On the Coast – Over 55 Issue 32 I November/December 2019(clone) | Page 18

We are staying in a cabin at the
Holiday Haven White Sands. Psst! it’s a
caravan park but they don’t tell anyone.
They don’t like calling it that. The
cabin is very nice with a barbie on the
veranda and ocean glimpses between the
twitching saltbush. Walking into town is
a snack for seniors in sensible shoes. You
are there in minutes.
For dinner that evening, we order
grilled snapper from the local (award-
winning) fish and chip house and buy a
jolly decent bottle of white wine. After a
zap in the microwave, we eat on the deck
while listening to the long hiss of the sea,
with occasional whiffs of kelp from the
beach below.
Huskisson is beyond charming. It
began life as a whaling town and is the
often overlooked treasure of Jervis/
Jarvis/Jorvis Bay and dates to the
early 1840s. The flanking village of
Vincentia (a great Coles and BWS here)
was the site of the settlement of South
Huskisson, founded in 1841 as a seaport
and terminus of The Wool Road. South
Huskisson was intended to be a ‘private
town’, whatever that means. Shipbuilding
was a major industry here in Huskisson
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O N T H E C OA S T – OV ER 5 5
Fast Facts
Holiday Haven White Sands
is more often known as ‘the
caravan park on the point’
at Huskisson. The park is
excellent and has premium
caravan and camping sites
with uninterrupted views
across Jervis Bay.
The park has a range of accommodation options to suit campers, caravans,
RVs, as well as the aforementioned fully furnished cabins.
Visitors have direct access to Huskisson Beach and are a mere 10 minute
stroll to clubs, pubs, dolphin and whale watching cruises, shops, cafes and
restaurants.
in the 1860s. These busy shipyards built
sailing vessels and steamships, schooners,
tug-boats and island-trading ships during
the thirties and forties and two passenger
ferries for Sydney (Lady Denman in 1911
and Lady Scott in 1914). This leads me
rather neatly to our next adventure in
Husky (as the locals call it).
The Jervis Bay Maritime Museum
at Huskisson houses fabulous maritime
artefacts and navigational, whaling
and surveying instruments, nautical
equipment and objects relating to
the history of Jervis Bay. And what a
fabulous little museum it is, dear seniors
(I own a vintage putt-putt, so I might be
biased). It’s worthy of a visit to Husky
alone methinks. I only lament that many
of the museum’s excellent displays are
poorly lit for my 50+ eyes. But it houses