm house was built there, another old farm house at the neighbouring beach of Currawong dates from 1916. The area became enclosed by national park following the establishment of the Ku-Ring-Gai National Park in 1896 and was considered to be near a potential site of a national capital leading up to Federation. The small settlement remained as a group of farms until 1922 when the area began to be subdivided into fifty allotments. The area underwent subtle growth during the twentieth century with the construction of two wharves in 1914 and 1944.