The escarpment swaggies: ‘Bandy’ Sam, ‘Dumby’ Henderson, and Bernard the German

NOT even a reigning monarch could shift old Bandy Sam from his bush humpy at Slacky Flat, Bulli. Although authorities were eventually successful in clearing the shanty town of unemployed men and low income families from the blackberry and weed infested flat named after the coal waste that had been progressively washed down from the…

The wild men of 22 Mile Camp

By MICK ROBERTS © AMERICA’S Wild West could be considered tame compared to the wilderness separating Sydney from Illawarra’s far northern coal mining villages during the mid to late 1880s. Notorious shantytowns sprang up in the bushland to service the men who built the Illawarra Railway and they were no place for the faint hearted. The navvies…