Woonona Bulli barbers and hairdressers: The mysterious Fred Williamson

NOTHING remains of Fred Williamson’s hairdressing salon at Bulli today. Where his barber shop sat, Memorial Drive spews a seemingly endless flow of vehicles onto a congested Prince’s Highway, opposite Hospital Road. Eric Francis “Fred” Williamson was operating a hairdresser or barber shop in front of Pritchard’s Music Hall at Woonona as early as 1906.…

Bill Christiansen and Ed Ball helped fill the lagoons at Thirroul

ONE of nine children – eight brothers and a sister – William John Christiansen was a well-known Woonona ‘grease-monkey’. He loved tinkering with engines, and before regulations were put place, operated one of the northern Illawarra’s earliest public bus services between Austinmer and Wollongong. Born in Woonona to Charles and Mary Christainsen in 1899, he…

Woonona: Take a shopping trip down memory lane

During the 1990s I photographed quite a few business places in Woonona shopping centre. While the quality of the photographs are not the best, they will undoubtedly bring back many memories to some readers, of a time when Woonona boasted several banks, a selection of eateries and supermarkets. Sit back and enjoy the following slide…

Henson’s Bus Service, Corrimal

The South Coast Times reported on Monday 11 June 1951: Henson’s Bus Service, Corrimal, has been attending to the majority of the transport needs of that centre for over 20 years. Today a modern fleet of buses service the area from a large depot situated in the heart of the town. Principal of the company…

Woonona’s Richardson & Lewis’ store

By MICK ROBERTS © WRITING to me in the late 1990s, Ned Andrews of Towradgi remembered back in the 1930s an old weatherboard shop on the northern corner of Gray Street and the Prince’s Highway at Woonona. “I was about seven or nine years of age when the local family store was Richardson and Lewis, where…

Old Bulli’s not dead yet

OLD Bulli is more alive than the men in other places of mushroom growth think. She can spoil the little ‘game’ of those who want to have great post offices and to burden the country with more taxation. ‘Go to bed !’ say we to you Woonona toilers. You can’t raise a progress committee. We don’t want…

Molloy’s Timber Mills, Bulli

By MICK ROBERTS © MORE than a century of sawmilling at Bulli came to an end in May 2013 with the closure of Molloy’s Timber Yard. Austrian-born cabinetmaker Gunter Grafenauer operated Molloy Timber with his wife, Pamela, for 38 years before shutting the long-operating business. Mr Grafenauer bought the timber business in 1975 from the Molloy family,…

Granny Orton’s Bulli Store

Down Memory Lane With JACK DEVITT* GRANNY Orton had a small shop and residence in Park Road Bulli, still existing now (1990s) as a hair hairdressing salon next door to Dr. Feneley’s former surgery. She sold pencils, exercise books, rubbers for school kids plus a few jars of jelly beans, boiled ollies and, from Arnotts…