Not only a Councillor, Aunty Shirl played a huge part in her community – a founding member of the Birubi Surf Life Saving Club and actively involved in helping to make Anna Bay a better place.

If you are lucky enough to walk the new path, take a moment to think of Aunty Shirl and all she did for our community!

The first to arrive to our area were Worimi folk. Ample evidence indicates the presence of Aboriginal people who may well have walked onto the “island” before the ice caps melted.

European lobstermen were recorded back as far as the 1880s along with the Chinese who, after failing to find gold out west, moved to the coast. On the island the Chinese caught fish, trapped lobsters and collected muttonfish (abalone) which were salted and sent either to their countrymen, still at the diggings, or transported back to China.

In the 1890s Italians were dropped off on the island by passing coastal traders to trap lobsters and were picked up, with their catch, on the return journey to Sydney. It is recorded that they set up to 900 pots around the island.  The Italians never ventured onto the mainland.

It was 1906 when French Scientist Dr Danzig, the nephew of Louis Pasteur, arrived on the island with his entourage of assistants and researchers. A plague of rampaging rabbits was causing havoc in the pastures of sheep farmers in New South Wales, turning green fields into deserts. The aim of the French involvement was to introduce rabbits onto the island, as part of a controlled study, then inject them with a virus in the hope that it would spread from one rabbit to another. Unfortunately, the experiment failed miserably so the French team left the island – but the rabbits did not.